by Andrew Lock
‘Rafael, have you seen Peter?’ I asked.
‘What? No, not Peter. It’s Daniel.’
The cold sense of dread I’d felt when we’d realised that Peter was missing became even colder.
‘Rafael, where is Daniel?’
‘He fell.’
‘What happened?’
‘He was slow,’ Rafael panted. ‘I think oedema. Cerebral. I got him down the slope and across the rope to the Bottleneck. He held onto a rock but it came loose. He fell off the cliff. He’s dead.’
Anatoli then burst in with, ‘Did you see Reinmar?’
‘He summitted, but after that I don’t know.’ I passed Rafael another cup of hot water from our stove.
‘Tell us what happened,’ I said.
The Norwegian explained that Bidner had reached the summit shortly after I had started down, and that Reinmar had summitted some time later. On their descent, Jensen and Bidner had gone ahead of Reinmar. They had only one headlamp between them, so they climbed down together. As they descended, Bidner had succumbed to the effects of cerebral oedema (an altitude-induced build-up of fluid on the brain) and become unsteady on his feet. Jensen helped him down, but Bidner had fallen to his death at the top of the Bottleneck. Jensen had then continued down alone.
Bidner’s death was tragic, but we’d still not accounted for Peter or Reinmar. In the emerging dawn, we searched the slopes above us for several hours, but there was no sign of either of them. There never would be.
It seemed most likely that Peter had lost his hold on the mountain on that same desperate slope from which I’d nearly toppled, since we knew he’d reached that point with Anatoli. If he’d reached the fixed rope at the traverse under the serac, he’d have been able to safely move to the top of the Bottleneck. Had he fallen from that point, he would probably have ended up on the slopes above Camp 4, where we could have seen him.
Reinmar had probably suffered the same fate. His was the second headlamp we’d seen as he descended the fatal ramp at 2.30 a.m. The single headlamp that I’d seen at 3 a.m. had belonged to the Scandinavians. Like his friend Peter, it appeared that Reinmar had fallen before reaching the safety of the fixed-rope traverse.
*
An expedition that had been an amazing success just hours earlier had turned into a disaster. Half of the six of us who’d summitted had been killed on descent.
Anatoli was distraught. Reinmar had been a close friend of his. He wanted to wait at Camp 4 in case some miracle of survival occurred. I held no such hopes, but in any case my decision was soon made for me. Jensen, who’d been standing outside our tent, suddenly toppled over and lay still on the snow. He too had fallen victim to cerebral oedema. His only hope for survival was descent.
While Anatoli stayed at the camp a little longer, I crammed my sleeping bag into my rucksack, tied Jensen’s rucksack on top of mine and hauled him to his feet. With an arm around him, I forced him to walk down the slopes towards Camp 3. I wasn’t gentle but the situation was desperate. I had also been at extreme altitude long enough to be affected by oedema, and if I collapsed we were done for. Anatoli wouldn’t have been able to carry both of us, even if he found us in time. With that in mind, I pushed, cajoled, dragged and carried Jensen down the mountain.
Peter and Reinmar had been carrying our two radios, so I was unable to call Base Camp and tell them what was going on. I knew that the British team members were on the way up to Camp 3 that day, and I needed them to climb a little higher to meet me as I brought Jensen down. By this time I was faltering from exhaustion, and I started to worry that we’d be caught by the night before we reached camp.
I searched through Jensen’s pack and found a radio. I called the Swedish base camp, but trying to relay a message in my exhausted and dehydrated state was difficult, especially as I didn’t speak Swedish. After numerous calls, the first few of which were answered by their Pakistani cook, I finally made them understand that I needed them to pass a message to the British expedition’s base camp, that I needed help to get Rafael Jensen down to safety.
Whether the message would get through to the British climbers high on the mountain, I did not know. Nor did I know if they would even help. Jensen’s condition was deteriorating and I had no choice but to push on. There were still a couple of crevasses to be negotiated. I kicked a deep hole in the snow, sat him in it and tied all my climbing slings together, one end of which I clipped to his harness, the other to mine. I had to jump the crevasse and hope that, if I missed the other side, his body weight would stop me from plummeting into the abyss.
