Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day

by Zuckerman, Peter

  Although Roskelley didn’t suffer any ill effects from the climb, residents of Rolwaling believe they did. Soon after Roskelley’s summit, a glacial lake on the flanks of Gauri Shankar burst through a natural dam, triggering a flash flood. Icemelt and debris submerged three women working at a water-powered gristmill. Two were fished out alive. The third died.

  Chhiring didn’t want to end up like the German or cause a flash flood as John Roskelley had. He considered it risky even to speak to mountaineers and figured they all were crackpots. Why would anyone spend so much money to climb without any practical purpose? And why weren’t they strong enough to carry their own food and gear, as the rest of the world did?

  But necessity and curiosity got the best of him. His family needed money, and Chhiring couldn’t make enough gathering firewood. His uncle Sonam Tsering, a mountaineer, told him that portering was the solution. The gods would overlook the offense, given his circumstances, and Chhiring could return home rich. So at the age of fourteen, Chhiring left for the city, walking most of the way.

  When he arrived in Kathmandu, Chhiring discovered that the elders weren’t exaggerating. The apocalypse, predicted to occur outside Rolwaling, was known to the general public. Even the U.S. Embassy was issuing survival kits. The capital was doomed.

  Kathmandu is still waiting for the Big One, an earthquake that could flatten the city. The tremors of 1253, 1259, 1407, 1680, 1810, 1833, 1860, and 1934 knocked down temples and killed tens of thousands. The next quake will be worse. Kathmandu has swelled to a million residents, and most of them live in brick warrens tottering atop shallow foundations. Assessing the risk, the United Nations has waged a campaign to promote earthquake preparedness, but nobody seems flustered. Fatalism is part of Kathmandu’s character.

  If driving rules exist in the city, they’re Darwinian. A green light means full speed ahead; a yellow light means full speed ahead; a red light means full speed ahead and honk. Traffic spills into a medieval grid too narrow for the modern world, and no meaningful lines are painted on the road. Seat belts are a novelty, and drivers and pedestrians go wherever they dare, braving a crush of buses, bicycles, cows, chickens, children, dogs, food carts, lepers, motorbikes, peddlers, pilgrims, protesters, rats, rickshaws, sewage, strollers, taxis, trucks, and trash.

  A moonscape of brick factories rings the city, and soot thickens the air and congeals in the slits between the tenements. The smog, cupped inside an amphitheater of mountains, rarely disperses from Kathmandu, even at night. The particulate matter in the air almost always exceeds World Health Organization standards, and pedestrians wear surgical masks so they can breathe through the grit that settles in the lungs.

  Paradoxically, this polluted city started with a shade tree. According to legend, the Hindu god Gorakhnath, like many modern commuters, didn’t respect the right of way. Racing to a festival, he plowed into a chariot processional, and, to avoid embarrassment, tried to impersonate a human. Fortunately, a responsible bystander made a citizen’s arrest. To post bail, Gorakhnath planted a seed in the mud. It sprouted into a sal tree that grew tall enough to scrape the firmament. A monk felled the tree and used the wood to build Kasthamandap, a three-tiered pavilion. Still standing, it’s one of the world’s oldest wooden structures. Kasthamandap is Kathmandu’s namesake.

  In the 1950s, Kathmandu became a launching pad for mountaineering expeditions. Hippies followed in the 1960s, and Freak Street, acrid with incense, remains an asylum for the New Age movement. Tourism makes up a large percentage of Nepal’s economy, and Kathmandu depends on it. Tour guides, prostitutes, drug dealers, and self-appointed messiahs hustle near the city’s Durbar Square seven days a week.

  When Chhiring arrived in Kathmandu for the first time, he had never switched on a lightbulb. The teenager settled in Little Tibet, a community of Buddhist refugees who had fled the Chinese invasion in the 1950s. Chhiring’s neighbors helped him adapt to city life, and the nearby Boudhanath stupa gave him a sense of permanence. Considered one of the holiest Buddhist sites in Nepal, Boudhanath is a reliquary buried beneath an enormous mound of soil. The stupa’s shape symbolizes Mount Meru, the center of the Buddhist cosmos, with its summit in the heavens and its bedrock in hell. As soon as he arrived in Little Tibet, Chhiring joined the crowd of worshippers, pacing clockwise around the stupa in prayer. He repeated the ritual each morning until his uncle found him a portering job that paid $3 a day.

