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The incredible Masherbrum. George Bell took this picture on the march in to K2. He later climbed the Masherbrum with American mountaineer Willi Unsoeld. |
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The incredible Masherbrum. George Bell took this picture on the march in to K2. He later climbed the Masherbrum with American mountaineer Willi Unsoeld. |
The Santa Fe Reporter August 26, 1976
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From the easy chair of his comfortable living room on the outskirts of Los Alamos, George Bell talked, a little reluctantly at first, about his 30 years as an expedition mountaineer. When first asked to recount his exploits, Bell seemed surprised. "I'm over the hill," he protested. But Bell continues to make difficult climbs today, and few men have gone as far out on the edge of adventure as he has.
For instance: In 1953, in the summer of his 27th year, George Bell was engaged in a protracted fight for survival on the second highest mountain in the world. With him was a small team of American mountaineers, and their experience on the mountain—K2—has become an enduring piece of mountaineering legend and history.
The small expedition had done surprisingly well on the smooth ice and rotten rock that characterize the steep flanks of K2, located in the Karakoram. After five weeks of climbing, the entire party had reached a point above 25,000 feet, only two or three days away from the unclimbed summit. But a severe mountain storm continued unabated for eight days, pinning the men in their tents—the ones that weren't destroyed by the fierce winds. Diminished food supplies, plus the incapacitating illness of one of the party, forced the expedition members to attempt a retreat in spite of the storm.
Lowering the sick climber in a sleeping bag, the party began the difficult descent through high winds and swirling snow. Hours of hard work in the rarefied air took the climbers over the edge of a sheer ice wall just yards away from one of their high camps but 12,000 vertical feet above the glacier at the base of the mountain. They prepared to swing the sick man, Art Gilkey, along the ice wall to the small camp site.
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As Bell attempted to work his way down the ice to Gilkey, who was supported from above by a rope to Pete Schoening, his crampon failed to hold on the smooth ice. He slipped and fell. Tony Streather, on the same rope with Bell, was pulled from his steps. Both climbers plummeted toward the glacier below.
As Bell and Streather fell, their rope became fouled with the ropes of the other climbers—Dee Molenaar, Robert Bates, and Charles Houston. One by one these men also were pulled off the face. Everyone was falling, and no one remained on their ropes to check their plunge.
The climbing ropes, however, had become fouled with the rope supporting the sick Gilkey. As the tangle of ropes pulled taut under the weight of the falling men, the force of the fall was transferred to that one rope, held by Schoening higher on the ice. Incredibly, when the shock came, Schoening held. In a dynamic belay still unrivaled in mountaineering history, Schoening had stopped the fall of five men, and had held Gilkey as well. Tragically, Gilkey was swept to his death by an avalanche soon after the accident. But everyone else, in various stages of frostbite and exhaustion, made their way safely off the mountain.
When asked if he remembered much about K2, Bell said, "Oh, yeah, I remember. I remember feeling the wind come through my down clothing, feeling myself freeze. The weather was terrible; snow was blowing up and sideways.
"When I came off, I thought I was falling thousands of feet. I knew there was no way the fall could be stopped and I remembered being vaguely surprised to find myself dangling from the end of the rope. You don't last long at the end of a rope, so I threw off my pack, my glasses which were filled with snow, and my gloves so that I could start climbing up right away. I don't think I had time to be afraid."
Bell's hands and feet were severely frostbitten during the descent. He had to be carried from base camp by porters, and lost several toes because of the frostbite. Men who engage in this sort of endeavor, who push themselves and their abilities to the limits, are not always romantic idealists. Bell, 50, has not lived the life of a foolhardy thrill-chaser. A physicist, he has lived in Los Alamos since 1952, and is presently the head of a small group of scientists working on theoretic biology and biophysics; he also is the alternate leader of a group of theoretic physicists.
Soft-spoken and modest to the point of self-deprecation, Bell talked about his ascents without embellishment or exaggeration. The walls of his house are covered with his own skillfully done photographs from every corner of the world where there are great mountians: the Himalaya, the Karakoram, and the big ranges of Canada, the U.S. and South America. Yet details of his great climbs must be coaxed from him. With several dozen first ascents to his credit, Bell has credentials as a mountaineer that are matched by only a handful of climbers in the world. He has written articles for The Saturday Evening Post and other periodicals, and has co-authored books on mountaineering.