Fear gave me wings and I made it to the other side okay. I then had to pull Jensen from the hole and cajole him to stand at the edge of the crevasse. The moment he stepped forward, I took a running jump down the mountain slope, trying to use my momentum to pull him over the crevasse. It worked well enough. Rafael was jerked from his stance and most of the way over the crevasse but crashed into the far side, where he hung precariously, connected to me, and therefore his life, by the thin slings between us. I threw myself to the ground to stop him dropping any further into the hole, and then dug my feet into the snow. With all my remaining strength, I heaved on the slings until I’d pulled him out of the crevasse and onto safe ground. In my oxygen-starved state, I almost blacked out from the effort and I lay on the snow for fifteen minutes, as comatose as Rafael.
While I recovered my breath, I remembered that I was carrying a small vial of drugs for illnesses brought on by high altitude, such as the oedema that Jensen was suffering. I had dexamethasone, Diamox, nifedipine, aspirin and a few others, but I couldn’t remember the correct dosages. Forgetting I was carrying the drugs was a clear sign of my own cognitive impairment, but an even clearer one was that I didn’t see that the dosages were written on the outside of the vial. I decided that anything was better than nothing—in fact, everything was better than nothing—so I tipped the entire contents down Jensen’s throat. Not surprisingly, he perked up a bit and we continued.
After we had descended another hundred metres or so, I was relieved beyond words to see a couple of the British climbers making their way up from Camp 3 and I gratefully handed Jensen over to them. Another hour of descent and I was in the snow cave that Reinmar and Anatoli had dug on their way up. Anatoli appeared shortly after and we spent a subdued night, too tired and too saddened to talk much.
The weather turned for the worse that night, so the British abandoned their summit push and took Jensen all the way down to Base Camp. Their descent was not without incident, though. At one point, as their leader Roger Payne led Jensen down, the fixed rope to which they were clipped broke. Thankfully, Payne was able to arrest their fall and save them both.
Anatoli and I also descended to Base Camp, where we were met by a tearful Ernst. We could tell him little of how his two close friends had perished. He was wracked with sorrow, compounded by the thought that, having given his sleeping bag to Peter, he had enabled Peter to continue the climb with its tragic consequence.
A new storm pounded the mountain that evening. My stomach had shrunk due to the past strenuous week of climbing, so I could only nibble at the food our cook offered me, but I was severely dehydrated and drank innumerable cups of hot juice. Soon, I staggered gratefully to my tent, where I dropped into the deepest of sleeps. The next morning I awoke long enough only to have a drink and a quick toilet stop, then returned to my sleeping bag and slept soundly right through until the following day. I got up again for a quick drink and fell back into bed until, finally, after another twenty-four hours, I emerged. I had never before been so tired.
In the interim, Captain Rashid had created two plaques from stainless-steel dinner plates. We sombrely walked over to the Gilkey Memorial and added them to the much-adorned rocky monument.
Our ascent of K2 had been achieved within just twenty-four days of our arrival at base camp, which was very fast. However, that speed had perhaps contributed to the tragedy we’d experienced. Both Anatoli and I were still acclimatis
ed from our climbs a few weeks before this expedition, but it seemed likely that Reinmar and Peter had forced their bodies to cope with the extreme altitude at a faster rate than they should have. Our success in summitting was absolutely due to their insistence that we climb hard on the mountain’s lower slopes during the bad weather, so we could make best use of the good weather when it finally arrived. It was just a shame they didn’t get to enjoy that success.
No further expeditions would summit K2 that year, and it was probably just as well. Of the twelve climbers who reached the summit that season, five were killed on descent. Three of those deaths occurred during my own summit climb and, while I hadn’t contributed to the accidents, they were very much a part of my experience. The deaths had little immediate impact on me, though. On the descent from Camp 4 to Camp 3, I’d been too focused on keeping Raphael alive. Once at Base Camp, I was too exhausted to think, let alone grieve.
