The Last Man on the Mountain by Jennifer Jordan

Author:Jennifer Jordan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

ON JUNE 20, only two weeks into the climb, Dudley, Fritz, and George, whom Fritz still hoped would shape up and become a strong member of the team, made a carry from Camp II to Camp IV at 21,500 feet, where they waited for Jack and several Sherpas to follow the next day. Instead, a storm blew in, keeping Jack and the others low on the mountain while trapping the three of them in a tiny tent as the blizzard and hurricane-force winds soon made even leaving the tent suicidal.

K2’s wind is legendary, and while all of the famed 8,000-meter peaks regularly suffer violent wind, K2’s is nearly constant. Climbers who have survived the mountain talk of how it penetrates everything—tents, sleeping bags, and clothes—and even months after they have returned from the mountain, they can still feel the chill of that wind.

Day after day the storm battered the men at Camp IV, sounding like a freight train coming through a tunnel at full power, its wind gusts flattening the tent so that the men had to push their backs into the fabric to keep it aloft and take some of the pressure off the poles before they snapped in half. Fearing that a sudden gust would pick up the tent and blow them into Tibet, the men sat and lay in the cramped quarters, trying not to lose their minds. With their heavy books left behind in base camp, boredom forced them to read aloud the labels on their cans of food. After they had exhausted that activity, they fell silent again, staring at the bucking and straining tent around them.

Two days later, Dudley picked up his journal and saw the date printed on the page: June 22. On the other side of the world Harvard was hosting his class’s tenth reunion and here he was, hoping to survive hurricane winds and subzero temperatures while sitting 21,000 feet up a Himalayan peak. The red and white tents in the Yard that he visualized, the Radcliffe women in their straw hats and white gloves, the Harvard men in top hats and tails, and the robed commencement speaker intoning from the steps of the Harvard Chapel couldn’t have made a starker contrast to the tiny tent perilously perched on K2.

Dudley did his best to keep Fritz and George entertained with songs and stories, describing in great detail the yacht cruise he would take them on to tropical paradises, but his audience was often unreceptive and he too would grow quiet again, mesmerized as he watched the sides of the tent flexing and releasing in the wind, which reminded him of the Highland Light when she was at full sail. All the while, he massaged his feet hoping to ward off frostbite; he had felt the first nip a few days before and knew that the only cure at this altitude was warmth and circulation. He had to keep the blood moving through his toes.

Next to him, Fritz tried to keep focused on the task at hand: climbing the mountain.

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