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

by Zuckerman, Peter

  Early the next morning, doctors at a nearby military hospital declared nine of Nepal’s top royalty dead. Prince Dipendra, in a coma, lived on. As funerals were arranged, an official spokesman released a statement that the “accidental firing of an automatic weapon” was responsible for killing several family members. Dipendra wasn’t named as a suspect.

  It was a clumsy cover-up. Nepalis didn’t know exactly what had happened, but they had conspiracy theories. Some believed that Indian spies had framed Dipendra and orchestrated the massacre in an effort to install a puppet regime.

  Others had supernatural explanations, stemming from a well-known prophecy. The legend held that the Shahs would soon fall because the dynasty’s first king, Prithvi Narayan, had angered the god Gorakhnath. About two centuries earlier, the king had offered an ascetic a bowl of rancid curd. The holy man swallowed it and vomited; then, unexpectedly, scooping up the mess, he ordered the king to eat the curd himself. Repulsed, Prithvi Narayan flung the vomit in the man’s face. It was the wrong move. Shielding himself with his hands, the ascetic revealed himself to be a god and cursed the Shahs. Their dynasty, he said, would be limited to ten generations, one for each of his sticky fingers. Ten generations later, “I had known something was coming,” said Dr. Raghunath Aryal, the royal astrologer. “But how do you tell your boss that his son is about to commit mass murder?”

  Sixteen hours after the massacre, an eleventh-generation member of the dynasty was crowned. The comatose Dipendra ruled for two days. When he was removed from life support, the monarchy was returned to the tenth generation as his uncle Gyanendra became king.

  Rioters stormed the streets because they considered Gyanendra a bad seed. Propaganda described how royal astrologers had examined Gyanendra at birth and declared him unfit to rule. The boy, nevertheless, had been king briefly, at age four, when his grandfather Tribhuvan was forced into exile, along with most of the family. When the Shahs returned, little Gyanendra lost his crown. The boy grew up with a scowl; in his second coronation portrait, he is scowling still. Even loyal subjects found him suspicious. Why had Gyanendra’s own children been spared? Had the massacre been a plot by Dipendra’s uncle?

  After investigators had released the crime scene, Gyanendra razed the billiards room, the site of the massacre. By the time the first comprehensive investigation reports were released that summer, the Shahs had lost their credibility, and Maoist rebels were capitalizing on their weakness.

  At the time of Gyanendra’s succession, the Shahs embodied all that had gone wrong with the Nepali feudal system. The dynasty during its 239-year rule had produced a series of temperamental royals. In the eighteenth century, for instance, Prithvi Narayan had sliced off the lips of his opponents; in the nineteenth, Surendra had dropped his subjects down wells; in the twenty-first, Paras allegedly had run over a musician with his Mitsubishi Pajero because the man wouldn’t play his request. Yet the Shahs remained constitutionally immune from prosecution, and the family enjoyed an extravagant and much-resented lifestyle.

  The Communists promised to empower the populace, redistribute land, grant women equal rights, and eliminate the caste system. A coalition of Communist parties nearly secured a plurality of seats in the 1991 parliamentary election, and, five years later, the Maoists declared “The People’s War” to extinguish the monarchy and bring about a secular republic. Over the next decade they accomplished little, but they had gained strength by recruiting troops, looting police stations for weapons, and hoarding homemade explosives. When the unpopular Gyanendra succeeded the beloved King Birendra, the Maoists knew it was time to strike.

  The Maoists invaded remote villages unprotected by the royal army. They burst into classrooms, shot teachers, and abducted the pupils, forcing them to join their ranks as child soldiers. The troops tortured their opponents and displayed their mutilated bodies. They blockaded Kathmandu and gained control of the provinces.

  In response, Parliament passed the Terrorist and Destructive Activities Act, allowing ninety-day detentions and aggressive interrogation of Maoists. King Gyanendra suspended the elected government and instituted martial law, assuming command over the military and the press. He censored criticism of his government, imprisoned journalists, and executed suspected terrorists. “Nepal has been experiencing a grave human rights crisis,” declared a report from the United Nations General Assembly. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch condemned the abuse, recording gruesome cases of electrocution, beating, assassination, kidnapping, public execution, and sexual humiliation. Until 2006, civil war raged. The government controlled Kathmandu, but Maoists penetrated nearly every village. More than 12,800 people were killed, and about 150,000 were forced to flee their homes. Unemployment soared to around 50 percent.

