Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

All mountain climbers are liars, says Ed Viesturs, mountain climber. The sanctimony is strong in this one. Unlike, unfortunately, the quality of prose. At least now I have an answer to that eternal question, what would Shakespeare look like when paraphrased for a CNN newcaster. Lyrical descriptions bordering on the mystic qualities of light, snow, rock, and air belong in the realm of Robert Macfarlane, Ed Viesturs is here to impart some knowledge for your ignorant sea-level ass, and he does it with the force of an all-knowing avalanche disguised as your disapproving mother glaring at you because you went out in the cold without layers and are now on your deathbed with pneumonia. I don't know why I'm complaining, I didn't come here for transcendental poetry, I came here for technicality-soaked pages of mountain geology with all the dryness of a really good climbing boot, and there is certainly something refreshing about an adventure book that doesn't resort to cliched mysticism and gaia-porn. The reality of these stories is irresistibly full of drama, thrills, and pathos, and a robotic retelling feels like it would actually accentuate the drama, like Arnold as the Terminator narrating the historical events of Judgment day, something that deserves 5stars. Unfortunately, it isn't robotic, it is distractingly self-righteous and preachy, although in all fairness it's got such a solid dose of that right at the end that there's a recency effect in emotional reaction while writing this review. Most of the review might have been a scathing attack on his astonishingly graceless anti-normies tirade with all the sneering superiority that has characterized many mountain-guides I've met. As a dutiful non-irritating normie citizen with absolutely no inflated sense of my own importance in the grand scheme of things, let me just say, um my taxes pay your salary buddy.

Assorted thoughts
Early mountain literature were very diplomatic. Counter-culture revolution 60s/70s, literature started airing dirty linen: "Galen Rowell’s In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods and Rick Ridgeway’s The Last Step, which chronicled, respectively, the 1975 and 1978 American K2 expeditions, highlighted every interpersonal showdown among their teammates, they remembered (or recreated) blistering dialogues to dramatize them" - How much is just money and increased competition for the few professionals who can afford to live off their mountaineering careers? Later in the book is this "In the perverse logic of the day, that tarred the Wyoming cowboy with a certain unworthiness in the eyes of his Ivy League teammates. And Petzoldt’s profession as a guide, just as perversely, could be seen as a detriment on an expedition, not as an asset."

Dolorous Edd: The frustration of taking on more than my share of the work, of having other climbers shirk their responsibilities, and of having no leader who would assign tasks built inside me into a towering resentment. But I kept it all inside; I never blew up and chewed anybody else out. (That’s typical for me, I’m afraid—I tend to avoid overt conflict.)

The Russians don't come out too well in this book. I continually get the feeling they are the godsent White Asians whose Asian qualities of rudeness, unprofessionalism, parsimony, selfishness etc can be criticized with great glee by white people without the pesky danger of being accused of racism. There is quite a bit of internalized racism that the author obviously can't be blamed for, for instance trying to describe how expeditions had completely blown up in number, ranging 'From India (!!!!) to..', exclamations my own gratuitous addition of course. Poor Koreans and Japanese climbers are always just Koreans or Japanese, how dare they ask for names. Sherpa and Hunzas on the other hand are graciously named to demonstrate the generous liberal attitude of the author.

Chantal sounds like a real peach. The damaged kind that makes you sick and whose pit stabs the roof of your mouth.

I find myself very cynical when reading stuff like "Scott’s wife had wanted me to try to retrieve the wedding ring that he carried on a cord around his neck, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.", I can't see why anyone wouldn't do it, so I think best case scenario he was exhausted and walked straight by and did none of the 'looked for corpse, sat with him and spoke of better days, gone but not forgotten' nonsense. Worst case, he kept the precious :+

There is a K1. It's called Masherbrum now. Lt Montgomorie of Great Trigonometric Survey took theodolite to Srinagar mountain, Other K-peaks, the beautiful tower K7. Chomolungma is so much nicer a name than Everest 'Goddess mother of the world'. Unofficially should just use that, like Denali instead of McKinley. Balti people called K2 Chogori, which just means Great Mountain. So it seems like another kangaroo 'I don't understand you' story. On the name, Ed suddenly cracks out all the skills last used in high-school English lit class - K2 may owe its origin to chance, but it is a name in itself, and one of striking originality. Sibylline, magical, with a slight touch of fantasy. A short name but one that is pure and peremptory, so charged with evocation that it threatens to break through its bleak syllabic bonds. And at the same time a name instinct with mystery and suggestion: a name that scraps race, religion, history and past. No country claims it, no latitudes and longitudes and geography, no dictionary words. No, just the bare bones of a name, all rock and ice and storm and abyss. It makes no attempt to sound human. It is atoms and stars.