  For that job, Chhiring spent a month hauling seventy pounds of kerosene, stoves, and climbing gear to Island Peak, near the base of Everest. The Japanese clients were surprised that a teenager could lug so much up steep trails without complaining, and they praised his upbeat attitude. To Chhiring, these trekkers seemed normal enough—and by the end of the month he had earned $90. Never had he seen so much money.

  He spent half his wages on food, shoes, and clothes, which he took to his family in Beding. He returned to Kathmandu a few weeks later to find another job. It wasn’t long before Chhiring was spending six months of the year outside Rolwaling, accepting one portering job after another. The work fit his talents. He befriended clients and picked up their languages, becoming a leader among the porters because he could serve as an interpreter. Around the time he turned sixteen, a women’s team, impressed with Chhiring’s endurance and command of English, invited him to carry loads on Everest. Chhiring had never climbed on a glacier but agreed to do it.

  Western climbers spend years preparing for Everest; for many Sherpas, it’s their training ground. During their first week on the job, some Sherpas who have never climbed will be breaking trail, hauling gear, and establishing camps for professional guides and their clients. It makes a certain kind of sense on Everest. Thousands of people have summited it. The routes are well established, the climbing is nontechnical, and the wage for each support climber is substantial—about $3,000 plus a bonus for each client who tops out. Sherpas from mountain villages are better acclimatized than their clients and often have superior strength and balance at high altitude. On Everest, these abilities can compensate for inexperience.

  Sherpas begin with Everest for another reason too. Most believe the mountain can be climbed without retribution. Miyolangsangma, the goddess who resides on Everest, only occasionally punishes trespassers. If she dislikes being climbed, pragmatism offsets her displeasure. The goddess of prosperity loves to see Sherpas make money. “As long as you treat Miyolangsangma with respect, ask forgiveness and get paid well, she’ll tolerate the climb,” said Ngawang Oser Sherpa, the head lama of Rolwaling. “You shouldn’t do it, but she is the most forgiving of the five sisters.”

  Chhiring went up Everest for the first time in 1991. In the beginning, the climb was straightforward. He didn’t have much gear or formal training, but other Sherpas showed him how to strap on crampons and grip an ice axe, and he carried seventy pounds of bottled oxygen to the South Col at 26,200 feet. On his way down, however, a storm rolled in. The temperature dropped and Chhiring’s fingers turned gray. As everyone rushed to camp, Chhiring tried to catch up, but he stepped on a smooth plate of ice. It gave way under him like a trapdoor. Chhiring sank down to his shoulders. He clawed at snow, but his fingers were too stiff to grab hold, and he slid deeper. Waiting, he hung, his feet dangling in space.

  It seemed as though hours had passed, and he was nearly unconscious when another climber, also named Chhiring Sherpa, pulled him out by the collar. The older Chhiring was furious. He scolded the teenager. You’re too young to be on Everest, he said. Nobody your age should be up this high.

  The warning had an unintended effect. It humiliated Chhiring and made him want to climb even more. Something about failing, knowing he might have reached the top of the world if he’d worn thicker gloves and boots, made him want the summit. He decided he would learn to climb better than the Sherpa who had saved him—or anyone else. Money was another incentive. He made 35,000 rupees, or about $450, from his first Everest climb. Although it wasn’t a fifth of what experienced climbers were receivin
g, it was more than the average Nepali made in a year, and he had earned it in a month.

  For the next two years, Chhiring continued to work on high mountains, to seek advice and help from his uncle Sonam. Then, in 1993, Sonam left on an expedition that would be his last. Sonam, with four Everest summits to his credit, was joining Pasang Lahmu, a friend aiming to become the first Nepali woman on the summit of Everest. The duo topped out on April 22.

  Sonam may have prayed to Miyolangsangma, the goddess of Everest, and apologized for violating her sacred space. Nevertheless, as he and Pasang Lahmu descended toward the South Col, an upturned bowl of swirling clouds coalesced around the summit. The lenticular formation meant brutal weather blowing in. With no time to strategize, Pasang and Sonam joined three teammates in a forced bivouac. Huddling together in the open, they braced against raging winds.

  Miyolangsangma refused to intercede. The gale pounded them, and, after two days, they were presumed dead. Sonam may have forced himself to stagger several hundred meters before he fell. Climbers discovered his pack below Pasang Lahmu’s body.