  The Maoists finally got their way, in part. In July 2008, the monarchy was abolished and Nepal was declared a federal republic. Elections placed the Communists in power periodically, but protests and violence continued.

  During the height of the civil war, Pasang Lama was living in Kathmandu in a one-room flat with seven others. His village in eastern Nepal was a war zone: The king’s army, trying to root out Maoists, was arresting and shooting young men his age. Pasang couldn’t go back home, and his family of refugees needed money.

  Despite the violence, die-hard mountaineers kept climbing in Nepal, paying porters about $3 a day to carry loads to Himalayan base camps. The job required little skill beyond brute strength, making it one of the few options for men like Pasang. Cornered by war in a riot-torn city, living under curfew and fear of bombs, the seventeen-year-old potato farmer became a porter.

  Pasang Lama used a mnemonic to teach English speakers how to pronounce his name. “It’s Pah-SONG,” he would say, “because I’m always singing.” While trekking, Pasang skipped down dirt trails, clapping rocks together and crooning a Nepali tune resembling “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” His high notes even made the dzos stop chewing the cud and pay attention.

  A sticker on his helmet labeled him “The Joker,” and Pasang lived up to it. He smuggled rocks into friends’ sleeping bags, pillows, and packs. He wrapped pebbles in Tootsie Roll wrappers and handed them to children begging for candy. At night, he festooned tents with branch-and-trash towers. When the tents’ occupants crawled out in the morning and the scaffolds crashed down, Pasang threw back his head, cackling, and galloped off in search of the next victim.

  When he wasn’t trekking or climbing, Pasang turned into someone else. In Kathmandu, he seldom sang or joked, cloaking his happy-go-lucky personality in an armor of shyness and caution. Men like Chhiring bounded up to newcomers with the enthusiasm of a Labrador, no matter the setting. In Kathmandu, Pasang couldn’t do that. He hung back, keeping a safe distance. When acquaintances opened their arms for a hug, they received a handshake. While eating dinner with a group of new clients in Kathmandu, Pasang’s body was at the table but his eyes were patrolling the room, ready to alert him of danger. It often took him several hours to crack a smile for a stranger, but when he allowed one, his grin was sincere.

  Compact, stretching just shy of five-foot-two, Pasang had hands as rough as a cat’s tongue. When he was twenty-four years old, he looked fifteen and accepted his nickname: “Little Pasang.” Clients occasionally doubted that he was an adult and asked for “another sherpa with more experience than this baby.” To age himself, Pasang rarely shaved, but it made no difference. His chin refused to grow a beard.

  Pasang’s village, Hungung, lies on the Tibetan border in the Upper Arun Valley along the watershed of 27,765-foot Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest peak. For decades, Nepal’s government has restricted anthropologists, journalists, and some relief organizations from entering this sensitive border area. But it’s easy enough to sneak in. To get to Hungung from the nearest airstrip in the village at Tumlingtar, visitors have to ride for a day in a jeep and then undertake a ten-day trek.

  The trails leading into the village fork around rod-shaped mounds of limestone. By custo
m, all travelers must pass by the mounds on their left; even Hungung’s Tibetan mastiffs follow this rule. The residents live in rock-and-mud homes that roost among terraced hillsides, and black pigs dominate the pens. A stream trickles through the center of the village, providing running water of sorts, and rooftop solar panels, installed by a long-forgotten NGO, generate electricity. A health post is stocked with antibiotics, but no doctors.

  About 250 people live in the region. It was once the hub of a medicinal plant trade; now a general store deals in flashlights, lollipops, Neosporin, and Communist manifestos that, curiously, are available only in French. The residents speak Ajak Bhote, an endangered language derived from Tibetan, and believe they descend from the Ajak, an ancient priestly class once charged with protecting Tibetan royalty. Most villagers are Buddhists who work as farmers, herders, or blacksmiths.

