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

by Zuckerman, Peter

  Mehdi, after the amputation of his toes, returned home to Hunza and left his ice axe in the garden shed. Gradually, he learned to walk on his stumps. He was informed by mail that the Italian government had awarded him Cavaliere status, the equivalent of knighthood. Compagnoni sent him dozens of letters over the years, but Mehdi never had them translated.

  After the operatics of 1954, the Savage Mountain permitted no summits for twenty-two years. A Japanese team finally succeeded in 1977, with help from an army of 1,500 porters. In the late 1970s, Pakistan, which had limited the number of K2 expeditions to one a year, began allowing many more. Overcrowding contributed to the death toll, which spiked in 1986 when thirteen climbers perished in a single summer.

  At the same time, the spirit of the sport was changing. The first generation of high-altitude mountaineers were the proud “Conquistadors of the Useless,” pioneering first ascents. But what was left once all the major peaks had been conquered? Mountaineers scrambled for ways to distinguish themselves. Competing for media attention and corporate sponsorship, they took on more daring routes under ever-more-harrowing conditions. Reaching the top wasn’t enough. Climbers had to ascend without bottled oxygen; claw up hypertechnical routes; race up two mountains, one right after the other; climb during the Himalayan winter; bag every summit higher than 8,000 meters. And all of this had to be documented, on camera, for the Discovery Channel.

  Technology improved. GPS guided climbers through whiteouts; satellite phones buzzed; supercomputers predicted storms; crampons grew front points; DryLoft replaced reindeer skin. As new tools and equipment allowed the sport to become more extreme, they simultaneously made it more accessible. Western guide companies such as Peak Freaks and Mountain Madness appeared in the 1990s. For popular destinations like Everest, these companies organized all the logistics, obtained permits, hired staff, fixed routes, and charged $30,000 to $120,000 a head.

  Crowds packed the mountain. Amateurs who had trained on sea-level StepMills arrived at Everest, clipped their ascenders onto a fixed line, and winched their way through the clouds. Most Sherpas, grateful for the work, recognized that clients sometimes lacked technical expertise, but their dependence could be managed. They instructed weak climbers to avoid overexerting themselves and focus on their health. “We climb Everest twice,” Chhiring explained. “First, Sherpas go up to set the ropes and camps, then we go down to collect our clients and take them to the top.” A headline in The Guardian summarized the phenomenon: “Mount Everest: a not so novel feat.” The subhead observed: “So many people, and celebrities, are conquering Everest that it’s more resort than wilderness.” Sherpas did the heavy lifting, and thousands of happy amateurs joined the Mount Everest summit roll.

  The inadequacies of commercial climbing hit the spotlight in 1996 when fifteen climbers lost their lives on Everest, eight in a single day. Jon Krakauer’s memoir about the tragedy, Into Thin Air, sold four million copies and became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The book should have scared rational creatures away from the sport; instead, the “Krakauer effect” galvanized commercial mountaineering. Most newcomers arrived at Base Camp with the requisite experience, but a few imagined that their $65,000 expedition fee was a chairlift to the top, weather and ability be damned. Forced to turn back for their own safety, they sued for breach of contract. Even Sir Edmund Hillary worried that dilettantes were “engendering disrespect for the mountain.”

  The death of David Sharp in 2006 epitomized this decline. A thirty-four-year-old math teacher, Sharp was descending from the summit of Everest when he collapsed, still clipped to the fixed line, fewer than 800 feet above the highest camp. Over the next twelve hours, as many as forty summit-hungry climbers reportedly passed him as he lay dying. Some witnesses said they thought Sharp was merely resting. Others said he was in obvious distress and could have been rescued if anyone else had agreed to help. Nobody made an effort until they were descending from the summit, but by then it was too late. Sharp had been left to die; summit fever had trumped common humanity.

  As an Everest conquest lost its purity and prestige, professional climbers and avid amateurs defected to K2. Its difficulty resisted commercialization. A successful ascent without bottled oxygen was a shortcut to media attention, fame, and sponsorship. The Savage Mountain got a second moniker—The Mountaineer’s Mountain—and Sherpas wanted to bag it, too. Sherpas were the strongest on Everest. They held the records for the first, fastest, and greatest number of summits, and it was getting hard for them to distinguish themselves there. Hundreds of Sherpas had climbed Everest, but only two had succeeded on K2 without using bottled oxygen.

