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SM-014 Mountaineering · K2, Karakoram 1953

The 1953 American K2 Expedition — One man lost, six saved by a single ice axe

fallsstormpartial-loss1950-1999
Lost
1 climber (party of 8)
Peak
K2, 8,611 m
Ended
10 Aug 1953, Abruzzi Spur
Status
Partial loss

Summary

In August 1953, an eight-man American expedition led by Charles Houston was driven into a desperate, storm-bound retreat high on K2, the second-highest mountain on Earth, when one of its members, the geologist Art Gilkey, was felled by a life-threatening blood clot at roughly 7,800 metres. Gilkey died on the descent — almost certainly swept away by an avalanche while anchored to an ice slope on 10 August — and his body was never recovered intact, though clothing and remains positively identified as his emerged from the glacier forty years later. The other seven men survived.

The expedition, the third American attempt on K2, was attacking the Abruzzi Spur on the mountain's southeast side, the route that remains the standard line today. The team had pushed Camp VIII to about 7,800 metres and was poised for a summit bid when a violent storm pinned them in their tents for days. There, Gilkey collapsed with thrombophlebitis — a clot in his leg that soon threw emboli to his lungs, a condition that is grave at sea level and effectively a death sentence in the thin air of the death zone.

What makes the episode famous is not the death but the rescue that nearly failed and the single act that saved the rest. As the exhausted party lowered the immobilized Gilkey across a steep traverse on 10 August, George Bell slipped on hard ice and his fall, transmitted through the tangled ropes, plucked five more men off the mountain. Pete Schoening, the youngest member at twenty-five, held all six on a belay improvised around his ice axe and a frozen boulder — an act mountaineers know simply as "The Belay." It is remembered as one of the great feats of self-rescue, and as a model of the team ethos its members called the brotherhood of the rope. Throughout, the climb depended on Hunza and Balti porters who carried the loads on the lower mountain.

Timeline

June 1953
The third American attempt
Houston and Robert Bates lead an eight-man team to K2, attacking the Abruzzi Spur, the southeast ridge first probed by an Italian duke in 1909.
Early July 1953
The mountain engaged
The party establishes a chain of camps up the Abruzzi, supported on the lower mountain by Hunza and Balti porters.
1 Aug 1953
High camp set
The team pushes Camp VIII to roughly 7,800 m, poised below the summit pyramid for a final bid.
2 Aug 1953
The storm breaks
A severe, prolonged Karakoram storm closes in, pinning the eight men in their tents at the highest camp.
7 Aug 1953
Gilkey collapses
Art Gilkey faints stepping from his tent; Houston diagnoses thrombophlebitis, a clot in the leg, which soon shows signs of pulmonary embolism.
8–9 Aug 1953
Trapped
The storm rages on; with Gilkey unable to walk and worsening, the team faces an impossible choice between certain death by waiting and a near-impossible descent.
10 Aug 1953
The descent and The Belay
Lowering Gilkey, George Bell slips; the tangled ropes pull six men off the slope, and Pete Schoening arrests them all on a single ice-axe belay.
10 Aug 1953
Gilkey lost
Anchored to the ice while the shaken party pitches camp, Gilkey vanishes; a groove in the snow suggests an avalanche carried him away.
11–15 Aug 1953
The long retreat
Battered and frostbitten, the survivors take days to descend from Camp VII to the lower camps and at last to base.
1953
A cairn for the lost
The survivors build a stone memorial to Gilkey at the foot of the mountain.
1993
The glacier returns him
Clothing and human remains positively identified as Gilkey's are found at the foot of K2, four decades after his death.
2004
The belayer honored
Pete Schoening dies; his single axe-belay is by then a touchstone of mountaineering self-rescue.

The duke's ridge and the brotherhood of the rope

K2 in 1953 had never been climbed and had killed before. The highest peak of the Karakoram, on the border of present-day Pakistan and China, is steeper, colder and more avalanche-prone than Everest, with no easy line to its 8,611-metre summit. The Abruzzi Spur — the southeast ridge that Luigi Amedeo, Duke of the Abruzzi, had reconnoitred in 1909 — was the most plausible route, and the one the Americans chose. It is the line by which most ascents are still made, and it is unrelentingly exposed: a chain of rock and ice steps where a fall is rarely survivable and rescue all but impossible.

Houston's team was small by the standards of the great siege expeditions — eight climbers rather than the dozens of porters and oxygen sets the British had thrown at Everest. They climbed without bottled oxygen and with a deliberately egalitarian ethic. Houston, a physician, and Bates, his longtime partner, had been on K2 together in 1938; the others — Robert Craig, Dee Molenaar, George Bell, Pete Schoening, the British transport officer Tony Streather, and Art Gilkey — were bound by an idea they spoke of openly as the brotherhood of the rope: that survival was a shared obligation, that no man would be left. That conviction would shortly be tested past the point most parties break. As on every Karakoram expedition, the approach and lower camps were sustained by Hunza and Balti porters whose labour, routinely underplayed in the record, made the attempt possible.

A clot at eight thousand metres

By the start of August the team had carried Camp VIII to roughly 7,800 metres and was within reach of the top, needing only a break in the weather. The break never came. On 2 August a storm settled over the upper mountain and held for days, confining eight men to a cluster of small tents in the death zone, where the body wastes faster than it can recover and every task costs disproportionate effort.

