the explorers journal - The Explorers Club

Karakoram Range, K2 is so remote
it is not visible even from
the nearest village. Since its
discovery in 1856 by a survey
team, its height and difficulty
have lured the best and bravest
of mountaineers, including
Ed Viesturs, the first American
to summit all fourteen of the
world’s 8,000-meter peaks
and author of the recently released,
K2, Life and Death on
the World’s Most Dangerous
Mountain. Viestures picked six
K2 expeditions, (1938, 1939,
1953, 1954, 1986, and 2008)
to lay bare the “story behind
the story” in order to explore
the basic tenets of mountaineering:
“risk, ambition, loyalty
to one’s teammates, self-sacrifice,
and the price of glory.”
He begins his story in
August 2008, when several
international expeditions were
poised for the final slog to K2’s
summit. Echoing the Everest
disaster of 1996, things began
to go wrong early on—a
late start by oxygen-deprived
climbers; a pile-up at a narrow
“bottleneck,” where everyone
waits their turn; bad weather
moving in; and the usual problems
of miscommunication.
When the climbers reached
their prescribed turnaround
time, many were still waiting to
ascend. Then disaster struck.
An enormous serac (suspended
glacier) hanging above the
bottleneck, which had been
stable for decades, calved,
roaring down the mountain
and cascading down on the
climbers.
Veisturs recounts the events
of that climb and helps us understand
that there was no one
event that claimed 11 lives. He
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also looks at his own experience
climbing K2 and honestly
recounts events that his previous
book, No Shortcuts to the
Top, glossed over. The book is
packed with little-known acts
of incredible heroism, stupidity,
selfishness, profound
friendship, bitter life-long enmity,
feats of daring, amazing
rescues, and horrific loss. He
says he wanted to “imagine my
way into their company, where
I can ponder the what-mighthave-been
of their dilemmas.”
In addition to being a great
read, the book examines the
hubris we all carry with us and
how we come to terms with it.
N o t e b o o k s f r o m
N e w G u i n e a
by Vojtech Novotny
256 pp • Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009 • ISBN-10: 0199561656, ISBN-
13: 978-0199561650 • $34.95
When field ecologist Vojtech
Novotny, a professor of ecology
at the Czech Academy
of Sciences, settled in New
Guinea to study tropical
forests, he had no idea what
the foray would bring over
the course of a decade. For
in addition to the region’s
extraordinary environmental
diversity, he found abundant
culturaldiversity with distinct
groups speaking more than
1,000 languages. His experiences
there are recorded in
Notebooks from New Guinea,
a charming and insightful, if
unusual, riff on the world he
encounters.
Soon after his arrival,
Novotny finds that magic and
spirits permeate local belief
systems, which impact his
own work. He finds he has to
move his entomological lab
because the swamp where it
was built sat atop a masalai
(spirit), which was believed to
be causing sickness in the lab.
When discussing cannibalism,
he tells us “one might argue on
humanitarian grounds against
ideologies that view neighbors
as canned meat on two legs,
(but) eating the deceased
was actually a highly civilized
custom.” Novotny is interested
in the edges of populations,
where he says the most
change is occurring. Whether
speaking of plants, insects,
or people, he talks about a
landscape that is in constant
flux as volcanoes bury and
tsunamis wash away villages,
rivers change course, and mining
companies strip the land.
What Novotny discovered is a
people with a profound sense
of place who have a deep
understanding of their natural
environment, which is being
crunched by “the big yellow
tractor.” His book is a delight,
an ode to a unique part of the
world.