  Chhiring intended to be the third, but his wife, Dawa, thought his ambitions were perverse. Now in his midthirties, Chhiring had a family, a house, a business, and a potbelly. By 2007, Dawa thought she’d persuaded him to give up on K2. “He had become more sensible,” Dawa said. “K2 was a fantasy. And even if he got the chance, I knew I could stop him.” But in his mind, Chhiring never relinquished the mountain. He kept looking for a way. After a decade of dreaming, he found a solution: a man named Eric Meyer.

  An anesthesiologist from Colorado, Eric Meyer had lived in a decompression chamber for six weeks in the mid-1980s. Researchers for Operation Everest II, a study on oxygen deprivation, barraged him with fitness tests to analyze how hypoxia had withered his body. They drilled cores out of his legs to determine how his muscles atrophied under high-altitude conditions. They forced tubes up his arteries to examine how his heart deteriorated. In exchange, Eric earned $4,000. He spent it on a climbing trip.

  The ultra runner and triathlete tested his limits, cultivating his mind and body in tandem. He practiced yoga every morning for an hour, studied martial arts in Asia, and stocked his Sub-Zero refrigerator with green smoothies made of puréed algae, broccoli juice, and barley grass. These efforts cast an enchantment over his appearance. His skin was so smooth it seemed varnished. His hair was so radiant it practically glowed in the dark. He had virtually no body fat. Graceful and relaxed, he spoke with the mellow authority of a meditation guru.

  In 2004, recovering from a divorce, Eric spotted Chhiring when climbing Everest. While everyone else at Advanced Base Camp seemed wasted, Chhiring bristled with energy. The Sherpa had arms thicker than most climbers’ thighs. He pitched tents and set ropes faster than anyone. His five-foot-nine frame supported outrageous, unbelievable loads. “I’d never seen anyone so strong,” Eric recalled. “I had to get to know him. We started talking, and we bonded instantly. I knew I’d made a friend for life.”

  Chhiring told Eric about his dream of climbing K2, his daughters, his village, and his mother dying in childbirth; Eric told Chhiring about his volunteer work to improve health care and reduce infant mortality in the developing world. Chhiring and Eric shared meals of rice and dal. They swapped stories and traded tips on climbing technique. They meditated. “He didn’t treat me like a sherpa,” Chhiring said. “To Eric, I was an equal. We became brothers.” After climbing to the top of Everest, Eric asked Chhiring to visit him in Colorado.

  In the summer of 2007, Chhiring and Dawa arrived in Steamboat Springs, a ski town known for its powder. In Steamboat, delis name their sandwiches after explorers, and toddlers learn to slalom almost as soon as they can walk. Chhiring fit right in. He and Eric pedaled up mountain trails and scaled crags. They carbo-loaded on noodles Dawa cooked in Eric’s kitchen and ran marathons. Chhiring learned to drive a pickup along the back roads and laid cement foundations to stay in shape. “He never seemed to get tired of carrying bags of concrete,” observed Eric’s friend Dana Tredway. It was the perfect vacation until K2 got in the way.

  Eric told Chhiring he planned to quit his job, secure a permit from Pakistan, and climb the Savage Mountain. Maybe Chhiring could join him—not as a support climber but as a full-fledged team member? Five friends were already planning to join up: three Americans, a Swede, and an Australian. Sponsors such as Warid Telecom would defray the cost, so Chhiring would only ne
ed to cover $3,000. As a team member rather than staff, Chhiring wouldn’t have to babysit anyone. He could focus on reaching the summit. The team would follow the Abruzzi Spur, K2’s southeast flank, the sanest way up. They wouldn’t dope on bottled oxygen. Chhiring would join the ranks of the most elite climbers.

  Chhiring didn’t need convincing. Dawa did. “And I didn’t want to step in the middle of it,” Eric recalled. “There are plenty of reasons not to climb K2. I couldn’t promise her he’d come back.”