  Growing up in Hungung, the oldest of four children, Pasang was reared without a father. Phurbu Ridar Bhote, a mountaineer, moved to Kathmandu to find work when his son was six. Phurbu visited his family every two or three years. Sometimes Pasang dreamed that an avalanche had buried Phurbu, but Hungung’s lama reassured the boy. Using clairvoyance, the lama updated Pasang on his father’s whereabouts—whether Phurbu was bound for Everest or K2 that year—and delivered messages Phurbu sent in prayer. The lama told Pasang that his father wanted him to apply himself and study mathematics. Pasang read whatever books he could find and attended school as often as he could, but living was usually hand to mouth. He sowed the millet and barley fields and dug potato tubers. He gathered firewood and swept the homes of wealthier villagers in exchange for rice or a few coins.

  When Pasang was fifteen, he received word from his father to join him in Kathmandu. After a decade of saving and a stint on K2, Phurbu had amassed the equivalent of $1,000, plenty to send his son to prep school and university. “I wanted him to stay as far away from mountains as possible,” Phurbu said. “Who would climb if he had a choice? It’s only a matter of time before you’re killed. I didn’t want my first-born son to die before I did. He needed to get an education. I climbed mountains so he wouldn’t have to.”

  Before leaving for Kathmandu, Pasang changed his surname from Bhote to Lama because he didn’t want his heritage to hold him back. Pasang is Bhote, a Tibetan ethnicity culturally distinct from Sherpa. Although the two groups have related beliefs and share many rituals, Bhotes frequently face discrimination. Like an immigrant taking the surname Rockefeller, Pasang chose Lama, the highest Sherpa caste, so no one in the city would look down on him.

  With a new name and a new life ahead of him, Pasang Lama left for Kathmandu. During the ten-day trek to the nearest road, he planned his future. First he’d earn a degree that would lead to a safe and respectable job. Next he’d get so rich he would send his siblings to prep school in the city. Then he’d buy solar panels for his mother. Maybe he’d build her a new house. By the time Pasang reached the highway and saw a metal creature rumbling toward him, he had convinced himself that anything was possible. The teenager had never seen a bus before, but he confidently climbed inside and left his old life behind.

  For several days, as the wheeled machine bounced down the road, Pasang watched a ghastly world appear. Kathmandu’s pollution and bustle rattled him. How could a million people cram into such an intolerably tight space? As the bus kept plowing through traffic, he missed Hungung’s expansive skies. Finally the vehicle delivered him to Balaju, a densely populated area northwest of the city center. Pasang joined his father and six other relatives in a one-room rental. At night, they all piled onto the same mattress. During the day, they tipped it upward to allow living space. The toilet was a hole dug in the courtyard.

  Soon after arriving, Pasang started eleventh grade at British Gurkha Academy, studying commerce. His classmates taunted him. “They pointed at me and shouted, ‘Bhote, Bhote, Bhote!’ ” Pasang recalled. “They were calling me a stupid villager.” The teenager struggled to keep pace, unaccustomed to schoolwork in Nepali, a foreign language to him. He flunked the first year, costing his family precious tuition money. Demoralized, Pasang went back to Hungung for a season to harvest the potato crop. He then returned to Kathmandu in September 2000 to give school another shot. This time he was on track to finish, but in June the royal massacre disrupted exams. Kathmandu went into lockdown.

  Hungung was worse. The Royal Nepalese Army invaded during a festival, publicly killing three suspected terrorists who were about Pasang’s age. Fighting flared. Pasang’s mother, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, and nieces fled.

  “It wasn’t safe to stay, especially as a woman alone with children,” said Pasang’s mother, Phurbu Chejik Bhoteni. Bus tickets were too expensive. Carrying two toddlers and whatever else she could strap on her back, Phurbu walked the entire way to Kathmandu on a fractured leg. The journey took more than a month. Exhausted and hungry, she and the children arrived in the spring of 2002 at Pasang’s one-room flat.

  They couldn’t all fit inside, so Pasang, his mother, his father, his two younger sisters, his younger brother, and a fluctuating number of desperate relatives moved into a separate room that cost more than they could afford. Food and rent became higher priorities than education. Pasang had to find a job.

  Competition was cutthroat. Refugees were flooding the job market. Destitute, they accepted any employment they could get. Wages fell; unemployment rose. After three months, Pasang found work, but it was humble. He received an offer to earn $3 a day carrying pots and pans to Gosaikunda, a holy lake north of the city.