On 7 August Gilkey fainted as he stepped from his tent. Houston, examining him, found the signs of thrombophlebitis — a blood clot lodged in the deep veins of the leg. At sea level the condition is dangerous; at 7,800 metres, with the lungs already labouring, it is very nearly hopeless, and within days Gilkey was coughing in a way that signalled emboli reaching his lungs. There was no possibility of a helicopter, no drug that would help, no way down that did not run thousands of vertical feet of steep, storm-loaded ice. To stay was to watch him die and likely to die with him as supplies ran out. To descend was to attempt the near-impossible: lowering a man who could not stand, wrapped in a sleeping bag and tent fabric, down terrain that taxed even an unburdened, healthy climber. The team chose to try. They would not leave him.

The Belay, and the slope that took him

On 10 August, after the storm relented enough to move, the seven able men began lowering Gilkey across a steep, hard-iced traverse toward Camp VII. They were roped in clusters, edging the makeshift litter down foot by foot, when George Bell, high on the slope, lost his footing on the ice. He could not self-arrest. His fall pulled his rope-mate Tony Streather, and as the two slid their rope fouled the lines joining Houston and Bates, and then the line running to Molenaar and the helpless Gilkey. In an instant six men were sliding toward the Godwin-Austen Glacier two miles below.

Pete Schoening had been belaying Gilkey and Molenaar from above, the rope wrapped around his shoulders and the shaft of his ice axe, which he had driven behind a boulder frozen into the slope. When the cascade hit, he sat back, jammed the axe, and held. The hemp rope, the wooden shaft and one man's grip absorbed the falling weight of six and stopped it. No one knows precisely how the belay held; that it did is one of the most celebrated facts in the sport. The men, several injured — Houston concussed, Bell and others frostbitten — were dragged back to a fragile footing and the party clawed its way to a campsite, anchoring Gilkey to the ice slope while they hacked out platforms and pitched tents.

That was the last anyone saw of him. The climbers heard his muffled shouts; minutes later, when Bates and Streather went to bring him in, the slope was bare. A faint groove led down into the dark. The likeliest explanation, and the one the survivors came to accept, is that a small avalanche swept Gilkey and his anchors away. A few believed he may have cut himself loose to spare the team the burden that had nearly killed them all. Either way he was gone, and the seven survivors began the long, broken retreat to the bottom of the mountain.

The Five Factors

01
Sudden incapacitation in the death zone
The expedition was healthy and well-positioned until a single member was struck by an illness — a deep-vein clot and pulmonary embolism — that no high-altitude party can treat in place. A medical emergency above 7,500 metres converts a strong team into a stranded one, because the patient cannot descend under his own power and the terrain forbids carrying him quickly.
02
Weather as the trap, not the trigger
The storm did not kill anyone directly; it removed every option. By pinning the team for days at the highest camp it exhausted supplies, deepened the avalanche danger and ensured that when descent finally began it had to happen on the worst possible ground. Prolonged confinement in the death zone is itself a mortal hazard.
03
The unforgiving rescue
Lowering an immobilized man down steep, hard ice is among the most dangerous operations in mountaineering, because it concentrates the whole party's weight and movement on marginal anchors. The very act of trying to save Gilkey put all eight lives on a knife edge — the rescue gap inverted, where the attempt to help nearly destroys the helpers.
04
Cascade failure on a shared rope
One slip by one man propagated through entangled ropes into a six-person fall in seconds. Roping a team together shares the load of a single slip, but it also means a single uncontrolled fall can take everyone; without an independent anchor, the system has no firebreak. Schoening's belay was the firebreak the rope system otherwise lacked.
05
The margin held by one anchor
Survival came down to a single ice axe, a single boulder and one man's strength and presence of mind. That the belay held was extraordinary good fortune resting on sound technique; had it failed, all six would have died. Reducing a whole team's survival to one unduplicated anchor is the thinnest possible margin, and it is the mechanism by which this story so nearly became a total loss.

Aftermath

One man died and seven came home, several with frostbite that cost fingers and toes; Gilkey's death was the only fatality, but the descent left the survivors physically and emotionally marked for life. At the foot of the Abruzzi Spur the team built a stone cairn in his memory. The Gilkey Memorial has since become the gathering place for plaques honouring the many climbers killed on K2, a sombre monument at the base of one of the world's deadliest mountains. In 1993, a later expedition found clothing and remains at the foot of the peak that were positively identified as Gilkey's, the glacier finally yielding what the avalanche had taken four decades before.

The expedition failed to summit — K2 was first climbed the following year, in 1954, by an Italian party — but the 1953 attempt became one of the most admired failures in mountaineering history. Houston's and Bates's account, K2: The Savage Mountain, fixed the episode in the literature, and Pete Schoening's belay entered climbing pedagogy as the standard illustration of what a sound anchor and a cool head can do. The story is remembered less for the peak it did not reach than for the principle it upheld: that the team chose, at enormous risk to themselves, not to abandon a dying companion, and that their solidarity, though it could not save Gilkey, saved everyone else.

Lessons

  1. Build descent and rescue plans for a fully incapacitated member before the summit bid, not after — the casualty you must carry is the scenario most likely to kill the rest.
  2. Treat a prolonged storm at extreme altitude as an active, worsening emergency, not a pause; every day in the death zone erodes supplies, strength and the safety of the eventual retreat.
  3. Never let a roped team's survival depend on a single anchor; place independent protection so one slip cannot become a fall of the whole party.
  4. Weigh the rescue against the rescuers honestly — solidarity is a virtue, but a rescue that is near-certain to kill the team needs the same cold scrutiny as the climb itself.
  5. Credit the porters and local labour who make every Karakoram attempt possible, rather than recording only the climbers' names.

References