  Dawa couldn’t speak English as well as her husband, and she was oblivious to the plans that he and Eric were hatching. Chhiring tried to ease her into them before the end of summer. During the final week of their vacation, he sat her down on Eric’s couch, slid a disk into the DVD player, and punched some buttons on the remote. A six-inch gorilla in a red Hawaiian shirt appeared on the flat screen. The puppet assumed a Kermit-the-Frog twang: “I’m Murph. I may not look like much, but I get around.”

  Murph Goes to K2, a hokey documentary for children, explained to Dawa how a puppet safely ascended the world’s deadliest peak. When the screen went black, Dawa turned to her husband in disbelief. Now she understood what Eric and Chhiring had been talking about in English. Did Chhiring actually think he was going to climb K2 like a stupid puppet?

  She wanted to leave Eric’s home and walk the three miles to the airport. Instead, Dawa forced a smile and sat quietly for two hours as her husband and Eric joked in a language she couldn’t understand.

  When Chhiring and Dawa returned to their A-frame guesthouse for the night, Chhiring acted as though everything had gone well. He took off his shoes, sat cross-legged on the floor, and began the evening prayer. Facing the Rockies, he gripped his mala rosary and repeated a mantra: Om mani padme um. The rite, which Chhiring performed twice a day, is meant to invoke compassion. Dawa usually joined him in prayer, but she’d been compassionate enough that evening. Now it was her turn to talk. “You offend the gods,” she said.

  Chhiring kept repeating the mantra.

  “Did you hear me, Chhiring? Climbing K2 is a sin.”

  Chhiring recited Om mani padme um for ten more minutes. Once he stopped, he got up and slinked into the bedroom, avoiding eye contact with Dawa.

  Dawa watched him leave and took a moment to collect herself. She wouldn’t call him a bad father, a bad husband, a bad brother, a bad son. Chhiring was none of those things, but she would tell him what he was. Dawa opened the bedroom door. “You’re an addict,” she said.

  Chhiring, sprawled on the mattress, turned his head to the wall.

  Later that night, Dawa lay beside him and waited for sleep to come. An hour passed. She listened to her husband’s breathing. She knew he was still awake, so she decided to speak her mind. “If you go to that mountain,” Dawa told him, “I will leave.”

  She’d never said that to him before, and even this was a bluff. A woman with two young children seldom divorces her husband in Nepal. Social mores are against it. So is the legal system. “But what else could I do?” Dawa recalled. “I could beg, I could cry, I could tell him why he shouldn’t go, but he’s a man. And in Nepal, men decide everything.”

  Dawa cried anyway. After a moment, Chhiring told her what she wanted to hear. Nobody should climb K2. Not a Buddhist. Not a parent. Not when it costs as much as a house. Chhiring couldn’t justify gambling his life to stand on top of a mountain. K2 had worse odds of survival than Russian roulette. It didn’t make sense.

  But people don’t climb because it makes sense. You can come up with reasons—it gives direction to the lost, friends to the loner, honor to the reprobate, thrills to the bored—but, ultimately, the quest for a summit defies logic. So does passion. So does a trip to the moon. There are better things to do. Safer, cheaper, more practical. That’s not the point.

  The next morning, when Eric asked Chhiring whether he really wanted to climb K2, Chhiring didn’t look into his wife’s face. He didn’t pause. He didn’t explain himself or describe the sacrifices his family would have to make. He had known the answer for twenty years, and his response was immediate.

  Yes.

  3

  The Prince and the Porter

  Narayanhity Royal Palace, Kathmandu, Nepal

  Evening, June 1, 2001

  Two hours before he murdered them, Crown Prince Dipendra tried to get his family to relax. He started a billiards game, poured drinks, and joked about turning thirty. The Tarantino-style bloodbath that followed inflamed a civil war that displaced 150,000 Nepalis, including a potato farmer named Pasang Lama.

  Pasang’s trajectory toward K2 started around 8 p.m. on June 1, 2001, as two dozen members of Nepal’s royalty strolled into Kathmandu’s Narayanhity Palace, a bubblegum-pink sprawl guarded by soldiers, high gates, and mildew-streaked walls. Together, the family formed the last of the Shah dynasty, the absolute rulers of Nepal since 1768.

  The crown prince, a stocky playboy who went by the nickname Dippy, was a practiced host. Educated at Eton, a prestigious English boarding school, he held a black belt in karate and had enjoyed weaponry ever since he received his first pistol at the age of eight. Dippy was also in love with the wrong woman—or at least that’s what his family thought.

