THAT SAME DAY, House and Anderson began packing for their climb. They did the food first: piles of Stove Top stuffing with packets of Gu and baggies of a powdered drink mix called Spiz, enough for 12 days. "In Alaska, you'd take [enough for] 24," Anderson said, and House nodded, tossing in some chunks of halvah and a few tins of kippered herring, which he called "my own special burden."

A day later they started winnowing their gear, an exercise in minimalism that was spectacular to behold. Their single-wall tent weighed two pounds. Their sleeping bag—why

Summit day was interminable. They'd camped at 24,278 feet, but soft snow in the morning bogged them down. When House looked over at Anderson and asked him how he felt, Anderson put a FInger to his temple and pulled an imaginary trigger.

take two?—was a featherlight quilt of Polarguard that House had stitched together himself and that compressed to fit inside a helmet. Their "rack" was, by rock-climbing standards, tiny: five ice screws, nine stoppers, or nuts, nine titanium pitons, three spring-loaded camming devices, 20 wire-gated carabiners, two locking carabiners, and two rappel devices. The only redundancy was an extra camera. "In the modern world of climbing," House noted, "if you come back without pictures, no one will believe you." In all, it came to 64 pounds; by splitting the load, they'd be able to do most of the climbing with their packs on.

On the evening of August 27, my last night in camp, House placed a sat-phone call to a meteorologist in Jackson, Wyoming, and got a provisional go-ahead. The next morning, at 4 a.m., I joined the two for a hike to the glacier where the route begins. But at dawn, the cloud deck was still hovering menacingly a few thousand feet above the valley floor, and when I left them an hour later they were pondering whether to launch or not.

In the end, they started four days later, on September 1. Day two was technically the hardest, with several ice pitches up to 90 degrees, while day three was the longest, an 18-hour marathon with more than 30 pitches that ended only when they found a bergschrund on which to camp. The psychological crux came on the fourth day, when they had to find a way through a seemingly impassable rock band—and did after a desperate hour of searching.

"If we hadn't," House told me later, "we'd have been looking at 60 to 80 rappels to get down, and with the gear we had we couldn't have done it."

Summit day, day six, was interminable. They'd camped at 24,278 feet, but soft snow in the morning bogged them down, and it took an hour to make the first 200 feet. When House looked over at Anderson and asked him how he felt, Anderson put a finger to his temple and pulled an imaginary trigger—a positive sign, House concluded, because it meant Anderson was "still able to make a joke."

They reached the summit just before sunset, stayed an exultant 15 minutes, returned to their high camp, and, after a few hours of sleep, descended via the Messner Route, the same way House and Miller had bailed the year before. A day later, as they stumbled down the moraine in a state of complete exhaustion, four strange men came running out of the junipers and embraced them in terrifying bear hugs. It took House a few minutes to realize that among them were Rana and Ghulam, the assistant cook. In base camp, House hugged a tearful Hussein.

"Success, Fida, success!" he said, before the emotion became too much and he stole off to his tent.