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24th August, 2010
“The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2” (W.W. Norton and Co., $26.95), by Jennifer Jordan: Since the runaway success of Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” in 1999, books about mountaineering have become their own subgenre of adventure lit. “The Last Man on the Mountain” focuses on an expedition that tried to be the first to climb K2 in 1939.
Author Jennifer Jordan was at the base of the mountain in 2002 when she stumbled upon a grisly discovery: “There, laid out on the rocks and ice, was the very recognizable skeleton of a human being: the pelvis, two femurs, and scattered ribs.” Jordan prefaces the book with that moment, then backtracks to tell the story from start to finish about how a wealthy American named Dudley Wolfe died alone in a tent 24,700 feet above sea level.
It’s a fascinating tale, taking the reader from Manhattan high society to the slopes of what the climbing community calls the “Savage Summit” (also the name of Jordan’s book about ill-fated female climbers of K2). Readers who are not familiar with high-altitude mountaineering will have no problem getting into it, thanks to details like the luxury items Wolfe brought with him on the trip: “ ... bedroom slippers, a herringbone tweed jacket … a tuxedo, twenty silk ties and a Brooks Brothers bathrobe.” Mountaineering gear, it seems, has come a long way.
Readers who are into high-altitude adventure stories will not be disappointed. These six men (seven counting a British guide they picked up before the 330-mile trek to base camp) tried to do something that was not accomplished until 1954. Before Gore-Tex, GPS navigation and oxygen tanks, they sought to put footprints on the second-highest mountain in the world.
But the tragic hero of the tale always is Dudley Wolfe. Jordan wears her journalist hat throughout to try and piece together the circumstances that led to his death. Did expedition leader Fritz Wiessner do everything in his power to get Wolfe down the mountain? Or was he so incapacitated after his failed summit bid that he broke the cardinal rule of climbing?
The dead cannot speak, of course, leaving Jordan to stitch together what happened based on interviews, unpublished letters, diaries and deposition transcripts. Taking a page from Sebastian Junger in “The Perfect Storm,” she uses italics to indicate dialogue she constructs based on facts gathered in her reporting. It is a device that sometimes slows down the narrative, but the transparency spares the reader of the Bob Woodward experience: you always know who really said what.
By the end of the book there is plenty of blame to go around. Jordan does an admirable job assigning it and letting the reader decide where to place emphasis. She has done her job, refuting the stereotype that Wolfe was a fat and slow climber who tried to be the first to buy his way atop a Himalayan peak. “If we deserve nothing else,” writes Jordan, “we deserve to be remembered fairly, for our gifts as well as our faults.”
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