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

by Zuckerman, Peter

  Chhiring knew they shouldn’t all be weighing on the same anchor. One falling block could bowl everyone over. He stepped to the side, twisted in an ice screw, and clipped himself onto it, hanging to the right of the oncoming train. Others saw Chhiring’s logic. Pasang, Wilco, and three others followed, unclipping from the main line and free-climbing toward a rock ramp.

  The climbers waited, hanging in place. More rope was needed, but nobody seemed to know who might pass it forward, and the lead climbers couldn’t navigate the gridlock below. As the sun beat down, the men peeled their jackets to their waists. They praised the weather gods for bringing such a glorious day and whined about the holdup. The men sucked in the moistureless air and changed their oxygen cylinders. Those climbing without oxygen tried to ignore the drumming inside their skulls. Every once in a while, an ice chunk fell from the seracs and bounced down the slope.

  Eric had turned around hours earlier, giving up on the mountain and his dream of reaching the summit. Without his friend, Chhiring became restless. “Instead of sweating, I started to shiver,” he recalled. It felt as though the goddess were breathing down his neck. He had to get moving, but where? About to free-climb, he noticed that Wilco was already giving it a try.

  The Dutchman soon slipped, and he whisked toward Chhiring. “I didn’t have time to blink,” Chhiring recalled. His left hand shot out to grab Wilco’s harness. His right hand seized the collar of Wilco’s downsuit. Then, out of hands, Chhiring body-slammed him, pressing Wilco into the ice.

  Wilco slid only six feet. His right crampon nicked Chhiring’s side. The left ripped into Iso Planic, a Serb below them, and released a flurry of feathers from Iso’s down jacket.

  Swiveling, Wilco heaved his axe into the ice. The pick sank in and held. Wilco clenched the axe and leaned hard, pulling himself to a stop. Winded, the men could only nod. The slide had been harmless.

  The next one wouldn’t be. Below them, the newlyweds, Cecilie and Rolf, were maneuvering around the clog of climbers, carrying about 50 yards of rope harvested from the lower slopes. Cecilie, pushing herself up the Bottleneck, passed Chhiring, Wilco, and Iso to her right. Continuing, she reached Dren Mandic, who unclipped. “He was being a gentleman,” said Hoselito, Dren’s friend, who thought he’d unclipped to let Cecilie pass. If so, it was a fatal courtesy.

  Cecilie asked Dren to stow the loose rope in the top of her pack. She ducked down and around; he pivoted up and over. This choreography jerked the fixed line, according to Chhiring and Muhammad Hussein, who were a few yards away. The rope slapped into Dren, pushing him off-balance. He lost his footing, then his grip. Both he and Cecilie plunged.

  Cecilie shrieked. Her jumar caught, and she fell only a few feet. Dren, with no rope to stop him, tried to bear-hug her. Unable to hold onto her, he dropped, feet first on his stomach, his face raking the Bottleneck. Frantic, he flailed at the snow with his arms, trying to self-arrest.

  For two stories, Dren slid. Then his crampons snagged a rock and spun him around like the second hand of a clock. When he had turned a full 180 degrees on his stomach, his leg released and he took a nosedive down the Bottleneck. His helmeted head crunched into a rock ramp, launching him into the air. Somersaulting, he plunged another 10 stories and smacked into a spongy mound of snow, off-route.

  Above him, the mountaineers froze. It happened so fast that some barely saw it. Stunned, Chhiring watched Dren’s legs squirm, sticking out of the snow.

  Chhiring had never seen anyone die on a mountain before. Dren had to live, Chhiring rationalized. A week earlier, he’d watched this man kneel on the moraine to admire tiny flowers sprouting from a clump of moss. The goddess would never exact revenge from a sentient being who appreciated even the smallest life, a man with Snoopy strapped to his pack.

  Chhiring radioed Eric in Camp 4, telling him an injured man needed a doctor. After the call, he shut his eyes and looked away from the mound where Dren lay. Chhiring visualized Dawa and his daughters and thought of Dren’s family somewhere, not yet knowing. It was past 11 a.m., and Chhiring knew he’d have to climb well past the planned turnaround time. Contemplating his options, he gazed at the seracs above, “softening like yak butter in the sun.”

