Read Online The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 by Jennifer Jordan - Free Book Online
Authors: Jennifer Jordan
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the demands of the Third Reich to summit against all odds was not a lethal combination. Several club members began to challenge Fritz Wiessner’s membership, and unsubstantiated but persistent rumors spread that he sympathized with and perhaps was even spying for the Third Reich. After the Nanga Parbat disaster, several members called for his resignation from the club. But Fritz also had his defenders, chief among them his good friends Robert Underhill, one of America’s esteemed fathers of rock climbing, and his wife, Miriam Underhill, a talented and pioneering climber in her own right. In a letter of apology to Wiessner for the club’s “grave mistake” in publicly challenging his membership, Underhill told Fritz how personally frustrated he was that Americans were somehow unable to “understand Hitler and what he has done for Germany.” He went on to lament that Americans “cannot realize the moral and spiritual revival which…Hitler seems to have been able to bring about. You have no doubt long since made up your mind simply to endure this almost universal misinterpretation of Hitler and Germany, but I am terribly sorry to see it break out in our club, in such a way.”
Anti-German sentiment had been rampant in the United States ever since the start of the Great War two decades earlier, and Fritz felt the sting of prejudice in other places as well. Eventually, the threats of expulsion from the AAC subsided, but the rumors never did, and while not a shred of evidence ever surfaced to suggest that Wiessner was working with Germany after he emigrated, many in the club deemed him a Nazi spy to their dying day.
In the spring of 1935, Wiessner and a group of his European friends, who had all cut their climbing teeth in the Alps, were cresting a cliff in the Shawangunk (pronounced Shon-gum) Mountains one hundred miles north of New York City when they looked to the north and saw a long, high line of white quartz cliffs in the distance. Returning the next weekend, Fritz found a 230-foot-high, eight-mile-long band of seemingly endless climbing routes. His subsequent establishment of the northeast’s most famed climbing area near New Paltz, New York, called the Gunks in climbing circles, is legendary. He and Austrian climber Hans Kraus (Alice Wolfe’s friend whom she helped free from Nazi detainment) used only three pitons in the upper section of their otherwise free ascent of High Exposure, one of the “jewels of the Gunks,” an overhanging cliff of serrated bands hundreds of feet above the alluvial plains of the Hudson River Valley. Wiessner’s climbing broke such new ground that at a meeting of the American Alpine Club in 1964, when a climber was crowing about having made a first ascent on a crag in Connecticut, Fritz tactfully interrupted and told the man that he in fact had pioneered the route over twenty years before.
From upstate New York, Fritz traveled west in the summer of 1936 to the Canadian Rockies, where the Coast Range’s highest and still unclimbed mountain stood waiting: Mount Waddington. After sixteen attempts had failed and two climbers had died trying, many believed the 13,260-foot Waddington, more of a stark rock icicle than a real mountain, was simply not climbable. Fritz, however, considered it a puzzle to be solved. For his expedition he chose a small and eclectic group of close friends and stellar athletes, among them William House, a twenty-three-year-old forester from New Hampshire who had relatively little expedition experience but had already gained a name for himself on the rock walls of the White Mountains. And, echoing his inclusion of Elizabeth Knowlton on Nanga Parbat, Fritz included Betty Woolsey, who had raced on Alice Wolfe’s women’s US Olympic ski team in Garmisch the previous February. Not only were Woolsey and Knowlton strong athletes, their very presence helped Fritz to raise awareness and much-needed funds for a string of climbs in the 1930s and 1940s. But, like
Anti-German sentiment had been rampant in the United States ever since the start of the Great War two decades earlier, and Fritz felt the sting of prejudice in other places as well. Eventually, the threats of expulsion from the AAC subsided, but the rumors never did, and while not a shred of evidence ever surfaced to suggest that Wiessner was working with Germany after he emigrated, many in the club deemed him a Nazi spy to their dying day.
In the spring of 1935, Wiessner and a group of his European friends, who had all cut their climbing teeth in the Alps, were cresting a cliff in the Shawangunk (pronounced Shon-gum) Mountains one hundred miles north of New York City when they looked to the north and saw a long, high line of white quartz cliffs in the distance. Returning the next weekend, Fritz found a 230-foot-high, eight-mile-long band of seemingly endless climbing routes. His subsequent establishment of the northeast’s most famed climbing area near New Paltz, New York, called the Gunks in climbing circles, is legendary. He and Austrian climber Hans Kraus (Alice Wolfe’s friend whom she helped free from Nazi detainment) used only three pitons in the upper section of their otherwise free ascent of High Exposure, one of the “jewels of the Gunks,” an overhanging cliff of serrated bands hundreds of feet above the alluvial plains of the Hudson River Valley. Wiessner’s climbing broke such new ground that at a meeting of the American Alpine Club in 1964, when a climber was crowing about having made a first ascent on a crag in Connecticut, Fritz tactfully interrupted and told the man that he in fact had pioneered the route over twenty years before.
From upstate New York, Fritz traveled west in the summer of 1936 to the Canadian Rockies, where the Coast Range’s highest and still unclimbed mountain stood waiting: Mount Waddington. After sixteen attempts had failed and two climbers had died trying, many believed the 13,260-foot Waddington, more of a stark rock icicle than a real mountain, was simply not climbable. Fritz, however, considered it a puzzle to be solved. For his expedition he chose a small and eclectic group of close friends and stellar athletes, among them William House, a twenty-three-year-old forester from New Hampshire who had relatively little expedition experience but had already gained a name for himself on the rock walls of the White Mountains. And, echoing his inclusion of Elizabeth Knowlton on Nanga Parbat, Fritz included Betty Woolsey, who had raced on Alice Wolfe’s women’s US Olympic ski team in Garmisch the previous February. Not only were Woolsey and Knowlton strong athletes, their very presence helped Fritz to raise awareness and much-needed funds for a string of climbs in the 1930s and 1940s. But, like
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