Second Highest Strangeness

Photograph by By Vittorio Sella (1859–1943)

We all know the classic weird tale settings: dark woods, moonlit moors, fog-bound swamps. The gothic tales practically write themselves.

But for this horror writer’s money, the eeriest place on Earth has none of the above features. Indeed, its stark barrenness is what makes it so forbidding. Like a pocket of uncreation that lingered, forgotten, in the Western Himalayas after Noah’s Flood. It’s a place so remote it didn’t have a name until the nineteenth century–even then, it just got a perfunctory surveyor’s mark.

… just the bare bones of a name, all rock and ice and storm and abyss. It makes no attempt to sound human. It is atoms and stars. It has the nakedness of the world before the first man – or of the cindered planet after the last.

-Fosco Mariani

K2. That’s all.

Earth’s second-highest mountain–in a just world, it would be the first–towers 28,251 feet above the Godwin-Austen Glacier in the Karakoram Range on Pakistan’s border with China. Despite its enormity, the mountain remained unknown to the outside world until the British surveyed it in 1856. Its location is so remote that it cannot be seen from the nearest human settlements–whose people manifest European features and claim to be the posterity of deserters from Alexander the Great’s army.

In sharp contrast to Everest Base Camp, which you can drive to, and which does in fact have blackjack and hookers, just reaching K2 base camp entails a two-week expedition worthy of an Indiana Jones flick, complete with rickety rope bridge.

That fortnight of trekking gets you to the Baltoro Glacier, where you learn how aptly they named the Karakoram (Black Gravel).

Manage not to fall into any of the abyssal crevasses covered by thin layers of snow, and you’ll reach Base Camp in the shadow of the Mountain.

There, you can see–and on warm days, smell–K2’s own cemetery, a stone cairn festooned with epitaph-engraved mess plates called the Gilkey Memorial. More on why later.

From there, it’s a 13,000-foot climb up 70 degree slopes described as an “icy church steeple” in notoriously unpredictable weather with 1/2-1/3 sea level oxygen. And since K2 is farther north than Everest, the average temperatures are colder.

The differences show up in the stats. Over 4,000 people have climbed Everest. If you have the money, you can hire a Sherpa to push you to the top in a wheelbarrow. The queue for the summit looks like the line for Space Mountain.

Only 377 people have reached the summit of K2. Its climber fatality rate is 25%, which dwarfs Everest’s 1%.

And to back up K2’s status as the KEEP OUT sign of the gods, many of those deaths occurred under strange circumstances.

The first British attempt on the mountain in 1908 was co-led by “Wickedest Man in the World” Aleister Crowley. By some miracle–or perhaps the other thing–everyone on Crowley’s team returned from their failed expedition unscathed. It didn’t seem to augur well for others, though.

In 1939, German-American climber Fritz Wiessner led an ill-equipped and underqualified team in quest of the summit. Plagued by infighting and a bizarre apathy that overcame many members of the crew, high camps were left unsupplied, and Maine socialite Dudley Wolfe was left alone at 7,500 meters for days.

Weissner came within 800 feet of the top but acceded to his Sherpa’s frantic demands to turn back, lest they draw the ire of the gods who haunted the summit after nightfall. Bad weather kept Weissner from another attempt.

Miscommunication led to everyone else thinking the summit team dead. Weissner returned to base in a rage at finding the high camps understocked and unmanned. Amid a storm of blame throwing and legal threats, somebody remembered that Wolfe was still stranded in the death zone.

Though the whole team was exhausted, battered, and frostbitten, three Sherpas set out to rescue Wolfe. They found him trapped in his tent, lying listless in his own filth. Wolfe asked for one more day to get ready, and the Sherpas reluctantly descended to the next camp down, intending to return for Wolfe the next day.

But another freak storm intervened. Down at base camp, the rest of the team held out for days. But the food ran low, and the porters they’d hired in advance came to escort the bedraggled team back to civilization. Neither Wolfe nor his attempted rescuers were heard from again.

The 1939 disaster didn’t stop other mountaineers from trying again. Dr. Charles Houston, who’d led the 1938 expedition that had scouted the route used by Weissner’s team, returned in 1953 with a highly accomplished American group. Houston was determined not to repeat Weissner and company’s mistakes. He and his team made multiple trips up and down the mountain, ensuring robust supply lines. On August 1, they made it to Camp VIII at 7800 meters and laid plans for a summit bid.

Once again, K2’s infamously fickle weather had other ideas. A storm raged for five days, confining the expedition to their tents high on the mountain’s shoulder. On August 6, team member Art Gilkey collapsed due to blood clots in his lungs. Houston, a high-altitude medicine expert, knew the condition was a death sentence if they didn’t get Gilkey down immediately. Braving the heightened avalanche risk, the team lashed together an improvised stretcher and set out to save their friend. No one gave a moment’s thought to abandoning him.

Disaster struck again on the way down. One man slipped while traversing a sheer ice slope. One by one, every man in the roped-together team was torn off the mountain, until only Pete Schoening, who’d been belaying the others, remained on the slope. Acting quickly, Schoening wrapped the rope around his shoulders and ice axe handle. Somehow, he managed to hold his six teammates over the abyss until they regained purchase. His almost superhuman act has gone down in mountaineering history as The Belay.

The team stumbled into Camp VII on the brink of exhaustion. They fastened a morphine-sedated Gilkey to the mountain with ropes tied to ice axes driven deep in the slope and labored to set up their tents.

While the team was still making camp, they heard muffled cries from Gilkey’s direction. Upon rushing to the site, they found nothing–no stretcher, no ropes, no axes, and no Art Gilkey. A small groove in the snow hinted at a possible avalanche, but no one had heard the telltale rumble even as they’d heard Gilkey’s wail. Theories abound, but his death remains unexplained to this day.

Houston and the rest of his team returned home to a hero’s welcome. Though they’d failed to bag the peak, their honor, bravery, and selflessness made them legends.

The next year, when Houston heard about the first conquest of K2 by Italian climber Achille Compagnoni, he suffered a mental breakdown and was found wandering the streets with total amnesia.

See this gripping documentary for the whole story:

If you want the closest real-world analogue to the setting from Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”, try K2. Or better yet, stay at home and read my award-worthy weird horror novel Nethereal.