K2: Life and Death on the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain by Ed Viesturs
Book Review
** Many spoilers ahead, if you care about that sort of a thing**
A tour-de-force history of the climbing of K2, right from the very first recorded attempt by the Duke of Abruzzi to the 2008 disaster that was one of the worst in the mountain’s climbing history. K2 is a sheer beauty of rock and ice and snow jutting out of terra firma in the Karakoram range in North-West Kashmir (I refuse to call it POK/IOK/whatever the regional powers India and Pakistan call the region as) and widely regarded as one of the most technically difficult high-atltitude peaks. Everest almost seems like a walk in the park, going by the comparisions of acclaimed mountaineers.
Early on into the book, the author Ed Viesturs declares that he doesn’t like to comment/critique/judge the decisions (or hypoxia-induced indecisiveness, sometimes at 7000 m+) that lead the climbing attempts to fail/result in disaster/attain success but at a terrible cost like amputation of frostbitten digits, of other mountaineers and criticised the accounts of other mountaineers that did the aforementioned judging of summit attempts of their own expeditions and others. I felt it odd. If anything, we ought to analyse and objectively critique the actions of mountaineers if we are to learn anything from them and not repeat their follies in the Death Zone above 26,000 ft. But, contrary to his declaration, Ed ends up throughly analysing and criticising each major experidition on K2, till the 2008 tragedy.
Of the difficulties, obstacles, climbing routes, techniques to reach the summit relatively “safely” of the world’s second highest mountain, we learn a lot, given that Ed himself is a legendary mountaineer who climbed all the 8000ers in the world, without supplemental Oxygen, following the example set by another legend Reinhold Messner. We get told repeatedly the importance of pitons in marking the ascent route in order to find the way back to base camp if one gets caught in a brutal storm on high altitudes, which is pretty common it seems, up there close to the jet streams.
I read this book immediately after I finished Jon Krauker’s amazing Into Thin Air. Krauker set a really high standard in writing about mountains and men, given he is a both a journalist and accomplished climber himself as well as he was one of the key actors in the disaster of 1996 on Mt. Everest. On the other hand, Viesturs has to rely on second-hand accounts of almost all the expeditions he writes about, except for his own summiting of K2. Hence, this book clearly falls behind Into Thin Air in terms of sheer interest and the ‘cant put it down’ feel that that book generated in me, reason why I breezed through it in 5 days (which I repeated with this book too, but that is only because I am currently obsessed with mountaineering in the high Himalayas!).
Viesturs’s writing is very matter-of-factly when compared to Krauker’s which has a certain ‘journalistic dramatization’ flavor to it. In K2 we learn that the men who reach the highest mountains on the planet and even the high places are not immune to the politics and petty squabbling that we see play out among humanity everyday on the world’s stage, even while greater things are at stake. The author repeatedly underscores the importance of pitons, turaround times (the turnaround time you set before setting out to the summit from the highest camp before the summit), and the careful choosing your ‘brothers of the rope’. We also learn about some of the key players and their colorful characters of the annals of mountaineering, such as House (the ‘House’s Chimney, a dangerous section of the Abruzzi route is named after him), Houston, Messner and so on.
All said, this is a great read on the subject of climbing the world’s second most dangerous mountain that takes the life of one out of every three climbers who dare to put their feet on it windblown, desolate and perilious summit at 8611 meters above sea-level. I loved it.
