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

untouched giants. * After early British and Italian explorers had tried and failed to climb K2, the world’s second highest peak, in remote northern India, they declared the mountain’s sheer cliffs, unrelenting avalanches, and brutal weather unconquerable. Then, because Britain’s “Great Game” with Russia after World War I determined which power would control central Asia, the British turned away from K2 and focused their attention on the world’s tallest (and therefore in the eyes of many, best) mountain, Everest. Not to be excluded from the great conquests, German climbers set their sights on Nanga Parbat, a 26,660-foot peak near K2 at the western edge of the Himalayas in northern India, and the Americans were left with the seemingly impossible K2.
    Ironically, it would be a German immigrant built like a fireplug who was the driving force behind the American Alpine Club’s dedication to K2.
     
    B ORN IN D RESDEN in 1900 into a prosperous but not wealthy family, Fritz Hermann Ernst Wiessner developed a passion for art, architecture, and opera, learning to love beauty and perfection, particularly in nature. He was also a patriot, and even though Germany was apparently losing the punishing Great War once the Americans entered it, as soon as he legally could he joined a special military unit called the Schützen and was shipped to the front lines near Belfort, close to the Crown Prince’s army. Luckily, the armistice was signed before Fritz saw any active duty, as most of the Schützen youth were killed within weeks on the front.
    When the war ended, Fritz returned to his first love, the outdoors. Spending untold hours devouring his father’s mountaineering books, he read of the great exploits of the nineteenth-century climbers, from Charles Barrington on the Eiger in 1858 to the Matterhorn’s first and deadly ascent in 1865, when the Englishman George Hadow slipped on descent, pulling two other climbers in his party away from the face. A fourth teammate was able to wrap the rope around a rock but it snapped, and all of Zermatt watched through field glasses as the four men fell thousands of feet to their deaths down the north wall. The disaster would forever mythologize the mountain, and with every new generation of climbers there would be a fresh crop of men eager to challenge its deadly legacy. Still a teenager, Fritz Wiessner became one of them.
    Throughout his life, Wiessner had a pronounced, almost balding forehead, yet retained a boyish face and impish smile. At only five feet five inches and with a body that was all sinew and muscle, he had the perfect physique for scaling rock walls using primarily his fingertips and toes. Fritz learned how to climb with his cousin Otto Wiessner, and together the two would travel to the sandstone towers of the Elbsteingebirge district south of Dresden. One weekend, Fritz took the train with some other climbers from a local club to a rock tower near the Czech border. Otto was delayed but planned to catch up with Fritz and the others at the wall; when Otto couldn’t find them, he ventured off on his own, soloing the so-called Winklerturm. As he descended he saw that another group on the wall had gotten into some trouble and went to assist them. Suddenly a sandstone block under his fingers came loose and he fell. Later that evening, Fritz walked through the small town near the wall and noticed that several locals who knew him were looking at him very oddly.
    “What’s the matter?” Fritz finally asked a shopkeeper he recognized.
    Without a word the man took him to a small house near the town’s inn. Entering the dark parlor, he could see that there was a body laid out on a table. Moving closer, he suddenly stopped, stunned and horrified. The bloody, crushed face was Otto’s.
    At just twenty-one, Fritz suffered his first climbing death. It remained his most horrifying.
    Otto’s death, though, did little to curb Wiessner’s love of the rock, and soon he was pioneering