Spitzer Team Attempts K7
December 2007The route of the Cordes-DeCapio attempt on K7 in Pakistan. The two joined the Japanese Route after about 3,000 feet but retreated the next day.
Kelly Cordes delivers an amusing report on his attempt on K7 in Pakistan’s Charakusa Valley in September 2007, with Spitzer Award recipient Scott DeCapio.
By now failure shouldn’t bother me. I’ve had enough experience with it, as it’s part of the game in alpinism and in life. To be sure, it’s not just our failure on the actual climb, and I do realize—more so with each passing day—just how incredibly lucky I am to even do these things in the first place. Plus, this trip answered a crucial life question for me.
Anyway, from late August to late September 2007, Scott DeCapio and I spent one month in Pakistan’s spectacular Charakusa Valley. Despite feeling in the best climbing shape of our lives, and more physically and mentally prepared than we’d ever been for a trip, we got our asses thoroughly kicked.
In addition to climbing an easy acclimatization peak and doing a 1,500-foot chossy rock climb—probably a first, but only because we were dreadfully off-route, and definitely not worth repeating—in mid-September we attempted our major objective: K7. (The lines we’d hoped for on K7 West didn’t have ice on them.) We got about halfway up the 6,934-meter/22,743-foot peak, starting from the east with a previously unclimbed (we think) ice and mixed couloir of about 3,000 vertical feet. The climbing was mostly easy/moderate, with a short crux of maybe WI5 M6, and brought us to the Japanese Route at the end of this first day.
The next morning we continued for 500 or 1,000 feet up the Japanese Route until a combination of breathlessness and fatigue, along with a major route-finding error and unbelievably warm temperatures, sapped our will. Our packs felt too heavy as well, and had us dreaming of sport climbing and the couch. We retreated from about 19,000 feet. As the saying goes, fatigue makes cowards of us all—or at least it did of us.
We were disappointed in ourselves and our performance.
Soon after the weather turned bad, with lots of snow-wrecking conditions, and with our time drawing short we left the valley.
Throughout our trip we struggled with the altitude, well beyond what we expected. We seemed to have serious difficulty acclimatizing, and even easy terrain became brutal, breathless work.
As for our K7 outing, it seemed quite clear who got the better of the exchange, and by no means do we consider our efforts a “new route,” despite the popularity of doing so upon intersecting an existing route, reaching a ridge, or just ending in the middle of nowhere. Were it a mere stroll from our highpoint (à la the absurd “end of the difficulties” line) to the summit, we’d have done it. Wait, wait, wait, we could see the end of the difficulties, so doesn’t that count? Yes, of course it does, and thus we’ve named it the “We Got Our Sorry Asses Kicked and We Admit It” route.
Seriously, K7 is a spectacular, complex mountain, and the three parties to have climbed it deserve full credit: the team of young Japanese college students who made the peak’s first ascent in 1984, Steve House’s awesome solo of a new route in 2004, and Doug Chabot and Bruce Miller’s impressive alpine-style repeat of the Japanese Route, also in 2004.
On the bright side of our trip, we had a blast traveling with our Quebecois friends, LP Ménard and Max Turgeon. Early in the trip, however, LP wrecked his ankle in a could’ve-been-a-major-catastrophe fall and had to return home for surgery. Max stayed and made a rapid, bold, solo ascent of East Farol Peak (ca 6,350m). His climb was about 4,300 vertical feet, mostly on ice (up to WI4+), and likely the peak’s first ascent. Very impressive. Max also climbed a new rock route with Marko Prezelj toward the end of Marko’s trip with Steve House and Vince Anderson. This trio had an incredible trip (and were fun to hang with in B.C.), with a couple of new rock routes and the first ascent of K7 West.
Scott and I did a fine job of averaging out the talent pool in the Charakusa.
Going for a peak high enough to require a permit and a military L.O. (Liaison Officer—I remain completely baffled as to the L.O.’s purpose) was a new experience for us, and everything I expected it to be: an expensive hassle. Since this fits nicely with my poor performance at altitude, I have no plans for peaks involving such bureaucracy in the future. Just not into it, as there’s tons of great stuff out there with no B.S. involved.
Some good did come of this, however. I’ve finally answered a crucial question and realized what I want to do with my life: I want to become a Liaison Officer. The apparent job duties suit me perfectly: must be lazy, demanding, and want to get paid. So, if you have any connections and can help me out, please let me know.
Also, continuing the funny-in-retrospect beat-down we received, our cook was horrible. Notwithstanding several examples of unbelievably inappropriate behavior—devouring a gift of homemade Balti bread (which we never even saw) brought specifically for us by the super-kind porter sirdar; coming into our tents uninvited; dropping his pants and washing his ass and crotch in the stream 20 feet from our tents…you get the picture—our cook wasn’t much of a cook. His specialties included Noodles à la Kerosene, Our Chocolate (or anything else we left lying around), and Dal with Rotten Veggies and a Hint of Ass.
We averaged more than one case per week of serious gastro-intestinal illness. All of us took courses of Cipro at some point, which I’d never had to do—never even been seriously GI sick in my two previous Pakistan trips. I really missed Ghafoor, my dear friend and cook from the previous trips, who was with Josh Wharton and Bean Bowers on the Choktoi Glacier
Despite some challenges, the trip was still a great experience, and, as with my past trips to Pakistan, the local people were overwhelmingly kind and generous. No doubt some craziness happens there, as in any country, but the perfect analogy would be to take yourself back to, say, the L.A. riots, and then imagine foreigners freaking out and saying, “Don’t go to the United States!” The areas where we traveled were all tremendous, and the mountains breathtakingly beautiful. If I hadn’t heard any news before my trip, I’d think that Pakistan was the most peaceful place on earth. The consistently negative news about Pakistan in our Western media should give us cause to consider sensationalism and our tendency to generalize, lest we fall victim to propaganda-fueled thinking that, before we know it, can have us categorizing an entire nation or group of people as “bad.”
The world’s a helluva place, and I’m so grateful for these opportunities. Still, as always, it’s great to be home, where our lives are so good it’s almost unbelievable. We’re so fortunate.