Adventure Mag Scan…Best of Outside: Every month (okay, whenever I feel like it) The Wetass Chronicles will take a look at the online offerings of the adventure mags. Usually, issues are put online about a month after publication (when the newest issue hits the newsstand), and I’ll focus on the stuff that arrives online…so I can provide links (and you can read it for free). The November 2003 issue of Outside is now available online, and its got some great stuff for climbing and adventure addicts.



The cover story about K2 elaborates on a theme that TWC and the ExplorersWeb have already written about: namely that K2 is a bitch–much deadlier and harder to climb than Everest. But author Kevin Fedarko–who’s a vivid and nimble writer–digs into the history and quirks of K2 in detail that is both gruesome and enthralling. Here he is on one of K2s grizzlier oddities:

We started up the Godwin-Austen Glacier, which cuts along the foundation of the mountain’s immense southern face. As we walked, Jordan told me about the postmortem K2 performs on the climbers who perish here. The ridges and escarpments of this peak are so sheer that the dead are rarely entombed on the mountain itself; most are scoured off by avalanches and rockfalls, and when their bodies hit bottom they become encased in the glacial field, where they are slowly torn to pieces.

“It’s kind of like a bread mixer,” Jordan observed as we picked our way around thin crevasses and frigid pools of Windex-blue meltwater. “The worst of the violence is the avalanches, but there are also the years of tearing and crushing in the glaciers. The movement churns them up in summer, back down in winter. Appendages get torn off in the disgorging process. When they surface, they’re almost all headless, because that’s the weakest link in the body. Mostly you find legs–very few arms.”

Fedarko also writes in detail about the famous 1953 American attempt to climb K2 (it failed, but in spectacularly dramatic fashion). Check it out.



An American Team Didn’t Get To the Top Until 1978: “I can believe it took so long to clim this fu*$ing mountain….”

(Photo: Jim Wickwire via Outside)

Also: Greg Child, an excellent climber/writer, has a short piece on a heated controversy over uber-climber Reinhold Messner’s forthcoming book account of how he lost his brother Gunther, after summitting Nanga Parbat in 1970:

“The epic that ensued–Gunther and Reinhold’s two-day descent down uncharted territory, Gunther’s June 29 disappearance in a reported avalanche, and Reinhold’s frantic search of the debris field and grief-stricken escape through the Diamir Valley, is the defining experience of Reinhold Messner’s life, and it’s described in his 40th book, The Naked Mountain, to be published for the first time in English in November by The Mountaineers Books. What U.S. readers may not hear about is the firestorm that the German edition sparked in Europe. In books written as direct rebuttals to The Naked Mountain, two members of the expedition claim that Messner’s story is a whitewash of the truth–that he abandoned his brother on the peak.”

It’s an incredible accusation, if true. Cain and Abel at 8,000 meters……



Young Messner (center) on Parbat: “Hmmmm, what’s it going to take for me to get famous on this peak…..”

(Photo: Reinhold Messner via Outside)