  Grateful for this first portering job, Pasang shouldered loads over the undulating terrain between Kathmandu and the lake. Afterward, with one trip on his résumé, it was easier to find the next job, and the next. An American trekker befriended him and offered to pay his tuition, so Pasang attended classes during the slow season between expeditions, but he no longer considered himself a commerce student. School could not support his family; portering could.

  Still, he disliked it. Pasang didn’t speak the same language as many of the other porters, and he hadn’t learned their protocol. One misunderstanding nearly cost him his job. In 2004, Pasang carried a pack stuffed with tinned fruit, Clif bars, freeze-dried soup, and kerosene to the Base Camp of Annapurna, a mountain whose name means “full of food.” Pasang had brought nothing of his own to eat, expecting his employers to feed him. They didn’t. Pasang scrounged for handouts from kitchen hands, gathered scraps from his clients’ plates before washing them, and bartered clothing for rations. When the clients extended the trip, supplies dwindled further. Pasang’s peers had no more food to share. Feeling sorry for him, the cook brewed him stew from roots found around camp and offered him three days’ worth of lemon-lime Tang. When the Tang ran out, Pasang reeled from hunger.

  As he lugged his eighty-pound load, all he could think of was food, food, food. His muscles jittered. His feet kept missing the places he intended to step. “I was going to pass out unless I found something to eat,” Pasang recalled. He didn’t consider asking the Western climbers for help. “You just don’t do that,” he said. “Porters aren’t hired to beg for things or complain.” If he had, other staff would have alerted the expedition outfitter, who’d blacklist him.

  Stealing seemed safer. After four days without food, Pasang staggered off the path and hid behind a boulder. Setting down his load, he rummaged through it and pulled out a tin of mandarin oranges and hammered it against a rock. The metal burst and the edge sliced deep into his middle and index fingers. Blood smeared over the can, but Pasang was smiling. He jimmied back the lid, slurped the sweet syrup, and dropped the delicate wedges into his mouth. Sugar coursed through his body. Revitalized, Pasang shouldered his load and tied a rag around his bleeding right hand.

  On the trail that day, Pasang had visions of mandarin oranges—luscious wedges, dripping in syrup, melting in his mouth. He craved other tins inside the pack but resisted the urge until that evening, when he stole a can of tuna. If the othe
r porters suspected, they stayed quiet. The thefts continued until his job finished three days later. “Annapurna was the first and last time I was a thief,” he said.

  After Annapurna, jobs poured in. Clients called him a porter, but Pasang—who eventually was setting ropes, pitching tents, and hauling gear up rock and ice—saw himself as something better. By the time he reached the summit of Everest in the spring of 2006, he was unquestionably a mountaineer. The civil war and its bombing and maiming had slowed that year, and the Maoists called a truce in November, but Pasang’s mother doubted the fighting would stop. Refusing to return to Hungung, Phurbu Chejik said she’d seen enough violence. She and the children would stay in Kathmandu. Pasang continued to support them with the wages of what he considered to be a temporary career.

  A proposal in May 2008 raised the stakes. Pasang was ushering a South Korean woman named Go Mi-sun up Lhotse, the world’s fourth-highest peak. On their return from the summit, “Ms. Go” told Pasang about her ambitions. There are fourteen mountains taller than 8,000 meters, she explained. She intended to be the first woman to climb them all—and to do it faster than anyone else had. With five down and nine to go, K2 was next. Would Pasang help?

  He was more than a little infatuated with Ms. Go, who laughed with him, joined him for meals in the kitchen tent, shared her energy bars, and asked whether he had a girlfriend. When her climbing partner, “Mr. Kim”—Kim Jae-soo—lost his cool, Ms. Go smoothed things over. To Pasang, she was angelic, and she had his trust.

  Once in Kathmandu, Pasang had only had a few days to decide whether he’d join her. He scoured the Internet to learn more about Ms. Go. She was Asia’s sweetheart. After a 200-foot fall shattered her backbone, she’d made a comeback as a star of the Asian X-Games. Go was backed by Kolon Sport, the Nike of Korea, and adored by her fan club.