Unlike many other K2 expeditions which have ended in acrimony and bitterness, such as Wiessner's 1939 expedition and the successful Italian expedition of 1954, the 1953 expedition formed lifelong bonds of friendship between its members. Houston remarked that we entered the mountain as strangers, but we left it as brothers, while Bates would later say that the Brotherhood of the Rope established on K2 outlasted the expedition by many decades and was based on a shared sense of values, interests and mutual respect and affection. Because of this, and the bravery and selflessness of the attempt to save Art Gilkey, the expedition has been held up by writers such as Jim Curran as a symbol of all that is best in mountaineering. Jim Wickwire, who made the first American ascent of K2 in 1978, described their courage and character as one of the greatest mountaineering stories of all time, and wrote in a letter to Houston that to have climbed on the 1953 expedition would have been even better than climbing K2 in 1978. Many years after the expedition, Reinhold Messner, the first man to climb all fourteen 8000 m peaks, said that while he had great respect for the Italian team which first climbed K2, he had even more respect for the American team, adding that while they failed, they failed in the most beautiful way you can imagine.