  As confirmation of Sonam’s death spread to Kathmandu, Chhiring couldn’t accept it. He remembered how Sonam had assured him that Everest could be climbed without consequence. “I saw he was mistaken about that,” Chhiring said. “My head was telling me to quit and go home.” Yet when he returned to Beding, Chhiring saw the power of money. His six-year-old brother Ngawang was plump and wore new shoes. His father had installed a corrugated tin roof. His sister was learning to read. Although the family mourned Sonam, none of Chhiring’s siblings were asking him to quit. “And I couldn’t,” he said. “I didn’t want to.”

  The following year, Chhiring was back on Everest with a Norwegian team. Climbers recognized his endurance at altitude and recruited him to work for them on subsequent expeditions. Soon Chhiring had joined teams from Belgium, England, France, Germany, India, Japan, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, and the United States.

  As Chhiring landed more jobs, he became more ambitious. When clients asked him to carry a forty-five-pound load, he hauled ninety. Instead of simply carrying, he volunteered to fix ropes, break trails, lead pitches, organize expeditions. He stopped using bottled oxygen, which purists regard as doping. He worked Everest as a yearly routine, reaching the summit ten times, and broke an endurance record for topping out three times in two weeks.

  Family members saw him change. He became wealthy by Nepali standards and seemed indifferent to the elders’ prophecy. Sometimes he climbed not for the money but for the exhilaration. His lama warned that it was only a matter of time before he’d be cursed. Chhiring’s father, now healthy, decided that his son had gone mad. Villagers were afraid Chhiring’s riches would tempt the younger generation to leave.

  They were right. When Chhiring returned to Rolwaling during the off-season, he wore La Sportiva boots and a North Face jacket. He brought provisions for the village—fuel, rice, socks, wool sweaters—and described urban novelties, such as motorcycles and televisions. The teenagers were awed. Mountaineering may be a sin, but it sure made you rich. Villagers flocked to Kathmandu.

  Chhiring gave them a place to stay, found them jobs, and started an expedition company, Rolwaling Excursion. The elders appreciated the clothing he brought back, and their opposition softened, even as Beding’s population crashed to twenty-three permanent residents.

  Chhiring’s accomplishments impressed his peers, but critics dismissed his achievements because they were on Everest. Anyone can climb Everest over and over, they argued, even a Playboy centerfold. The mountain has fixed lines strung from nearly start to finish. Everest is commercial, more a jungle gym for tourists than one of the great climbing challenges. Although this guy may hold an endurance record, it’s from high camp, not Base Camp. Real climbers take on real mountains, like K2. Chhiring craved the chance to prove himself, but getting to K2 cost money, and he was about to settle down.

  At sixteen, Chhiring had fallen for Dawa Sherpani, a girl he’d seen herding yaks. Dawa hadn’t taken him seriously then. Now she owned a teashop near Boudhanath, and Chhiring was a regular. He’d sit at a corner table, swilling black tea, and jump up, making his presence felt, if a male patron paid Dawa too much attention. Dawa wasn’t impressed, but Chhiring had learned to move fast. He persuaded Dawa to consult his lama to see whether their horoscopes were compatible. It was a perfect match.

  They skipped the traditional three-day ceremony, exchanged vows in an hour, and went to his place. Their daughter, Tshering Namdu Sherpa, arrived in the spring. Four years later, Dawa gave birth to a second daughter, Tensing Futi Sherpa. The family, along with Chhiring’s brothers and sisters and Dolkar, a white spaniel, moved into a cream-colored townhouse that resembled a four-tier wedding cake. It had more than just running water and electricity; Chhiring’s home had a television, a microwave oven, an office, a prayer room, two computers, and four bathtubs—luxuries he’d never dreamed of as a child.

  Compared to Beding, this was easy living. Chhiring’s expedition company boomed, nearly doubling in size every year. Chhiring began organizing climbs with dozens of employees, many from his village. By now a major patron of Rolwaling’s monastery, Chhiring finally had won approval from the elders. He held platinum elite status at the Mount Everest Summiters Club. His daughters were becoming fluent in English and attended a private prep school. Only his wife seemed worried.

  “So many people relied on him,” Dawa said. “If he got killed in the mountains, Chhiring wouldn’t just be hurting himself. He’d be hurting me and the children. I didn’t know what we’d do if he died.”

