K2 Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous MT

Today's news--or yesterday's news--is that the first woman to climb the 14 highest mountains in the world (all over 26,000 ft) completed her quest on Annapurna. Annapurna seems to be the last mountain for a lot of people in this rarefied club of completely insane climbers. Ed Viesturs, who wrote (with David Roberts) K2:Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain, almost got hung up on Annapurna. That mountain almost became his Waterloo, but when he finally summitted in 2005, he became only the 6th person in the world to join the 14 club. So now, Oh Eun Sun of South Korea is another first.

But Viestur's book focuses on K2 and there's a reason he calls it the world's most dangerous mountain. It's not a "savage" mountain, as some climber/writers have termed it. It's not some malevolent being, but the fact remains that in an era when summitting Everest becomes almost humdrum (apparently), K2 remains the province of experts, and of very few succesful summits. Usually statistics give me a headache and my eyes glaze over. I forget whether the number was 400 or 4,000 (or even 40). I'm embarrassingly useless with numbers, but this statistic stuck with me: In 2008, 290 climbers reached the top of Everest, while only 18 reached K2. More sobering are the deaths to success ratio. Only 1 died on Everest that year while 11 died on K2. If you look at the all-time successes versus deaths on the two mountains, 1 in 19 died on Everest while 1 in 4 died on K2. Not very cheery, so why do people do this?

I'm the first to admit I'm an armchair ice climber. In fact, give me Antarctica survival tales to really perk me up. Just don't ask me to set foot outside my own house if the wind is whipping up a storm of snow in the dead of winter. I do love hearing about other people's efforts, and--unlike some--I prefer a good success story to a crazy cartwheel into the void. Better yet, give me a crazy cartwheel that is arrested by a well-timed ice ax, and I'm happy. Or give me a lost, snowblind climber (like Michel Parmentier who waited in vain for his climbing partners) who is talked down K2 in a storm by another climber working from memory! Chamoux got on the radio and did a remarkable thing: he tried to talk Parmentier down, giving him the "beta" of the route from memory..."Keep right, keep right, don't veer to the left, then straight down for perhaps two, three hundred metres...over" Turning to the others in the dome tent, with the radio off, Chamoux said, "He has perhaps a fifty-fifty chance that he finds the ropes. If not..."

Viesturs has everything in this book. I thought it would get boring and/or repetitive once he stopped writing about his first-hand experience, but not once did I get bored. He covers the earliest efforts in 1902, he writes about the 1938 and 1939 expeditions and the horrible 1954 first summit that spawned a decades-old feud and lingering bitterness. He also covers the deadly summer of 2008 in which a horrible percentage of summitters--or near--summitters came to very bad and/or unknown ends. I like Viestur's tone. He oftens says he doesn't like to second-guess other climbers or air dirty laundry, as he calls it, but he subtly explains how he might have acted differently or he gently tries to rehabilitate some climbers whom he believes were treated harshly. This book is full of facts without being dry and it has reignited my interest in reading more.

My only complaint was that it was very hard to keep the characters of each expedition clear. I would have liked a nice appendix which listed dates and names and any "firsts" or interesting discoveries that came from each expedition. Still, this is a nice overview of the history of K2 and a reminder that climbing such heights is still for the skilled, the dedicated, and the (perhaps) slightly unhinged.

Here's Viestur's on The Daily Show just after he became the first American to climb all 14 8,000 Meter mountains.