The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 by Jennifer Jordan Read Free Book Online

measure up for the long haul. Pleasants was no different. While they stayed married for years, they remained childless and she lived more or less a single woman’s life, splitting her time between New York society and long vacations in Europe. When they finally divorced in the late 1920s, she escaped to the mountains of Austria, where she found a new life of hunting and skiing with a host of creative and accomplished friends. After killing her first ibex, she wrote to her family in New York, “The blood was so hot you could have boiled an egg in it!”
    While children bored her and she never sought to have her own, Alice was a powerful presence whose nieces and nephews adored and feared her in often equal measure. She could be ruthless in her comments, cruelly pointing out if one had gained weight or had an unsightly blemish. After the mortified niece fled to her room sobbing, Alice would wave off her biting criticism with “Well, that’s the way I see it.” When she took her niece Lisa shopping for her first evening gown, what should have been a pleasant outing became an ordeal when Alice demanded, “Why can’t you stand up straight?” and made cutting remarks about the adolescent girl’s lingering baby fat. But Alice was also tough on herself and fanatical about her own appearance. Rising before dawn every morning of her summer visits to the family house in Bar Harbor, Maine, she would climb to the summits of nearby mountains in Acadia National Park before breakfast in order to stay in shape. In the 1930s, when she was well into her forties, she became one of the first women to ski the unrelenting ice wall of Tuckerman’s Ravine, a glacial cirque on Mount Washington’s southeast face in New Hampshire.
    She was also a gracious hostess, inviting those same nieces to Austria for extended vacations, sitting for hours showing them the art of needlepoint, and teaching each of them how to ski, although the lessons were far from gentle. “That is a stupid way to ski! Bend your knees, for heaven’s sake!” she would yell down the slope. Still, her nieces looked forward to their visits. Her apartments in St. Anton and New York always had the best of everything. The bed linens were Egyptian cotton and professionally laundered so that the creases were crisp. The lavender soap was imported from England, the towels monogrammed, and always there were cut flowers in every room.
    Part Jewish, Alice had an abiding hatred of the Nazis and their rapid encroachment on her beloved second home of Austria. Although deeply political and entirely outspoken, she would don her white gloves and society hat and play the role of pampered, ignorant American matron presenting herself at Third Reich military offices in order to gain the release of her detained Jewish friends, among them Hans Kraus, a famed orthopedic surgeon. *
    In 1931, at the age of thirty-nine, she won a gold medal at the Parsenne Ski Derby at Davos, Switzerland. Three years later, while skiing above St. Anton in the spring of 1934, she met a gentle, soft-spoken, and earnest yachtsman and budding ski racer. Soon, the feisty divorcee and the understated bachelor realized they shared a deep passion for all things outdoors, not only skiing and touring but hunting as well. While Dudley lacked a profession, he nonetheless was a charming, generous man who didn’t throw his money around garishly, as so many wealthy Americans did, and she knew he loved her. She feared her family would take issue with his apparent idleness, but they took issue with everybody, and besides, she and Dudley would spend most of their year in Austria, thousands of miles away from her family’s critical eyes.
    In late October 1934 Dudley and Alice cabled home to America: they had gotten married in Geneva and would be sailing to New York on the SS Bremen in early November for the obligatory celebrations. Alice was also organizing a fundraiser in New York in December for what would become America’s first