The Black
Summer

By 1986, K2 had been climbed by exactly one line: the Abruzzi Spur, the ridge of the 1939 tragedy, finally completed by the Italians in 1954. That summer, nine expeditions gathered below the mountain to change the map — the cream of the golden age of Himalayan climbing, all at once.

There were the Poles of the high-altitude school that was rewriting the sport — Jerzy Kukuczka and Tadeusz Piotrowski aiming straight up the unclimbed south face, Wanda Rutkiewicz aiming to be the first woman on the summit. The Italian Renato Casarotto came to solo the south-southwest pillar — the "Magic Line." The French husband and wife Maurice and Liliane Barrard climbed as a pair, high-altitude romantics. The Austrians and the British international team took the Abruzzi; with the British came Alan Rouse, and the film team of Kurt Diemberger and Julie Tullis, who had been working the great peaks together since 1981.

Between June 21 and August 10, twenty-seven climbers reached the summit — more than in the previous thirty-two years combined. Thirteen people did not come home. The mountain spent the whole summer teaching the same lesson, and nobody could afford to hear it until it was over.

On June 23, 1986, Wanda Rutkiewicz of Poland became the first woman to stand on the summit of K2 — climbing without supplemental oxygen, at the front of the era's hardest school of mountaineering. Half an hour behind her came Liliane Barrard, beside her husband Maurice, with Michel Parmentier: the first married couple on the summit of the second-highest mountain on Earth.

The Barrards climbed the way they lived — light, high, together. On the descent, after a bivouac high on the mountain, they fell behind. Rutkiewicz and Parmentier came down; the Barrards never did. Three weeks later the mountain gave Liliane back, at its foot, and she was buried near Base Camp. Maurice it kept until 1998.

It was the summer's pattern in miniature, set in its first week: a magnificent first, and a descent that cost more than the summit was worth. The season's ledger would repeat it, line by line.

Jerzy Kukuczka was in the middle of the greatest run in the history of high-altitude climbing — racing Reinhold Messner to all fourteen 8,000-metre peaks, and doing it by new routes and in winter. For K2 he chose the unclimbed south face, with Tadeusz Piotrowski: no fixed camps above the face's base, no oxygen, no retreat once committed.

On July 8, in deteriorating weather, the two Poles pulled over the top of the face and stood on the summit. The route — the "Polish Line" — was hailed at once as one of the boldest climbs ever made at that altitude, and it has never been repeated in full.

The mountain collected its fee on the way down the Abruzzi. On July 10, exhausted, out of food and descending in bad snow, Piotrowski stopped to wait for Kukuczka. Then, downclimbing steep ice: one crampon came off. As he reached to fix it — the other. Tadeusz Piotrowski fell past his partner and was gone. Kukuczka descended alone, and lived to finish the fourteen.

Renato Casarotto was the finest solo climber of his generation, and he had come to K2 for the hardest unclimbed line on the mountain: the south-southwest pillar, the Magic Line — alone. Three times he went up. Three times the mountain turned him back, the last from nearly 8,300 metres.

On July 16 he gave it up and came down for good. A short distance from Base Camp — on flat glacier, the climb finished, his wife Goretta waiting at the tents — an ice bridge collapsed under him, and he fell 40 metres into a crevasse.

He was still alive. He raised the alarm on his radio, and climbers ran onto the glacier and hauled him to the surface. He tried to take a few steps, and died at the lip of the crevasse — of internal injuries the fall had already decided. He was laid to rest, at Goretta's wish, in the crevasse that had taken him.

On August 3, the Poles Przemysław Piasecki and Wojciech Wróż, with the Slovak Peter Božík, completed the Magic Line — the third new route of the summer, and to this day one of the hardest ever climbed on K2.

They descended the Abruzzi in the dark, exhausted, rappelling and downclimbing a web of old fixed ropes. Somewhere above Camp IV, Wojciech Wróż slipped from the end of a fixed rope and fell to his death — the summer's cruellest arithmetic: a first ascent for a life, hours apart.

The same days took the season's quietest casualty: Muhammad Ali, a Pakistani sirdar working for the Korean expedition, killed by stonefall low on the Spur — the man on the mountain who had not come to climb it.

On August 4 the Abruzzi gave up its last summits of the summer. Around four in the afternoon, Alan Rouse broke trail to the top and became the first Briton to climb K2; Mrufka Wolf, climbing with him, turned back below the summit. Around seven in the evening came Kurt Diemberger and Julie Tullis — the "highest film team in the world," partners on the great peaks since 1981, standing at last on the mountain they had circled for years.

It was far too late in the day, and the price began immediately. On the descent Tullis slipped and pulled Diemberger off; his belay held both, but the fall left her hurt. They bivouacked in the open above 8,300 metres, then crawled into Camp IV at about 8,000 metres — as a storm arrived and sealed the Shoulder shut.

Seven climbers were now pinned in the death zone: Rouse and Mrufka, Diemberger and Tullis, and the Austrians Willi Bauer, Alfred Imitzer and Hannes Wieser — with a handful of food, failing gas, and tents that the wind was tearing apart.

Julie Tullis — the first British woman to summit K2 — died in the night of August 6–7, in the tent, beside the partner she had filmed the mountains with for fifteen years. She was buried on the mountainside. The storm kept blowing for three more days.

On the morning of August 10, after five days of storm, the snowfall stopped. Alan Rouse — the strongest of them a week before, who had broken trail to the summit — could no longer stand. He was left in his tent, delirious; there was no way on earth to carry him. Alfred Imitzer and Hannes Wieser collapsed within a few hundred feet of the camp and could not be raised.

Three kept moving: Willi Bauer in front, breaking the trail; Mrufka Wolf; Kurt Diemberger behind. Somewhere on the endless fixed ropes below the Shoulder, in the wind and the coming dark, Mrufka fell out of the world's sight. A year later, a Japanese expedition found her — still attached to the fixed ropes, upright, as though the mountain had simply stopped her clock.

Bauer staggered into Base Camp on the evening of the 10th, past frostbite, barely able to speak; Diemberger came down behind him. Of the seven who had been trapped at Camp IV, two came home. The Black Summer was over. Thirteen were dead — and the arguments about what it all meant, in the books and journals of the decade that followed, never really ended.