  She was on his mind that night. Watching the billiards game, he downed several shots of Famous Grouse whisky and smoked a joint laced with a black substance, probably opium. As the drug took effect, Dipendra swayed, unable to hold himself upright. He stammered and banged into furniture. Four relatives dragged him to his bedroom.

  Sobbing, the prince called his girlfriend, Devyani Rana, who was of lower social standing. Dippy had been ordered to break up with her. He’d have to marry a woman his mother would select or be stripped of royal status. The prince’s words to Devyani were slurred. He hung up, dialed, and hung up again.

  Devyani Rana called back, reaching his aides, and warned them that Dipendra might injure himself. The aides rushed to the bedroom and found the prince on the floor, squirming and tearing at his clothes. They propped him up and helped him to the bathroom, where he vomited. They splashed cold water on his face and got him into bed.

  Alone, the prince called his girlfriend again. He told Devyani he loved her and would try to sleep. Instead, he donned combat boots, black leather gloves, and a camouflage jacket and vest. Then he assembled his weapons: a 9 mm Glock pistol; a modified 9 mm MP-5K submachine gun; a Colt M16 assault rifle, with light and scope attached; and an SPAS 12-gauge pump-action shotgun. Carrying at least two of these guns, he stumbled toward the billiards room.

  Almost the entire royal family was crowded inside. Among them was King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah, a soft-spoken grandfather with wide amber spectacles. By Hindu tradition, King Birendra was considered a demigod, an incarnation of Vishnu. He stood near the east end of the billiards table, sipping cognac and discussing the risks of high cholesterol.

  When his son entered the room in combat fatigues, gripping a shotgun and a submachine gun, King Birendra didn’t seem alarmed. The king, perhaps thinking Dipendra had come to show weapons from the royal arsenal, stepped forward. “Isn’t the Crown Prince a bit old to be dressing like this?” remarked an aunt.

  Then, as the guests watched, the prince pulled the trigger. Two bullets from the submachine gun tore into his father’s side. King Birendra crumpled to the ground, blood soaking his dress shirt. “What have you done?” were his last words, according to official reports.

  With a gun in each hand, Dipendra couldn’t control the recoil. Bullets sprayed into the ceiling and the west wall. Two relatives lunged toward the king and tried to stanch the bleeding. His rounds spent, Dipendra threw down the machine gun and darted out of the room. “There was some screaming initially, but after that everyone was just looking around,” recalled Dipendra’s brother-in-law, Gorakh Rana.

  Seconds later, Dipendra returned with the M16 in his right hand, the pistol in his left. He fired another shot at the king at point-blank range. Diprendra “really looked exactly like the
Terminator 2, expressionless but very concentrated,” recalled his aunt, Princess Ketaki Chester.

  His favorite uncle, Dhirendra, raised his hands, trying to soothe the homicidal prince. “That’s enough, Babu,” he said. Without answering, Dipendra fired a burst of bullets that tore through his uncle’s chest. He shot more rounds at the men applying pressure to the king’s wounds. The prince left the room once again, retreating onto the veranda.

  Then, as though he had forgotten something, Dipendra returned. Spraying bullets wildly, he kicked bodies to determine who was dead. Finally, the family panicked. Some shrieked and leaped behind a sofa. Others dashed down the hallway and into the botanical garden. Dipendra jogged out the door toward the royal apartments and dove up a stairway.

  His brother, Prince Nirajan, raced after him, trailed by their mother, Queen Aishwarya, and from the landing, Dipendra took aim. His brother dropped.

  The queen surrendered. “You’ve killed your father, you’ve killed your brother. Kill me too.”

  Dipendra shot her in the face. Aishwarya’s body slid down the stairs, coming to rest on the seventh step.

  The top royalty were now dead or dying, so the prince wandered through the gardens. It was a muggy night, thick with cicadas. Bats hung from the trees, and condensation dripped from the panes of the greenhouse. Quietly, Dipendra stumbled toward a bridge over the royal frog pond. He raised a gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. A single bullet tore through his head, just behind his left ear, and out the other side of his skull. He was found on the grass, near a statue of Buddha. In less than five minutes, Dipendra had shot himself and fourteen members of his family.