The term Brotherhood of the Rope (I would love to add Sisterhood or even use another term, Fellowship of the Rope) refers to the psychological, social and spiritual connection amongst members of a climbing team, their reliance upond one another for safety, security and success. It is also the philosophy and title of the biography of famed American climber and doctor Charles Houston, whose team’s failed 1953 attempt on K2 in Pakistan. He tackled K2 twice, and became the foremost authority on altitude sickness. In his book K2: The Savage Mountain, he was writing about the Brotherhood of the Rope:

…men banded together in a common effort of will and strength–not against this or that imagined foeman of the instant, but against their only true enemies: inertia, cowardice, greed, ignorance, and all weaknesses of the spirit.

Charles Houston died last year, and this evening I came upon an amazing video of him speaking and sharing his film from K2 in 1953. WW means worth watching.

Yesterday I was reading a report on the last year accident on K2 when Norwegian Arctic adventurer and mountaineer Rolf Bae died too. A friend of mine could tell me that they’d their own time for Rolf Bae and that they’d read a poem while saying farewell to him.  Even if it was really morbid, I decided to write this post and paste the poem called “Do not stand at my grave and cry”.  The poem is written by Mary Elizabeth Frye, and tells us not to cry ’cause person didn’t die just kept growing green. I know that I am sarcastic now, but I can not help it ’cause I really hate ‘death is not the end’ kind of pathetic sayings. I am not saying that this poem is pathetic, but yes in this context. Then I tried to find more about this poem and found Akikawa Masafumi. I thought at first that he was a climber, but then I saw that he was Japanese tenor singer. When I heard his interpretation of this poem, I realized that the context is everything ’cause suddenly the poem wasn’t pathetic any more:

PS: I loved the way Pessoa explained how to say farewell and to forget:

When the grass grows on top of my grave,
Make that the sign for me to be totally forgotten.
Nature never remembers, that’s why she’s beautiful.
If they have the sick need to interpret the green grass on my grave,
Let them say I keep growing green and being natural.

Wanda Rutkiewicz was Polish and one of the greatest woman mountaineers ever. She was the first woman to successfully reach summit of K2 in 1986, and the third woman to climb Mt. Everest. In her mountaineering career she climbed with twenty expeditions spread over 22 years. She was last seen on 12 May 1992 at 8300 metres while climbing Kanchenjunga and adding it to the eight 8000 metre peaks she already climbed. “She was already a legend in her lifetime”, as Piotr Pustelnik has commented in a documentary titled ‘Caravan of Dreams’ that we saw last year at VIMFF. In this documentary Wanda is sometimes depicted as arrogant and selfish, while I would say that she was just a strong person: ”My life doesn’t have any meaning until it’s the way I want it to be. I’d rather don’t waste my life. I prefer to risk it.” She was a charismatic person, and some himalayanist colleagues was jealous and loved to hate her. Many climbers would say that Wanda created a separate branch called woman’s mountain climbing. There have been rumors that her polish colleagues taught children in Pakistan to ask for candy and money by saying ’Wanda pussy’. After that, the children would yell ’Wanda pussy’ at the sight of any white woman. It’s hard to believe that this is the correct information. RIP, Wanda.  

   ps: I loved this photo, but unfortunately I couldn’t find any better resolution.

ps 1: I gave myself a New Year’s present yesterday: Karawana Marzen. 

Many climbers have tried to crack the code of K2, the second- highest mountain (8611 m) and the deadliest peak on the Earth. Reinhold Messner who is considered the greatest mountaineer of the 20th century, christened K2 to “the mountain of mountains” in 1979. He said that K2 is the most beautiful and dangerous of all the high peaks, and that an artist has made this mountain.

The Italian climber Fosco Maraini said that K2 is great, but challenging: “Just the bare bones of a name, all rock and ice and storm and abyss. It makes no attempt to sound human”.  All agree that K2 is not an amateur’s mountain. Even among experienced mountaineers, K2 is more than twice as deadly as Everest. Jim Curran tried to  compare his climbing on K2 with famous Munch painting ‘The Scream’ saying this: “K2 stands absolutely on its own. The approach is hard. The base camp feels like the moon. The mountain itself looks utterly impregnable, and there’s no easy way up the thing. And all this hits you between the eyes when you see it for the first time. It’s like that famous Munch painting. You know the one— The Scream? Except, of course, you’re the one doing the screaming.” The reason why I started to write this post is because I came over great lecture by Jennifer Jordan who wrote a book ‘Savage Summit’ and made a movie ‘Women of K2′, in which she is trying to tell a story about the first five women who climbed K2 and died either while descending or later in another expedition. This led to the legend that K2 carried a “curse on women” until 2004 when curse was broken by Edurne Pasaban. K2 has an uncrackable code.