Though not as tall as Everest, the "Savage Mountain" is far more dangerous. Located on the border of China and Pakistan, K2 has some of the harshest climbing conditions in the world. Ninety women have scaled Everest but of the six women who reached the summit of K2, three lost their lives on the way back down the mountain and two have since died on other climbs.

In Savage Summit, Jennifer Jordan shares the tragic, compelling, inspiring, and extraordinary true stories of a handful of courageous women -- mothers and daughters, wives and lovers, poets and engineers -- who defeated this formidable mountain yet ultimately perished in pursuit of their dreams.

Savage Summit

William Morrow & Company

Chapter One

A Women's History of K2

The chief joy is the varied and perfect exercise, in the midst of
noble scenery and exhilarating atmosphere. The peak utters a
challenge. The climber responds by saying to himself, I can and
I will conquer it.

-- ANNIE SMITH PECK (1850?1935)

For most of the modern age, "woman climber" was an oxymoron.Women were almost without exception wives, widows, prostitutes, royalty,or slaves. But sometime during the late eighteenth century, whenthe first woman cinched a rope around her waist and lashed her bootsinto bear claw?shaped steel crampons to climb up ice walls and steepsnow slopes, war was declared on the status quo. From the time ofthose earliest rock and alpine pioneers, women have had to deal withtheir gender as well as the mountains in order to climb. Whether it hasbeen climbing with the danger and annoyance of twenty-two-poundskirts and the inconvenience of monthly menses or negotiating thepower struggles with their male teammates, porters, guides, and officials, women have had very different experiences than men in theclimbing world.

Early explorers of the sea, desert, jungle, Arctic, and mountains weremostly men whose cultures and personal fortunes allowed them suchfreedom. The few women of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentiethcenturies who had the financial and societal independence to venturebeyond the narrow confines of the day found getting to the mountains adifficult feat. Not only did men invite other men to attempt the then-unclimbed peaks around them, but many resented the intrusion of women into their very male pursuits, as if the presence of women somehowdiluted the fun, the danger, and the escape of their adventures. If ithad been possible, one can imagine those early men posting a "No GirlsAllowed" sign above the mountains.

The early female mountaineers also faced resistance and umbragefrom deep within the cultured societies of London, Paris, and Boston,which had difficulty embracing the display of women, in britches orskirts shortened to their calves, ropes pulled tight around their bodies,climbing and sleeping on mountains, with men! Further, it was onething for men to risk death in their lofty pursuits, but for women who"belonged" safely at home caring for the children, it was practicallyblasphemous.

But the women pioneers of rock and ice persevered through theirculture's indignation and scorn, first ascending Mont Blanc in 1808(although barely, as Marie Paradis, exhausted and quite undone by herefforts, begged her companions to throw her into the nearest crevasseto put her out of her misery), the Matterhorn in 1871, and finally theworld's mightiest peak, Mount Everest, in 1975. With every rope theysuffered second-guessing, petty jealousy, and recrimination, not tomention the resentment of men who felt challenged when womenachieved the same feats that they had heralded as pushing the limits ofwhat the human body could endure. After all, if a mere woman could doit, how dangerous could it be?

Pretty damn dangerous, as it would turn out, particularly for thosewho set their sights on the world's highest mountains, the fourteen thatstand above 8,000 meters, roughly the cruising altitude of a jetliner.Only a tiny fraction of the world's population will ever breathe the rarefiedthin air that veils the top of the world, and even fewer will survivethe experience. High-altitude climbing is the most deadly of recreations,many times more lethal than skydiving, race-car driving, orbase-jumping. On certain peaks the fatality rates are staggering, but onK2 they are mind-boggling. When a climber straps on his cramponswith the intent of ascending K2, he knows he has a one-in-four chanceof not making it off the mountain alive. One in four. And as bad as those odds are, they are even worse for women. Six women havereached the summit of K2, but five have died trying. (In addition to thethree who died on descent, another two women died on ascent withoutreaching the summit.) For women the statistics are small but nonethelesspowerful. The bottom line is that women have fared disastrouslyon K2.

Ironically, as bad as their experience on K2 has been, women actuallydie less often than men on the other 8,000-meter peaks. Althoughthere has been almost no scientific research on the effects of high altitudeon the female body, what little data there are actually indicate thatwomen are better suited to the rigors of the Death Zone than their malecolleagues. Recent studies suggest that as men and women climbhigher, men's initial advantage of muscle mass and brute strengthequalizes out against women's better endurance and ability to adapt tothe thin air. Not only do women suffer high-altitude pulmonary edemaless often, but they acclimatize better, they retain their base body weightbetter, and their more efficient circulatory systems lead them to sufferless frostbite?the formation of ice crystals in the cells that destroystheir structure and constricts the oxygen flow, leading to infection and,if untreated, quickly to gangrene, resulting finally in amputation. Thereis also early evidence that the female sex hormone helps to guardwomen against the deadly effects of high altitude, but further researchneeds to be done to make that theory conclusive.

Women have in fact survived their Himalayan ventures slightly betterthan men. In the entire Himalaya there have been thirty-one femaledeaths, or 4.7 percent of all fatalities. But women account for 5.4 percentof all the ascents. Women therefore have a 0.7 percent better survivalrate than men in the Himalaya. An exception is on K2, wherewomen represent almost 10 percent of the total deaths and only 2.5 percentof all ascents. Women are therefore four times more likely to getkilled on K2 than nearly all the other 8,000-meter peaks ...

Excerpted from Savage Summitby Jordan, Jennifer Excerpted by permission.
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