Sign in with Facebook
Ben's Reviews > K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain
K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain
by
by
Yes, Viesturs is completely full of himself. He can't even praise his children's skiing skills without interjecting "I'm a pretty good skier myself." But, I suppose, at least the book comes across as authentic to that aspect of his personality. Overall, I thought this was a great history of K2 climbs, especially of the 2008 disaster. It is highly opinionated, with Viesturs trying to draw lessons and willing to place blame for mistakes. (Mistakes that he would never have made himself, of course.) It is focused and not overly long. There are some great climbing stories.
> � There's no viable analogy between Everest in 1996 and K2 in 2008. Not a single one of the eleven climbers who died that August on the world's second-highest mountain was a true client in the sense that Scott Fischer’s Mountain Madness or Rob Hall's Adventure Consultants customers were. None of them were paying big bucks to have a commercial guiding company get them up the mountain. They were almost uniformly experienced climbers in their own right.
> Yet in one respect, 2008's mountaineers allowed themselves to slip closer to the status of clients than nearly anyone had on previous K2 campaigns. This had to do with their dependence on fixed ropes. In the aftermath of the tragedy, too much focus has been put on the collapse of the serac, too little on the whole business of the fixed ropes.
> Even Jim Wickwire in 1978, though near death after his bivouac, summoned the nerve and the technique to climb down the traverse and the Bottleneck unaided by fixed ropes or partners. No one even thought of fixing ropes all the way through the Bottleneck until about two years ago. How quickly, though, the comfort of fixed ropes gets taken for granted
> The second ascent of Mount Everest came in 1956, only three years after Hillary and Tenzing, when a Swiss party climbed the highest peak in the world and made the first ascent of neighboring Lhotse, the fourth-highest. The second ascent of K2 came only in 1977, twenty-three years after Lacedelli and Compagnoni
> The 1978 team was likewise torn with dissension, but finally placed four Americans on top. Jim Wickwire, John Roskelley, Lou Reichardt, and Rick Ridgeway—superb mountaineers, all four—made the third ascent of K2 via the long and intricate northeast ridge, which had been attempted before but never completed. (For the top 2,000 feet, the Americans' route coincided with the Abruzzi route.) Three of the four reached the summit without supplementary oxygen.
> Achille Compagnoni, must go down in history as one of the indelible bad guys of mountaineering. For fear of sharing the triumph with the younger, better climber, Compagnoni was apparently willing to let Bonatti and Amir Mahdi freeze to death in an open bivouac. And the premeditated ruse Compagnoni devised to prevent that sharing—hiding Camp IX behind rocks above a dangerous traverse—turned the bravest Hunza climber of his day into a frostbite victim
> On Everest, every spring you can usually count on a stable window of clear weather, when the high jet-stream winds start to get pushed away by the approaching monsoon. But the monsoon doesn’t reach the Karakoram. Instead, you have to throw the dice with the weather.
> I believe it will be the Poles, with their legendary stamina, tolerance for pain, and tenacity, who will be the first to get up K2 in winter.
> � There's no viable analogy between Everest in 1996 and K2 in 2008. Not a single one of the eleven climbers who died that August on the world's second-highest mountain was a true client in the sense that Scott Fischer’s Mountain Madness or Rob Hall's Adventure Consultants customers were. None of them were paying big bucks to have a commercial guiding company get them up the mountain. They were almost uniformly experienced climbers in their own right.
> Yet in one respect, 2008's mountaineers allowed themselves to slip closer to the status of clients than nearly anyone had on previous K2 campaigns. This had to do with their dependence on fixed ropes. In the aftermath of the tragedy, too much focus has been put on the collapse of the serac, too little on the whole business of the fixed ropes.
> Even Jim Wickwire in 1978, though near death after his bivouac, summoned the nerve and the technique to climb down the traverse and the Bottleneck unaided by fixed ropes or partners. No one even thought of fixing ropes all the way through the Bottleneck until about two years ago. How quickly, though, the comfort of fixed ropes gets taken for granted
> The second ascent of Mount Everest came in 1956, only three years after Hillary and Tenzing, when a Swiss party climbed the highest peak in the world and made the first ascent of neighboring Lhotse, the fourth-highest. The second ascent of K2 came only in 1977, twenty-three years after Lacedelli and Compagnoni
> The 1978 team was likewise torn with dissension, but finally placed four Americans on top. Jim Wickwire, John Roskelley, Lou Reichardt, and Rick Ridgeway—superb mountaineers, all four—made the third ascent of K2 via the long and intricate northeast ridge, which had been attempted before but never completed. (For the top 2,000 feet, the Americans' route coincided with the Abruzzi route.) Three of the four reached the summit without supplementary oxygen.
> Achille Compagnoni, must go down in history as one of the indelible bad guys of mountaineering. For fear of sharing the triumph with the younger, better climber, Compagnoni was apparently willing to let Bonatti and Amir Mahdi freeze to death in an open bivouac. And the premeditated ruse Compagnoni devised to prevent that sharing—hiding Camp IX behind rocks above a dangerous traverse—turned the bravest Hunza climber of his day into a frostbite victim
> On Everest, every spring you can usually count on a stable window of clear weather, when the high jet-stream winds start to get pushed away by the approaching monsoon. But the monsoon doesn’t reach the Karakoram. Instead, you have to throw the dice with the weather.
> I believe it will be the Poles, with their legendary stamina, tolerance for pain, and tenacity, who will be the first to get up K2 in winter.
Sign into Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ to see if any of your friends have read
K2.
Sign In »