When I finally awoke after three days of sleep and we placed the plaques on the memorial, I still didn’t feel too much. I’d seen half my own team, and a member of another group, slaughtered, in a matter of hours. But the loss was theirs, not mine. My subconscious was in control. I could not allow myself to feel any emotion.
Postscript
In 1996 Anatoli Boukreev was instrumental in saving several climbers’ lives in what is probably the best-known disaster on Mount Everest, when a storm trapped more than ten people above the South Col at 8000 metres. He climbed alone out into the storm’s fury to locate and rescue climbers who’d collapsed and been given up for dead by others. His book The Climb described his life and those experiences. On Christmas Day in 1997, Anatoli was killed in an avalanche while climbing a difficult route on Annapurna, another of the 8000ers.
Roger Payne, the leader of the British team on K2, who’d survived the incredible avalanche I’d witnessed on Mount McKinley in 1991 and the fall on K2 while he was helping Rafael Jensen down, was killed in an avalanche in the European Alps in 2012.
4
FRUSTRATION
To put yourself into a situation where a mistake cannot necessarily be recouped, where the life you lose may be your own, clears the head wonderfully.
Al Alvarez
AFTER I RETURNED home from K2, I made a number of public presentations around Australia about the expedition, which were well attended. At the end of one presentation, a woman asked me, ‘How do you feel about your friends’ deaths?’ Not being a particularly introspective person, I hadn’t really thought about it since the expedition.
‘Better than them,’ I replied. She looked rather perplexed, perhaps justifiably so, but persisted.
‘Yes, but how do you really feel?’
‘I feel happy that I’m not with them,’ I said. ‘Any other questions?’
When I thought about this encounter later, I realised that I still really hadn’t felt anything at all about the loss of life I’d witnessed on K2, or on my other recent expeditions. Consciously, anyway. By this time I’d been a police officer for twelve years, so I’d seen and dealt regularly with death. At work, we remained as objective as possible when dealing with deceased people and, while this situation was more personal, I suppose I’d just invoked that same approach.
The deaths were unfortunate, of course, but Lobsang, Peter, Reinmar and Daniel—even the two Norwegian boys on Pumori several years earlier—had all accepted the risks we’d faced and made their choices, even if, when we’d started, we hadn’t really been aware of just how extreme those risks were. So I thought no more about it. Peter and Reinmar and all the others had died, and that was that. I was still working to achieve my long-held dream of summitting Mount Everest and I wasn’t about to let the human cost affect my motivation.
*
Early in 1994 I was contacted by Goran Kropp, a Swedish climber who’d learned about the assistance I had given to Rafael Jensen the previous year. He was leading an expedition to Broad Peak and invited me to join the team. The other climbers were Mats Holmgren and Nicolas Gafgo. I agreed to go, and we met in Islamabad in May.
For the fun of it, our kindly expedition agent in Pakistan organised for our team to drive the Karakorum Highway to Skardu, rather than take the short flight. Clearly, he thought I hadn’t had enough near-death experiences already. Our driver, who I’m certain had never been behind the wheel of any vehicle before, loaded all our equipment onto the roof of his dilapidated bus, making it ridiculously unstable, then drove at breakneck speed for the entire journey. He launched us around blind corners above vertical cliff faces, all the while chain-smoking his hashish cigarettes and yelling maniacally, ‘Insha’Allah, we die!’ Thankfully, it wasn’t Allah’s will at the time, although he’d have been perfectly within his rights to rid the world of our driver.
At 8051 metres in altitude, Broad Peak is the twelfth-highest mountain on Earth but, being in the shadow of its larger neighbour, K2, it was ignored until the 1950s. Like many 8000ers, including K2, its summit ridge is the border between two countries—in this case China and Pakistan.
