Lino Lacedelli

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Lino Lacedelli (4 December 1925 – 20 November 2009)^[1] was an Italian mountaineer.

Biography

Lacedelli was born in Cortina d'Ampezzo (Province of Belluno).

His climbing career began as a young teenager when he followed a mountain guide up a local summit.

Together with Achille Compagnoni, he was the first man to reach the summit of K2 on 31 July 1954. The expedition was led by Ardito Desio. There had been many other attempts but those two conquered K2 first.

He died aged 83 on 20 November 2009 in Cortina d'Ampezzo, in the house he had lived his entire life.^[2]

Lino Lacedelli’s book

• Price of Conquest: Confessions from the First Ascent of K2

Italians proudly describe the first ascent of K2 as one of the golden pages in climbing history. However, not everything was epic in the expedition. While Lino Lacedelli and Achille Compagnoni were celebrated as national heroes; a furious Walter Bonatti accused Lacedelli and Compagnoni of having abandoned him in the death zone.

• The dark side of K2 conquest

1954, Bonatti, was a 24-year-old member in Ardito Desio's K2 expedition. Bonatti and local porter Amir Mehdi, known to history as "Mahdi" because the Italians got his name wrong, were ordered to bring spare oxygen bottles to Lacedelli and Compagnoni for a summit push from Camp IX, the final camp.

The high camp was further away than Bonatti and Medhi had expected and night fell before they reached it. When they called outside their climbing mates' tents, Bonatti and Mehdi were told by Lacedelli and Compagnoni to leave the O2 and descend in the darkness. At 8100m, Bonatti and Mahdi survived a night of exposure below the Bottleneck, but the Pakistani lost half of each foot to frostbite.

• 50 years of silence and lies

Back home, the summit team not only denied all charges, but Compagnoni counter-attacked Bonatti accusing him of trying to sabotage their summit push and steal the top for himself. Bonatti, who made the first ascent of Gasherbrum IV in 1958, was ostracised from the climbing community and in 1965 gave up mountaineering.

Bonatti has since published "The Mountains of My Life", an autobiography with stories about the expedition of 1954. In his book Bonatti displays proof of his innocence, including a photograph of Lacedelli and Compagnoni wearing oxygen masks on the summit.

• Lacedelli speaks up

50 years after the 1954 K2 expedition a very old Lino Lacedelli, who had remained silent all this time, couldn’t face taking the truth to his grave. In a book, he has confessed what really happened, thus changing the course of mountaineering history.

• A desperate night at 8100m on K2

On the night before the first ascent of K2, Walter Bonatti and Amir Mehdi of Hunza had to endure a freezing, storm-swept bivouac high on the Shoulder of K2, while their companions Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli spent the night in a tent literally within hailing distance. As agreed beforehand, Bonatti and Mehdi had carried the oxygen bottles for the summit team who were waiting for them in Camp IX. But the top camp was placed in a different, higher location than Bonatti had expected, and so when they couldn’t find the tent, they were forced into a desperate emergency bivouac at an altitude of 8100 meters.

Since then the controversy has raged as to exactly why the high camp was moved higher, did the oxygen really run out several hours below the summit as claimed, and if so, when exactly did Lacedelli and Compagnoni start out for the summit then? And since they could communicate with either verbally, why didn’t Compagnoni and Lacedelli help them over to the safety of their tent?

• From K2 to court

Ten years after the ascent, accusations that had been simmering just below the surface finally publicly erupted. Mountaineering journalist Nino Giglio published several newspaper articles based on interviews with Compagnoni and the expedition’s Pakistani liaison officer Colonel Ata-Ullah. It was claimed that Bonatti had tried to beat Lacedelli and Compagnoni to the summit that he used oxygen during his bivouac that caused the summiteers supply to run out early, and that Bonatti had deserted Mehdi and so was responsible for his frostbite and subsequent amputations.

These accusations prompted Bonatti to file and win a libel suit against Giglio and the newspaper (the damages were donated to an orphanage). It was easy to prove that Bonatti couldn’t have used the oxygen: he didn’t have the masks or tubing, just the bottles. One aspect of the libel case proved embarrassing to Bonatti, however. His lawyer tracked down Amir Mehdi in Hunza, hauling him into Gilgit District Court, ostensibly to support his client's case. Mehdi was asked about the bivouac - and, to Bonatti's mortification, his testimony supported at least one of Compagnoni's assertions. According to Mehdi, Bonatti had indeed been scheming to supplant Compagnoni on the summit team. He promised Mehdi they would spend the night in Camp 9's tent and continue on to the summit, regardless of Compagnoni's objections. Bonatti wanted to try to summit K2 without the use of supplemental oxygen.

But Mehdi agreed that allegations that Bonatti abandoned him or used the summit team's oxygen were bogus. If they had used oxygen during the bivouac, Mehdi could have saved his toes.

References

Further reading

• K2. Il prezzo della conquista, Lino Lacedelli and Giovanni Cenacchi, 2004, Mondadori, IT. ISBN 9788804535560
• K2: The Price of Conquest, Lino Lacedelli and Giovanni Cenacchi, 2006, Carreg Ltd. UK. ISBN 0-9538631-3-1.
• Ascent of K2: Second Highest Peak in the World, Ardito Desio (David Moore, trans), Elek Books, 1955
• The Mountains of My Life, Walter Bonatti (Robert Marshall, trans), Random House, 2001
• K2. Storia di un caso, Walter Bonatti.
• K2. La verità. 1954-2004, Walter Bonatti, 2005, Baldini Castoldi Dalai editore. ISBN 88-8490-845-0.
• K2. Lies and Treachery, Robert Marshall, 2009, Carreg Ltd. UK. ISBN 978-0-9538631-7-4.

External links

• Lino Lacedelli - Daily Telegraph obituary