  2

  Doorway to Heaven

  K2 was born during a period of mass extinction. Sixty-five million years ago, as dinosaurs were dying off, the Indian continental plate sped north at six inches a year, a reckless pace in geological time. It plowed into Eurasia, wedging itself under the larger continent, and K2, like Everest, rose from the sea. Still rising, the Karakorum is earth’s youngest mountain range, with jagged edges unfiled by the elements.

  The word Karakorum stems from several languages in the Altaic linguistic family of Central Asia: kara means “black” and kor’um means “gravel” or “rock.” The city of Karakorum was Genghis Khan’s opulent capital in thirteenth-century Mongolia, and traders used karakorum to describe the highest pass along the way. The British explorer William Moorcroft climbed the Karakorum Pass in the 1820s and applied the name to the mountains around it. In the 1930s, the Royal Geographical Society affirmed the title.

  The range extends southeast through Kashmir, along the borders of Pakistan and China, and latches into the Himalaya. The Karakorum has the world’s largest concentration of peaks more than five miles high. Harsher than the Himalaya, it is the most glaciated place outside the polar regions—so remote that Western explorers hadn’t mapped it until the mid-nineteenth century.

  The mountain now called K2 entered surveyors’ books in 1856. The Great Trigonometric Survey of India had ordered British lieutenant Thomas Montgomerie to map Kashmir as part of an empire-wide effort to determine the exact shape of the earth. With help from Kashmiri porters, Montgomerie spent four days towing a plane table, heliostat, and brass theodolite up Mount Haramukh in the Himalayan foothills. The climb rewarded him with a panorama of spires. Two peaks 130 miles northeast jutted from the range’s spine, towering above the rest. Montgomerie peered through the theodolite, took the mountains’ bearings, and inked their outlines in his field book.

  The closest peak, a hexagon with two summits, appeared taller to him. He labeled it K1. K stood for “Karakorum”; the numeral signified that it was the first peak in his survey. He marked the glistening pyramid farther away as K2 and later logged more mountains, all the way to K32. Along with the other peaks, K1 reverted to its local name, Masherbrum, or “mountain of fire” in Balti, the local language. K2’s designation stuck. Mapmakers knew its local name, Chogori, was a cursory description the Baltis used to signify a great peak. Linguists n
ow claim that Chogori is a Tibetan word that means “doorway to heaven.” The Buddhist ancestors of the Baltis named the mountain soon after they migrated from Tibet.

  Montgomerie’s visual estimate was off by 2,592 feet. K2 towers over Masherbrum. Straddling the borders of China and Pakistan, the peak looms above the Karakorum, soaring 28,251 feet, making it the second-tallest mountain on earth. Everest stands just 778 feet higher. From a distance, K2 resembles a prehistoric shark tooth. Closer in, you can see its striated gneissic rock, encased in ice. On clear mornings, the summit floats imperiously above the clouds and the sun bathes its glaciers with golden light.

  Thomas Montgomerie’s Sketch of K2: A British lieutenant sketched the mountain’s profile in his field book and labeled it K, for the Karakorum mountain range, and 2, for the second mountain in the survey. To locals, K2 is Chogori, or “doorway to heaven” in Tibetan. Mountaineers often refer to it as the Savage Mountain.

  K2 lacks the mass of Everest, but it’s sleeker—and meaner. Climbers call it “The Savage Mountain.” The peak has all the obstacles of Everest, and more. K2’s glaciers are riddled with fissures concealed by layers of snow; climbers step on these crevasses, punch through, and, if unroped, disappear. Blocks of ice cleave off overhanging glaciers; avalanches roar down icy flanks. And then there’s the altitude. No human, plant, or animal can tolerate such harsh conditions for more than a few days. With each lungful of air, climbers on the summit suck in only a third of the oxygen they breathe at sea level. Oxygen deprivation saps their strength and compromises their judgment. Altitude illness breaks them, giving some the coordination of toddlers.

  As if these difficulties weren’t enough, storms are harsher on K2. It stands 882 miles northwest of Everest, and, being farther from the equator, is more vulnerable to extratropical cyclones and their accompanying jet streams. Everest at least follows a reliable weather pattern: Water evaporates from the Bay of Bengal east of India, forming cloud banks; they float northward over the Himalaya, nudging the jet stream off the summit, in advance of the monsoon. In May, relatively windless weather graces Everest for as long as two weeks. In contrast, K2’s weather window is a crapshoot. Climbers don’t know when the window will open—or whether it will open at all.