In an unlikely setting for a world-class mountaineer, Bell grew up in Chicago. He first began climbing while in a summer camp near the Grand Teton Range in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The story of his first ascent, on the South Teton, is a humorous tale. Using a "stiff, old cowboy lariat" for a rope, Bell and his companion made it to the top only because they had climbed up pitches that were too scary to climb down.
But Bell learned from his early experiences in the Tetons that he enjoyed climbing. Therefore, while still an undergraduate at Harvard, he made expeditions to the Coast Range of Canada and the Wind River in Wyoming. Bell remembers the Wind River trip as one of his most enjoyable expeditions. While traversing the big, glacier-crossed range from north to south, he saw only two other men and successfully climbed more than 20 mountains, 10 of which were first ascents.
Later, while Bell was a graduate student at Cornell, he and some former classmates from Harvard went to a mountainous area of Peru where no climbing had been done since 1936. In 1949 Bell's party made the first ascent of Yerupaja, sometimes known as "The Butcher," a steep ice mountain which rises to an altitude of 21,770 feet. "We were just college kids," Bell recalled. "Some more experienced climbers tried to discourage us through the U.S. embassy in Peru, but there wasn't really any way they could." In 1952 Bell went back to Peru, where he and his party made the successful first ascent of Salcantay, more than 20,000 feet high.
In 1953 came the K2 expedition, followed in 1954 by a third expedition to Peru. The next year, 1955, Bell was invited on the Dyhrenfurth expedition to Everest, where an unsuccessful attempt was made to climb the nearby Lhotse peak by a direct route.
In 1956 Bell made another trip to Peru. "That trip wasn't very successful," Bell remembered with a grin. "I had just been married and was in a hurry to be back." Between 1956 and 1959, Bell contented himself with climbs in Europe and Canada. The next year, however, in 1960, saw what is perhaps Bell's most successful climb: the first ascent of the incredible Masherbrum in the Karakoram. It is said that mountaineers like to climb pretty mountains, and it would be hard to imagine a more beautiful mountain than the big, symmetrical ice-and-rock pyramid of the Masherbrum.
The first ascent of the Masherbrum was accomplished in the company of Willi Unsoeld, who later became famous for his new route to the summit of Everest. The Masherbrum was Bell's last big Asian climb.
However, Bell would have trouble backing up his claim that he is "over the hill." He later made several first ascents in the Brazos Cliffs area in northern New Mexico, and pioneered new routes in the Sandias.
Tales of heroic accomplishments seem to recur whenever the name George Bell is mentioned. As recently as 1971, Bell set out with a party of Los Alamos climbers to climb the dangerous Mount Robson near Jasper Park in Canada. After reaching the summit, two of the climbers—Don Liska and Dave Brown—were avalanched off the upper mountain and across a huge crevasse.
The two climbers were injured; Brown suffered a fractured leg and Liska injured his ribs. Because of the danger in trying to move the injured men, they were left in the snow with sleeping bags and one companion, while Bell, alone and unroped, ran down the crevassed glacier and beyond, a distance of more than 20 miles, to the Yellowhead Highway. He was able to bring help, and the men were evacuated from the mountain by helicopter before sundown.
George Bell is still climbing. Last year, he went to Mount Olympus in Washington, and he returned only a week ago from a 10-day holiday near Aspen, Colorado. The main difference is that these days, instead of Willi Unsoeld or Tony Streather, his climbing companions are his wife, Virginia, and his children, Carolyn, 17, and George, 15.
The Bell family is currently engaged in the construction of a cabin in northern New Mexico. As George Bell, family man, talks about the details of building the cabin, his eyes shine with the same light that flashes when he is talking of one of his big climbs. That's about the only clue that he is excited about something. Bell is a very understated man.
What does a life of risk and adventure, such as Bell has lived with almost offhand casualness, do to a person? Well, George Bell comes across as a very down-to-earth scientist and administrator with the outward appearance of absolute calm, even complacency, while the rest of us are scurrying about in search of some elusive gratification. It seems as if he has obtained the only wealth worth the effort: a treasury of long years well spent. He can afford to relax. He has been there.