First ever K2 expedition in 1902 had a familiar name whose over-long twitter bio would need to read Avid Climber. Magician. Drug cultist. Sex Demon. Poet. Bibliophile. Aleister Crowley.

Geopolitical revisionist historian: In the years since Pakistan had won its independence from India, the approaches to the Karakoram had become a region of military importance

Germans attempting Eiger north face - 'the last great problem' of the Alps, all were thought deranged. Nationalistic fervor. Hitler gave first climbers medals (2 Austrian, 2 German)

The logistical complexity and thoroughness of Wiessner's plan is a lovely throwback to exploration of that time, and reminiscent of Robert Scott's expedition

Crumper Extraordinaire that I am, couldn't help note this passage “Eyes turned away from the hardships of K2 and toward the comforts of home.� There’s a term some mountaineers use for this phenomenon. It’s called “crumping.� To crump is to let the hardship and danger of expedition life drain you of all your mountaineering ambitions, so that all you want to do is get the hell out of there.

Contextualizing just how progressive John Hunt's decision was for the times: Had Wiessner climbed K2 with a Sherpa, it would have set a glorious example, one not realized until 1953 on Everest, when John Hunt, recognizing Tenzing Norgay’s vast experience and bold ambition, paired him with Hillary for the May 29 assault.

Epicness: only Pete Schoening’s “miracle belay� in 1953 is more legendary than Wiessner’s self-arrest, which saved himself and his two teammates - Pete Schoening’s “miracle belay� has become a legend. Nothing like it, before or since, has ever been performed in the mountains—one man with a single ax and a grip of steel stopping the otherwise fatal falls of six teammates and of himself. Schoening’s deed, which as a superbly trained climber he performed by instinct in a split-second reflex, is, simply, the most famous belay in mountaineering history.

Other side of epicness: The three Sherpa found Wolfe lying in his sleeping bag, completely apathetic. He did not even read the note Wiessner had written to him. He had again run out of matches, and had eaten or drunk nothing for days. He had not even gone outside to defecate, so his sleeping bag and the tent floor were smeared with feces.

The entire aftermath of Wiessner's expedition was very intriguing. For example: Cynical observers would later suggest that had only Sherpa been killed on K2 in 1939, the AAC wouldn’t have lifted an eyebrow. But Dudley Wolfe was a Boston Brahmin, a blue blood from New England—as were many of the AAC’s luminaries and officers. And Fritz Wiessner was a German-American, at perhaps the worst time in the twentieth century to be one.

And: Beginning in the 1960s, and accelerating through the �70s and �80s, American climbing underwent a cultural revolution. A new generation, reexamining the 1939 expedition, saw armchair critics such as Kenneth Mason as reactionary old fogeys, while Wiessner was in effect reborn as one of the greatest climbers in history, his deeds on K2 considered heroic rather than foolish or neglectful.

And: By the time Thompson wrote the biography, he hated Frost. In that three-volume life, Frost comes across as a great poet but a monster in human terms. One reviewer called it ‘a big fat voodoo doll of a biography, with Thompson puncturing Frost from every angle.� But that’s still the public image

Context of Time: Robert Falcon Scott’s diary of his fatal trip to the south pole or the various books about Ernest Shackleton’s heroic expedition when his ship, the Endurance, was trapped in the ice off Antarctica and sank—I was taken aback by a recurrent theme: those guys were sure they’d been born too late.

guys who, like me, have specialized in 8,000-meter peaks know very little about Red River Gorge, or Hueco Tanks in Texas, or Mount Charleston in Nevada. We’re all still “climbers,� but our fraternities (and sororities) are so specialized that we scarcely understand one another’s jargon.

They f***ing love science: When his teammates finally discovered Scott’s last camp on his return from the south pole, eight months after the leader and his four brave comrades had starved and frozen to death, they found more than thirty pounds of rocks—geological specimens—still loaded on Scott’s sledge. By 1954, however, that tradition was almost obsolete.