  Acoustics distorted Cecilie’s scream into a maniacal wail that echoed off the Shoulder. The noise startled Fredrik in Camp 4. Clutching his thirteen-pound Sony video camera, the Swedish filmmaker opened his tent flap and peered through the zoom lens, using it as a telescope. Focusing on the Bottleneck, he could see the line of climbers proceeding, one by one, like an ant army. Fixing the coil of line that Cecilie had delivered, they were “continuing on as if nothing had happened,” he recalled. Fredrik scanned for something crumpled in the bright snow and shouted to Eric, who was on the radio with Chhiring.

  “I grabbed an oxygen set, water, and a survival bag,” along with the video camera to shoot footage, Fredrik recalled. Eric took a medical kit. Only midway up the slope did they confirm the fallen man’s identity over the radio. “Dren was my friend in Base Camp,” Fredrik recalled. “We were always laughing, cracking jokes.” Fredrik climbed faster, pulling ahead. “I wanted to see my friend alive.”

  After climbing for about ninety minutes, Fredrik saw two Serbs, Iso Planic and Pedja Zagorac, dragging a body in a red bivy sack. “You don’t want to know what his face looked like,” Fredrik recalled.

  Iso and Pedja explained what had happened. It had taken them fifteen minutes to climb down to Dren. By the time they’d reached him, he was no longer breathing. Iso had pumped Dren’s chest and forced air into his mouth, but CPR couldn’t revive him. Dren’s pulse was now long gone. The least they could do was take his body back to his mother in Serbia.

  Fredrik, pressing a finger to Dren’s carotid artery, confirmed that his friend was dead. “I was mad as hell. I was going to bring him back alive. I was committed to that. It was a perfect day, and I was staring up at that blue sky thinking this should not be happening on a day like this.”

  Iso and Pedja wrapped the Serbian flag, intended for the summit photo, around Dren’s battered head. “I was aware that it would be way better if someone cold-blooded took over the recovery,” Iso recalled. “We were in shock. Fredrik had experience in rescues. He was fresh and rested.” The Serbians wanted his help.

  Fredrik wavered. “I do not support the idea of trying to recover a body from the Death Zone,” he said. Transporting the dead puts the living at risk. Still, Dren deserved a dignified burial, and it was hard to say no to that. “I was asked to help to bring down my friend to Camp 4, and I agreed.”

  He stowed his camera in his pack, leaving the audio on, and bound Dren’s ankles. He coiled more line around Dren’s torso like a corset. From this makeshift harness, he tied two towlines, which radiated from Dren’s body in a V. Pulling these leashes, the men sledded Dren’s body along the ice toward the Shoulder.

  As they inched the bundle forward, they spotted Jehan Baig rappelling toward them. The Pakistani “seemed disoriented,” recalled Fredrik. He moved like a man in a squall, stumbling but somehow staying on his feet.

  Jehan shook his head when he caught up with the others and extended a hand, grabbing the towline. He joined Fredrik to pull the front line; Iso and Pedja pulled the back.

  Soon they reached an icy slope that might have been a blue-square ski run, except that it flattened before a sheer cliff. Fixed lines had been strung through this stretch in the early morning. Now, the ropes were gone, removed for use in the Bottleneck.

  Trying to lower Dren’s body and simultaneously keep it on the route, the men payed out rope a few feet at a time. The corpse had made it roughly halfway down the slope when several things happened at once.

  Jehan lost his footing and crashed into Fredrik’s right side, knocking him off-balance. Without saying anything, Jehan slid down the slope on his rear and hooked an arm around Dren’s body, holding fast.

  Meanwhile, Fredrik tipped forward, and his shin slapped into the rope as though it were a tripwire. He fl
ipped, face first. Fredrik righted himself and dug in his crampons to gain purchase on the ice. It worked—Fredrik didn’t slide—but the twist of his body wound the rope around his right calf, cinching it like a butcher’s wire.

  Fredrik clawed the slope. He couldn’t hold the position. The rope sawed into his leg as the combined weight of Dren and Jehan pulled down on him.

  “Release the rope!” Fredrik yelled.

  Jehan said nothing.

  “Release the rope!”

  Jehan kept silent.

  “We’re screaming at the Pakistani in three different languages—Swedish, English, Serbian—and I’m panicking,” recalled Fredrik. “If [Jehan] had let go, all he would have to do was use his ice axe to self-arrest, but he wouldn’t let go.”

