K2: Triumph and Tragedy

Jim Curran

Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1987; ISBN: 0-395-48590-8; Pp. 217, index, photos

After getting hooked on climbing books about Everest, I have decided to diversify and read something about the second-highest peak in the world, the "savage mountain" K2 in Pakistan. Although somewhat less known than its famous cousin with the mellifluous name, K2 has a formidable reputation among climbers---it is for a reason K2 is considered the most challenging of the 8,000m peaks. Since I know next to nothing about it, I picked the book mostly on the way it looked and the enormity of the tragedy it promised to tell me about.

Ten years before the 1996 Everest disaster, K2 saw its own deadly season with thirteen deaths amid the twenty-seven triumphs. The author was a member of the British team and was there to film the effort, not to climb the mountain. Unlike Mr Dickinson (The Other Side of Everest) whose responsibilities as a film-maker and self-admitted ineptitude at high-altitude mountaineering did not preclude him from ascending, Mr Curran never went much higher than Camp I. As a result, the book is filled with glorious detail regarding life at camp, but with very little immediate sense of the drama developing up higher.

This, of course, is not the author's fault. However, it does give the narrative a very detached feel, which is not helped by the typical British sense of irony, reservation, and occasional smugness. The book feels clinical and when the news of various deaths begin arriving in rapid succession, there is only a sense of "Oh, well, too bad" and nothing of the drama that climbers must have gone through. Some of the latter is evidenced by the pictures of distraught survivors of the storm that trapped climbers returning from the summit at Camp IV for too long causing the deaths of all but two.

Since the narrative is a bit rambling and because Mr Curran insists on writing about every single person that he meets, one quickly gets lost in the maze of characters that come and go, sometimes to the great beyond, without much consequence. The appendix listing the ascents and the deaths was helpful, but I had to refer to it, and the photos, almost constantly to remember who it was that I was reading about. There is also an inordinate amount of time spent on personal clashes and idiosyncracies. Some of that would be excellent---it makes sense to catch a glimpse of the intense people that find their expression in the mountains---but there is also a fine line between interesting and somewhat exhausting detail.

Still, the story of the gradual disintegration of the British expedition forms a splendid backdrop to the drama. The Brits begin my making an unlucky route choice and obtain a permit for the difficult West Ridge instead of the Abruzzi Ridge that most others use. After several unsuccessful attempts to establish the camps for the siege approach, they give up and then sneak up the traditional route without a permit. By the time Alan Rouse makes his fatal bid for the summit, he is the only British climber remaining, and even though he becomes the first Brit to ascend K2, he dies after the storm at Camp IV, even as his impromptu Polish partner finds her way down to safety. As many books about Everest have made painfully clear: altitude can kill by shattering the climbers' morale, making people the agents of their own destruction through negligence, stupid mistakes, blurred judgments, and spiritual fatigue.

Unfortunately, because the author did not climb and appeared to have no desire to climb, there is no hint of an answer to my perennial question, why do it? That may be the biggest shortcoming overall: we have a story told by someone who is essentially an outsider. I much prefer books written by mountaineers themselves, so my next K2 reading will be sure to be one of these. Still, a fairly informative book, well-written (technically), and occasionally pithy, K2: Triumph and Tragedy will not be donated to a library or sold any time soon.

December 4, 2004