Ultimately, I don't think it has mattered. I certainly would have liked to have climbed Everest because it is the highest and I think it's every climbers goal to reach the top of the highest mountain. We always went, in the three times I was on Everest, we were on the North Side attempting new routes up the north face, so it wasn't as though we were trying to nail the summit with taking the standard approach to the top. I think we would have, I really feel we would have made it in 1982 because we were up there with Dave Mahre, Larry Neilson, Marty Hoey and myself.

We were headed for the summit; we had all the equipment we needed, everybody was feeling very strong at that point and we were just putting in the highest camp at 26,400, roughly, just below the yellow band in the Great Couloir when the accident occurred that took the life of Marty Hoey when she suddenly fell out of her waist harness as she was leaning back on the fixed rope right beside me. Larry stayed up and made a solo attempt to reach the summit and got to about 27,500 before he turned back and suffered very serious frostbite injuries. We made one more attempt but I think Marty's death just really undercut any notions, serious notions, of trying to finish that climb. We ended up leaving the mountain after having a very somber memorial service for her at the base of the mountain.

We came back two years later with the core from that 1982 team but John Roskelley had been added to the team and that was something I feel good about because John, I think, had an undeserved reputation among some people as being someone who was difficult to get along with, who was such a powerful personality that he didn't always fit well into some of these large expeditions. I advocated his inclusion in the team to Lou Whittaker and Lou was good enough to accept John for what he was and John really was a critically important member of that expedition.

Of course, I was able to team up with him for the first time on K2. I'd been teamed with Lou Reichardt and he with Rick Ridgeway and things went very well in '84 and we were up there, the three of us, John Roskelley, Phil Ershler and myself, and we put in at high camp and we're now headed for the summit. We thought we had two oxygen bottles up there and it turned out that one of them had avalanched off so we just had one bottle. I'd had the lung surgery after K2 and there just wasn't any question about who was going to use that bottle and I don't think there was an ethical issue for me at that point, I thought I would use it.

We head up the next day, the three of us, and we're right up near the base of the yellow band and John is kind of leaning over his ice axe and he says he's dizzy and sleepy and it turned out that he had taken a couple of codeine pills right before we headed up because of an old frostbite injury that was bothering him, so we decided to head back down. We left the oxygen bottle there.

We go back down to the camp and got on the radio with Lou Whittaker and he said, 'well, the expedition is over.' Ershler was on the verge of heading down but then he kind of stayed and, as we began to talk during the day and as I began to think about the situation, I came to the conclusion that it would be too risky for three of us to go up with just one person on oxygen. Not so much going up but coming off. To have two guys who had not used oxygen the whole way and there had just been this accident the previous year in which a Japanese team had several deaths, they had climbed the South Col without oxygen.

So I wasn't thinking that clearly the day before, but the day after our first attempt I started arguing with Phil. 'Phil, you go back up with John, you take that oxygen bottle to the top.' Phil said, 'no, no, you should use it, it should be the three of us.' So there's this debate, and Roskelley sits back in the tent listening to us having this discussion, which was amicable, but forceful. And it went on for hours and it really wasn't until into the night that Phil and I were at one end of the tent and John was at the other and Phil leaned over and said, 'okay, I'll go.'

So he and John take off the next morning and go up and he grabs the bottle that I'd left up at 27,200, or whatever it was, and they head up. John eventually turns back at 28,000 and Phil keeps going for the summit, with the bottle ,and it was John who pushed Phil to go on because Phil was ready to turn back at that point. John said, 'Phil, think about being back in Seattle a week from now and regretting that you were this close and it's not that hard from here, look, look up there.' So Phil went and made it to the top and he was the only one from our '84 expedition to reach the summit and it was a team success. It was the first time that I had been on one of these expeditions in which I had not personally reached the summit but someone else had and it was a new experience for me.

I think that my decision not to climb, not to go up, could have been impacted by the K2 bivouac. That I maybe was less willing to hang it out on Everest in '84 by going with the two guys without oxygen than I had been on K2 in '78 and I think my ambition to climb Everest was probably never as strong as my ambition to climb K2. So in the equation of the risks you're willing to take, I was probably willing to take greater risks to reach the summit of K2.

— Jim Wickwire