One Mountain Thousand Summits by Freddie Wilkinson

Author:Freddie Wilkinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9781742691602
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2010-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

8

A CRITICAL SITUATION

The second week in July, the winds came.

A high-pressure system settled over western China to the north of the mountain; warm air from the seasonal monsoon low above the Indian Ocean set up to the south. The opposing systems met along the high divide of the Karakoram Range. Like tightly drawn lines on a contour map, the pressure gradient steepened. Pemba’s prayer flags fluttered and snapped above the rippling base camp tents as day after day hurricane-strength winds beat across the upper mountain.

For the men and women hoping to reach K2’s summit, the bad weather served to realign their schedules. By the beginning of July, only the Koreans and the Norit team were sufficiently acclimatized to mount a summit push as soon as conditions cooperated. Other expeditions, like the two international groups, had more recently arrived and still needed time to properly prepare. But as the days ran together into weeks of impotent ambition, nearly every team in base camp decided they would go for the summit the first chance they had.

The details of the “base camp meetings” have been one of the most talked-about aspects of the disaster. Minor discrepancies and differences among the different published accounts make knowing exactly what was decided—and, more important, what was understood by all parties—almost impossible. But most of those who were present in base camp recollect that it was Kim Jae-su, the leader of the Korean expedition, who first organized a meeting with the other teams who would be going for the summit.

Throughout that summer, Kim had been an enigmatic personality in base camp. He carried himself with a rigid air that was frequently interpreted by his neighbors as being standoffish or somehow disdainful of others. Kim’s projected persona was certainly complicated by his incomplete command of English, but there is no doubt he believed he was most qualified to lead the advanced team. In a translated interview conducted after the climb, he would say, “When it comes to equipment, we were the most well equipped team among all the teams . . . and more particularly, I was the one who had the most experience among [all] climbers at that time.” Asked by one of the Americans when they would pack up and head home, Kim responded that they planned to stay as long as it took to reach the summit.

Kim did have a practical reason to feel that his team should be in charge. The Korean’s climbing-Sherpas had already single-handedly fixed the Abruzzi Ridge as high as Camp III. Though relations between teams in base camp that summer were almost entirely friendly, many would mention an occasional, unspoken sense of condescension from Norit or the Koreans. On the other side of the coin, it is also fair to say that both Wilco van Rooijen and Kim Jae-su, whose expeditions had invested by far the most time and energy in preparing the SSE Spur and the Abruzzi Ridge, respectively, felt a little chagrined that now a host of smaller teams were going to piggyback on their hard work all the way to the summit.

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