  After roughly one minute, Jehan finally did as he was told. He released his grip around Dren’s body and started to slide, as still as a corpse.

  Limp and silent, Jehan gained speed until his crampons caught, and, in a sickening reprise of Dren’s choreography, he spun around headfirst. He began to slow down as the slope flattened, and it looked as though he might stop on his own before the edge.

  Eric and Muhammad Hussein, who had arrived to help, shouted at Jehan, ordering him to wake up and save himself. All he had to do was fan out his body. But still he crept forward. “Maybe it was a heart attack,” recalled Muhammad. “Jehan had placed himself in God’s hands.”

  The rink at the bottom was slick. Jehan had just enough momentum when he reached it to go sliding across the ice, barely moving forward. His head went over the ledge first. As his legs followed, he seemed to wake from his trance. He kicked and yelped, disappearing over the precipice.

  The men kept shouting after he was gone, and the screams captured on Fredrik’s tape suggest that they had trouble believing what had just happened. “What the hell is this?” Fredrik cried. “I came up here to help you guys.” Unable to see where Jehan had landed, they knew the drop was about 1,000 feet. Trying to recover one corpse had already produced a second. Stupefied, Iso and Pedja swaddled Dren in extra clothes. Fredrik pounded a stake into the slope and tied the towlines to it. Dren’s body was left to hang there until the mountain claimed it.

  Returning to the Shoulder in the direction of camp, the men broke down, sobbing in the snow. “The summit wasn’t worth it anymore,” Iso said. “Everything seemed so senseless.”

  At 2:21 p.m., the moon, cruising through space, barged between the earth and the sun. Its dusty body whittled daylight into a crescent. Jehan’s mother, Nazib, was in Shimshal. Around the time of her son’s death, a symbol of her faith was branded on the sun. The horizon glowed tangerine. Far to the north, a perfect corona gave the illusion of a hole in the sky.

  Above K2, the eclipse wasn’t total. A small slice of sun darkened for 121 minutes. Some mountaineers, still in the Bottleneck, wore yellow-tinted goggles and missed the change in light. “A solar eclipse is an omen,” said Chhiring, “but I didn’t see this one.” Most were unaware that K2 had claimed a second victim. They only knew that their pace was too slow. To reach the summit, they would need to descend in darkness. Nonetheless, the nineteen climbers in the Bottleneck continued upward.

  Each came up with tactical reasons for disregarding the 2 p.m. turnaround time. Marco, the Italian, mentally compiled a list of mountaineers who had gotten away with a late summit, including K2’s original Italian conquerors, Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli. He considered how his mentor, Agostino da Polenza, had survived an overnight bivouac in the Death Zone. Sure, some of these legendary mountaineers had lost digits, but all had survived, and Marco was convinced that he, too, could make it down in one piece.

  Wilco used applied physics to justify his decision. Descending at night, he concluded, would actually be safer—the sun wouldn’t be heating the seracs and causing them to calve. “It seemed almost illogical that ice chunks would cleave off [at night] when the temperature was decreasing.” He’d spent years preparing for K2, had done everything he could to reduce the risk, and wasn’t going to turn around just because the weak were holding him back. “I knew I’d regret it if I came home without a successful climb.”

  Chhiring felt comforted by the crowd. If scores of less able climbers were heading to the summit, why shouldn’t he? The weather was stable. The fixed lines would guide him down in the dark. “I’ll never get another shot at K2,” he told himself. But Dren’s death had persuaded him that the mountain goddess was no ally. He tried to ignore the queasiness that radiated down his throat and pooled in his stomach.

  Thinking about the goddess reminded him of the rice and barley in his pocket. Still suspended from an ice screw beside the Bottleneck, he removed the Ziploc bag and flung the contents into the air. They shimmered in space. Suddenly a gust of wind grabbed the grains and spat them back in his face. The offering had been rejected.

  It took until 2 p.m.—the planned turnaround time—for the members of the Flying Jump to break through the Bottleneck. “We were too slow,” Pasang recalled, “and we were burning through our oxygen too fast.” But he didn’t raise these concerns with his boss. Mr. Kim had already been clear enough: Pasang wasn’t hired to retreat; he was hired to lead. In this spirit, Pasang, now in front of the pack, blazed the trail above the Bottleneck. Seventeen people followed him.

