DISPATCHES

Howkins

	click for dispatch photos

Up, for example. Gravity does not like up.

We rediscovered this simple rule of physics en route to Camp 2 this week. Descending from the high point on our fixed lines to Camp 1 was easy, a quick, hour-long spider descent down 10 lengths of rope. Going up took four times more time, and ten times more energy.

You see, going "up" to Camp 2 doesn't mean just going up. It means going up, and over, and up, and over, and up, and over. In order to get to the little platform of snow on the ridge where we will situate Camp 2, we must first traverse around three long fingers of rock that extend down from the ridge. Each traverse is a 100-200 meter-long session of kicking crampons across 45-50 degree slopes of green ice and rotten nevé. The best technique for getting across seems to be front-pointing with one foot, and Frenching (using side-points) with the other.

Mike Bearzi has a name for this technique: "pied a splitova," he calls it, or just "splitova." At Base Camp, demonstrating splitova right, splitova left, looks like a happy Irish jig. You can do it with a smile. Up on the route to Camp 2, though, you can only splitova one side. And splitova right, splitova right, splitova right, for hours at a time, doesn't even remotely resemble a jig. You can't do it with a smile. By the end of the first hour, the little bones and tendons in your right foot are screaming for mercy.

At least the agony of endless splitova-righting is alleviated by the interest of various landmarks along the way. Just two pitches above Camp 1, for example, there is a door-sized chunk of granite we call "Ivan's Stone." Ivan discovered this particular rock on a tenuous sort of lead, with a belayer anchored to only two axes, and a single screw left on his harness. He pulled on the stone, and discovered that the entire thing moved, with a deep grinding sound, like the entrance to Aladdin's cave. None of our team is named Aladdin, so he gently finessed the rock back into place, leaning on it with his body weight, and fixed the rope to the snarl of old ropes behind it.

To "trundle" (knock off) Ivan's Stone would be death to climbers below, and possibly the grand finale of Camp 1, or the ropes leading up to Camp 1. So we have spent some significant time at ABC debating techniques for gluing it in place. Duct tape seems to be the most promising solution so far.

After Ivan's Stone come a string of Mike's Anchors. One "V-thread" (a technique for threading a strand of rope through a hole in the ice), and one Ushba ice screw, equalized, and one double-overhand loop for clipping in to. Neat, predictable, precise. Mike and Ziggy have fixed the majority of the ropes going to Camp II, and their anchors, like their climbing technique, bear the mark of experience.

And then, somehwere in the middle of one of the traverses, there is the field of pock marks in the snow, from rocks falling off the ridge above.

It was near one of these pock marks last Thursday that I paused to pass my ascender around a knot in the rope.

Whumph! My heart skipped a beat, and I stood rigid for a few wide-eyed seconds. While I was busy futzing with the rope, a rock bowling ball had broken loose from the cliffs above me and careened past, skipping down the steep slope and leaving fresh snow craters on impact. I watched the ball — a big, flat, square missile — sail through 4,000 empty feet of space, to the glacier below. The nearest crater was only about 10 feet from my feet. The bowling demon of K2 didn't score a strike or even a spare, but the gutter ball was a little too close for comfort.

Flying objects are one of the hazards on K2, and as I started to move up the the rope again, I thought about Jay Sieger's partner, who was killed by a falling rock on the south side of K2 last year.

I also thought about my own partner on the south side of K2, a Swiss climber named Chris Binggeli, and a near miss we had in just about the same place Jay's partner was killed.

After the near miss, to keep our eyes peeled for more rocks, Chris and I decided to play the "Game of Falling Things." The route we were climbing followed a cracked spine of rock and ice, with a vast snow couloir on the right, and a jumbled mess of twisted rock bands on the left. The entire snow couloir belonged to Chris. The twisted rock bands were mine. One falling object was worth one point.

Chris was already way ahead, 1-0, because the missile that had almost hit us had careened across the snow couloir. Then, after a few minutes of climbing, my crampon knocked a rock loose. It bounced down the rock spine a few times, and hit a right-angle rock that jettisoned it down the snow couloir.

"Two to nothing," Chris announced triumphantly.

"That's my rock," I retorted, "I knocked it loose." I noticed the familiar dull, oxygenless ache in my calves. It took me four breaths to get two sentences out.

Twenty minutes later, Chris said, "So it's my point."

Twenty minutes after that, I said, "No, it's not. I knocked it loose."

The liners of my boots were pressing deep into my shins, and so to balance the shin pain against the calf pain I was taking very precise, very controlled steps, counting steps, counting breaths, counting steps again.

An hour later, we crested the final snow ridge to our camp. "So you should get a point deducted," Chris said as he flopped down on a rock to peel his crampons off, "Three to zero."

There was no one close enough to play a round of Falling Things with last Thursday, so instead, I found myself tracking other numbers: my heart rate (using a Suunto altimeter watch), the gain in altitude, the number of anchors, the drop in barometric pressure.

By the time I had hauled my load of ropes and gear up to the top of the fixed lines, where Fred was leading the third traverse, the pressure had dropped by a full tenth of a point, to 14.00 inHg.

Above him, there were whorls of mist and snow dancing on the ridge, the tell-tale signs of high winds. And behind, the clouds surging over the Savoia Pass from Pakistan tell us that the weather is disintegrating.

We huddled in the spindrift at the belay and fixed ropes for another 3 hours, and then beat a hasty retreat to Camp 1, followed by a hasty retreat to ABC yesterday morning.

Since we returned to ABC, there has been approximately 6 inches of fresh snow. It looks like it will be at least several days before the avalanches have cleared the slopes and it is safe to go back up.

— Heidi Howkins, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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