Mandatory Herzog reference: “There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men�

Pedantic Ed antics making a case that I couldn't quite understand: When I first read that paragraph, I had to look up “orographical.� It means “having to do with the branch of physical geography dealing with mountains.� I rest my case.

Gracious Ed laying down some anti-racist rhetoric that postmodernism will gleefully deconstruct to reveal all its inherent racist glory: Hunza terror on steep terrain may well have looked to the Italians like mere laziness. It’s also possible that these high-altitude porters bridled every bit as much as Lacedelli and his disaffected teammates did under Desio’s stern dictatorship.

Everest vs K2 is fascinating to read.

Mountain stuff I picked out
A sharp pyramid of black rock, sheer snow gullies and ridges, and ominous hanging glaciers, K2 has a symmetry and grace that make it the most striking of the fourteen 8,000ers. Rising from the Baltoro Glacier in the heart of the Karakoram, K2 is flanked by five other of the world’s seventeen highest peaks. That range, in fact, holds the densest constellation of skyscraping mountains anywhere in the world—even denser than the Himalaya around Everest. Yet K2 soars in proud isolation over Broad Peak, Gasherbrum I, Gasherbrum II, and its other formidable neighbors.

the weather the next morning was decidedly iffy, with lenticular cloud caps covering all the major peaks—almost always a sign of a coming storm.

in 1938, climbers who wanted the best mountaineering footwear available wore relatively thin leather boots, their soles reinforced with hobnails—little metal cleats affixed to the undersurface. The nails gave you better purchase on ice and snow, but they were a real liability on rock slabs, because your feet tended to skitter off their holds. What’s more, at altitude the hobnails conducted cold straight to your feet, contributing directly to the risk of frostbite all early climbers faced in the Himalaya. It would be decades before Vibram rubber soles got invented, not to mention double boots—especially the kind of combination plastic outer shell and foam inner I wore on most of my 8,000-ers.

Climbing ropes, at that time, were still made out of hemp or manila. Nylon ropes, which are many times stronger and have a stretchiness that absorbs much of the impact of a fall, were still nearly a decade in the future. The ice axes of the day were three to four feet long and had shafts of hickory or ash, with a straight metal pick and an opposing adze for a handle. They looked more like Victorian alpenstocks (glorified walking sticks) than the short, fanged chrome-molybdenum ice tools we used in 1992.

the rock strata on the northwest ridge inclined upward, promising staircase-like steps. On the southeast spur on the diametrically opposite side of the mountain, the Italians found just the reverse: downward-sloping slabs and ledges that made for treacherous climbing and insecure campsites.

In 1938, ascenders were still a quarter century away from being invented. Instead, the climbers tied knots and overhand loops in their hemp fixed ropes, then simply hauled themselves up with their hands. Descending the steeper passages today, we clip our harnesses to the fixed rope with a figure-eight device and rappel the line. In 1938, the climbers also rappelled, but they did so with the traditional dulfersitz, a simple and ingenious method of wrapping the rope in an S-bend through the crotch, around one hip, up across the chest, and over the opposite shoulder, invented shortly after the turn of the twentieth century by the great German climber Hans Dülfer.

Bates set up a belay by draping a loop of rope over a prong of rock, then passing the rope behind the prong. That technique harkened back to Victorian times, but by today’s standards it seems pretty marginal. If House had fallen off the cliff, the hemp rope might well have severed as it came tight on the sharp rock.

classic chimney position, feet flat against one wall, back against the other.

bergschrund—a crevasse where the rocky core of the mountain is separated from the glacial mass that lies on top of it. Here the slope steepened, and though the crevasse itself was crossable on a snow bridge, the texture of the snow grew even softer and less stable.

For nine hours, Wiessner climbed the rock bands, hammering in pitons as he went. In succession, Wiessner mastered a short couloir of black ice, a short overhang of iced-up rock, and many rope lengths of shattered, friable rock, much of it covered with a treacherous skin of ice called verglas.

Gilkey was wrapped in a sleeping bag, with his feet in a rucksack. This makeshift litter was cradled by a network of ropes. Four men, each tending a separate rope try to pull and steer the immobile victim down