  Trying to make up for lost time, Pasang pushed himself but struggled with the terrain. He was now on the Traverse, the steep, exposed ridge that cuts under the seracs, tracing the mountain’s southeast face. As he climbed, his crampons scraped and clicked against the granite. To maintain purchase, Pasang had to deliberate over each step. “I told myself concentrate, concentrate, concentrate. Only think about the next step.”

  About two hours later, he reached the Snow Dome, the lump of ice that bridges into snowfield below the summit. Pasang waded in and sank to his hips. Plowing forward, he checked his oxygen pressure gauge and turned the flow to low, below one liter a minute. He climbed faster, probing for weak snow bridges. It was 4 p.m.

  His legs pumped forward, making a deep furrow in the snow, but he wasn’t on solid ground. One of Pasang’s boots punched through the crust, the ice around the ankle broke away, and his leg dropped into a crevasse.

  His reactions were quick. As he sank, Pasang fanned out his elbows, spreading his weight. He dropped slowly, and by the time he stopped sinking, he’d been swallowed only to the waist. One boot dangled into space. Keeping his weight on his arms, Pasang wriggled left and right, flipped his knees to his chest, and belly-flopped over the lip of the crevasse. He clawed himself out and away.

  Once standing, he patted his body to see if he’d lost any gear. It was all there, but his thoughts were scattered. The dip into the crevasse had left him shaken. If the crust he’d stepped on had been any thinner, he’d have fallen inside a splinter of ice and shattered his limbs. Unable to clamber up or make himself heard, he might have waited in the stillness to die.

  Pasang wanted to ensure that this didn’t happen to anyone, so he pulled out a wand with a flag, marking the snow bridge he had broken. Before starting the climb again, he scanned his surroundings. Ahead of him, a solitary red suit was tromping down the mountain. Pasang recognized Alberto Zerain, the Basque climber on the lead team who had surged ahead of everyone at the Bottleneck. Alberto flashed a zinc-oxide–streaked grin, and Pasang recognized the look: summit glow. “I was thinking, ‘How is this possible?’ ” Pasang recalled. Alberto had soloed up the rest of K2, topping out at 3 p.m., hours ahead of everyone else. Now he was on his way down. “That guy made K2 look easy.”

  Alberto dug his heels into the slope, advancing on Pasang, but he was approaching a crevasse. “I tried to get his attention,” Pasang recalled. “I waved my hands and yelled, ‘Not this side! Crevasses! Not this side!’ ”

  Alberto waved back but also stepped forward. The buttress beneath the snow bridge gave under his weight, and he lurched in. Unfazed, he wriggled out like a worm, and, a moment later, was descending again,
digging his heels into the slope just as before.

  When the two men met, Pasang shook Alberto’s hand, congratulating him for a successful summit. Although there had been radio chatter, Pasang didn’t brief him about the deaths in the Bottleneck. It would have ruined the moment. “If I had witnessed those falls, I wouldn’t have cared about the mountain anymore,” Alberto later said. “I’d have lost the pleasure.” Both men were in a hurry, and they went in opposite directions.

  Pasang envied Alberto, who was heading down to hot soup and a sleeping bag. Pasang watched him weave through the pack of climbers. As Alberto passed, several Flying Jump members motioned to him as if asking directions on a motorway. They wanted to know how many more hours to the top. Alberto shrugged, barely slowing. “I wasn’t going to try to predict how long it would take them to reach the summit,” he recalled. Climbers move at different speeds. Alberto assessed their pace and wanted to suggest a U-turn, but he hesitated. Turning around was a personal decision, he decided, between a mountaineer and his maker.

  It was 4:45 p.m., and Pasang realized he was wasting time watching Alberto. Annoyed with himself, he turned away and resumed kicking steps. The summit reared ahead of him like a cobra’s hood. Sundown would bring a temperature plunge that wouldn’t stop until dawn. Pasang was late, at a time when every second counted. The slower he went, the deeper he would climb into the night.

  After so much fantasy and anticipation, the summit was unglamorous. When he summited at 5:30 p.m., Pasang stood atop the pinnacle of a 100-foot snow ramp, with a ditch to the west where exhausted climbers had defecated. That was it. Unlike the summit of Everest, no prayer flags lay in weathered clumps. The snow beneath his boots looked like any other snow. Nevertheless, Pasang recalled, “it was the most perfect place.”