An attempt on Broad Peak in 1954 by a German expedition failed due to cold and violent storms. A joint German–Austrian expedition returned to the mountain in 1957 and attempted the climb under the most pure of climbing styles—without auxiliary oxygen or climbing porters. Included in the small team of four was Hermann Buhl, who had famously achieved a solo first ascent of another 8000er, Nanga Parbat, in 1953. Buhl and the team reached Broad Peak’s summit on 9 June, remarkably early in the Karakorum climbing season. In doing so, Buhl became the first person in the world to have made the first ascents of two 8000-metre peaks.
The team didn’t stop there. They split up to attempt two nearby peaks. On 19 June Marcus Schmuck and Fritz Wintersteller achieved the first ascent of Skil Brum (7360 metres) in pure Alpine style and in the extraordinarily fast time of just fifty-three hours. Buhl joined with the final team member, Kurt Diemberger, to attempt the nearby peak of Cholgolisa (7654 metres). Tragically, Buhl, the greatest proponent of lightweight high-altitude mountaineering of that era, was killed when he fell through a cornice on the summit ridge. Diemberger survived, however, and would go on to achieve other great ascents on the 8000ers.
Broad Peak is just 8 kilometres from K2, so our trek to base camp followed exactly the same route I had taken the previous year. This time, however, we went nearly a month earlier and there was considerably more snow on the ground.
When we arrived at Base Camp, our porter sirdar asked what date the porters should return to collect us. Goran nominated a date about four weeks hence, but I told him that it would be better to send a runner down to collect porters when we needed them, since booking them for a specific date would limit our ability to extend our time on the mountain if we needed to. Unfortunately, as it turned out, he stuck to his plan and set a fixed date.
Our intent was to make the first ascent of the mountain’s unclimbed South Ridge, which to our knowledge had only been attempted once before. The climb began well and we opened the route to about 6500 metres through a near-vertical rock buttress that rose about 800 metres from its base. But the team lost its mojo when Nicolas received a letter advising that his girlfriend back in Sweden had been killed in a motorcycle accident. He went home immediately, of course, and the others in our team didn’t have the heart to continue on this tough new route, so we switched to an easier line on the mountain’s West Face.
This route was far less technical, and after three days of climbing we reached Camp 3 at 7000 metres. The following morning we set out for the summit. We climbed a steep face to a col between the main buttress and the central buttress, and then followed an exposed rocky ridge up and over a false summit—a point at which some climbers are alleged to have stopped and claimed to have reached the summit. But we wanted the real summit and continued the traverse.
The ridge, which sits at 8000 metres, is perhaps a kilometre long. As we made our way along it slowly and carefully, the wind picked up and cloud started to billow around us. W
hen we were no more than 50 linear metres and just a few metres in height from the true summit, the wind suddenly built up to gale force. We were so close that it was hugely tempting to continue towards the summit, but prudence dictated that we retreat to safety. An Austrian woman who’d also been going for the summit that day, and who was climbing a short distance behind us on the ridge, also turned around and descended.
The storm continued for a couple of days so we retreated all the way to Base Camp. I felt strong enough to make another attempt a few days later, but at that point the porters who’d been booked to carry our expedition equipment back out of the mountains arrived. My chance to summit was lost—and the summit had been almost literally within touching distance.
Just as were preparing to start the trek back to civilisation, Goran told us that he’d arranged to join another team’s expedition—he was friends with the leader of that group, it turned out—so that he could stay on and have another try for the summit. Incredible. While I’d have loved to stay to chat further with Goran about leadership and team spirit, the porters were already heading down the glacier with my equipment, so I shouldered my backpack and followed.
At camp on one of the final nights, I washed in a stream and then hung my towel over my tent to dry while I went to grab a cup of tea from the cook tent. When I returned, I saw that my towel was missing and immediately assumed that a porter had added it to his linen cupboard. As much as I loved Pakistan and its people, particularly the hardy folk of the Northern Areas, it was an unfortunate reality that any bit of equipment or clothing not locked away in drums or boxes would go missing during a trek. No matter how securely we packed the loads, our porters always managed to relieve us of something by the time we arrived at our destination. It was almost a sport to see who could outsmart the other.