A Return to K2

Not long after his arrival at Exeter, Bates took up the offer for a leave of absence, though for an unexpected assignment. The quartermaster general of the Army requested that Bates be granted a leave to work with the War Department on mountain and winter warfare challenges and equipment in 1941. When the United States entered the war, Bates was commissioned a captain and sent to test clothing and equipment in Alaska, where he and the testing team made the third ascent of Mount McKinley. Later in the war, he supervised field testing during combat at Anzio in Italy. At the conclusion of the war, he returned to Exeter and spent the next two summers finishing his Ph.D. But he was not done with mountains, and they were not done with him.

The 1953 K2 expedition included lighter moments, like a dip in a hot spring (above), as well as those of great tragedy, including the loss of climber Art Gilkey in an avalanche.

In 1953, Bates and Houston assembled a national team of American climbers to attempt K2 again. That summer, Sir Edmund Hillary was making his successful attempt on Everest at the same time the American team was climbing K2. Neither of the two highest mountains in the world had yet been summitted. "We felt Everest was an English mountain. The British had lost men on Everest and had been trying to climb it for years," Bates says of the decision to attempt K2 instead of Everest. Besides, of the two mountains, K2 offered the greater challenge. "K2 is a much tougher climb. Everest is hard because of its height. You have less oxygen. But once you're past the ice fall, you put one foot in front of the other most of the rest of the way up. You still have to be tough enough to take it, of course. But K2 is darn hard climbing the whole way."

Potential members of the 1953 K2 team came to Exeter to be interviewed by Bates and Houston. They considered the experience of the various climbers, but in the end gave the most weight to personality traits. "We were looking for people who would work together and would get along, and people who had a sense of humor," Bates explains. "The group we put together got along beautifully. There were no prima donnas. The main idea was different from today. We were trying to get somebody up the mountain. It didn't matter who, as long as you achieved getting someone to the summit. We didn't have a single leader making all the decisions. We decided together who would go to the top."

Bates and Houston-the oldest of the party, at 42 and 40 respectively-were confident that they could get at least two members of the team to the summit. They had already mapped a route in the 1938 expedition and knew that despite the challenges, it could be done. They began the climb from base camp at the end of June and a little over a month later had reached Camp VIII at 25,200 feet with all eight men. Then the storm hit.

"We set a record for number of days spent at the highest altitude," Bates says of the six days they passed huddled in tents on a ledge of ice while the tempest raged. "The tents were banging all day and all night in the wind. It was not very pleasant." Caught in some of the worst weather to hit the region in years, they endured extreme conditions that made it impossible to light their stoves and melt snow for drinking water, let alone push on for the summit or consider retreat. The climbers had no choice but to wait out the storm, until a further calamity struck. Art Gilkey, a 27-year-old Ph.D. student in geology from Iowa, became gravely ill. Houston, the doctor of the group, diagnosed thrombophlebitis, a blood clot which quickly spread from Gilkey's legs to his lungs. If Gilkey was to survive, they had to get him off the mountain-fast.

"We agreed before leaving for K2 that if someone broke a leg on the mountain, we couldn't get him down," Bates recalls. "We had accepted the fact that in such a situation, we would have to leave the injured climber. But when Art was injured, we tried to do it anyway. It's not very logical. When you're in such a situation, you'll do a lot to try to save a life."

"Bob Bates was my mentor for my four years at Exeter," says George Russell '50, "and has been my mentor for the 53 years since. There must be others out there who are as caring, compassionate and down-to-earth, but I don't know anyone else like him."

Creating a stretcher out of one of the tents, the men roped Gilkey on and began carrying him down an impossibly steep ridge covered in ice and blowing snow. When one man slipped and his rope became entangled with ropes tying the other pairs of climbers together, five men were pulled off the ridge. Pete Schoening, up at the top, felt the first tug and dug his ice ax into the snow. In a move known to this day as "Schoening's belay," he hung on as he felt the men below him, one by one, come to a stop, one dangling in space. No one had been lost, but several of the men were injured. It was critical that they set up camp immediately. They left Gilkey, who could not walk, anchored in his stretcher in the snow with two ice axes while they pitched tents and tended to one team member with frostbite and another with a concussion. Less than half an hour later, they went to get Gilkey and bring him to the tents, but there was no sign that he had ever been on the plateau of snow where they had left him. An avalanche had swept him away.

In their book K2, the Savage Mountain, Bates and Houston recall the horrifying discovery: "Gilkey's death, though anticipated for other reasons, was a violent shock. He had been very close to us, and we could not forget his many kindnesses to each of us in the past weeks. We had admired him and loved him. But too many immediate problems faced us to permit brooding over our loss now."

Looking back on the loss today, Bates says, "When I first saw that Art was gone, I thought he had released his belay intentionally, to save the rest of us. Then I realized he could not have reached the ice axes holding him and pulled them out. We knew what we faced coming down. When we found that the avalanche had taken Art off the mountain, we realized that his loss could be what saved our lives." Even so, the climbers remained in a desperate situation with the injuries they had sustained and the storm continuing to rage. They spent a night at their improvised camp and started down in the morning, pulling frozen boots onto frozen feet. Miraculously, they made it out. "The fact that we were good climbers and that we were absolutely devoted to each other was what got us down," Bates reflects. At base camp, they erected a 10-foot cairn in Art Gilkey's memory and held a memorial service.

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