Stepping to the highest point of the ridge, he slung off his pack, crowed and whooped. For an instant, exhaustion evaporated. The panorama dizzied him. The sun was slipping like a brass coin into a pocket behind K2, which cast a triangular shadow into the dark hills of Asia. A dusky band of purple swept around the horizon, and shadows snuffed out the lacy cornices of Chogolisa and Masherbrum. Down the Baltoro Glacier, the scree-paved glaciers at Concordia merged like a freeway interchange. At his back was China; to his face, Pakistan; and above, infinity. At 28,251 feet, Pasang was the highest human on earth.
He pulled a Sony camcorder from his pack and switched it on. He panned over the violet shoal of clouds and peaks and focused on the climbers marching up the summit ridge: his cousin Jumik; his boss, Mr. Kim; and the rest of the Flying Jump: Ms. Go, Park Kyeong-hyo, Hwang Dong-jin, and Kim Hyo-gyeong. Just ahead of the Flying Jump were two Norwegians, Lars Nessa and Cecilie, who had climbed the last stretch without her husband. In all, eighteen people topped out on August 1. As the sun set, the celebrations continued for as long as ninety minutes.
Wilco, the irritable Dutchman, replaced his pout with a beatific grin. He bear-hugged his teammate Ger, who howled: “We are on the summit of Kay-Toooo!”
Mr. Kim lit a cigarette, took a drag, and passed it to Jumik. Lars put on bunny ears and hopped. Karim prayed, taking in the divine sweep of earth and sky.
“I’ll never leave you again,” said Hugues, into a satellite phone. His girlfriend was listening. “I’m finished now. This time next year, our family will be at the beach!” He trained a camera on his teeth to satisfy the dentist in Lyon. Both Karim and Hugues were losing it. “They had used up their bottled oxygen and barely responded to our congratulations,” Wilco recalled.
Coughing and crying, the climbers yanked pageantry from their packs. Ger, the first Irishman to summit K2, dropped on one knee and hoisted Ireland’s tricolor flag in triumph. Chhiring, who summited at 6:37 p.m., unfurled his flag, kneeling with the double pennant before him like an apron.
Last on the summit, Marco waved a ski pole strung with the flags of Italy and Pakistan, plus two pennants representing his sponsors, the Métis temp agency and Credito Valtellinese bank. In the weak light, Marco removed the shell of his glove and punched twelve numerals into his sat-phone keypad. Battery life was short, so he kept it brief as he told his banker, Miro Fiordi, general director of Credito Valtellinese, the news. The bank’s sponsorship investment had paid off.
Like Marco, others felt similar obligations to sponsors who had subsidized their climb. Mr. Kim and Ms. Go modeled Kolon Sport, high fashion for 28,251 feet; Chhiring promoted ColdAvenger face masks; Wilco’s mango-colored downsuit displayed the triangular logo of Norit Group, a water filtration company that had provided a healthy six-figure contribution. Nearly every summit photo contained a logo or product placement. These mountaineers documented their triumph not only for posterity but also for publicity. The photos advertised their businesses, their skills, and their sponsors.
Fredrik, part of the team sponsored by ColdAvenger, had once estimated how much summits could be worth. On his website—under the heading “The Value to You!”—he explained to potential sponsors that a $120,000 investment could generate a $4.3 million public-relations value and brand recognition. “We can guarantee a PR ratio of 10 times the invested money,” he wrote, basing his estimate on the value of the resulting advertising. Corporate interests had been speculating on a K2 summit. On August 1, they hit pay dirt.
The high-altitude porters and the sherpas also cashed in when their clients topped out. For each mountaineer they ushered up, they earned a bonus of $1,000 or more. This money encouraged them to push clients who were unfit to continue. “When your family needs that money,” Pasang acknowledged, “sometimes you don’t insist a weak climber turn back.”
But summits also have a cost, and by 7:45 p.m. on August 1, the human price was becoming apparent. The Flying Jump started lurching down the mountain like lushes leaving a bar—reveling, swearing, and puking on their boots. The summit party was over. Now they needed to find the way home.
PART III
DESCENT
Summit to Camp 4: As the climbers descended in the gathering darkness, an avalanche severed the ropes through the Bottleneck. Some climbers tried to make it down without the fixed lines; others spent the night in the Death Zone.
10
Escape from the Summit
As Pasang left the summit, his head throbbed so relentlessly he could hear his pulse in his ears. Ahead of him, Mr. Kim squatted in the snow, waving his arms like a wizard casting spells. He had run out of oxygen.
Going off the bottle is harder than never having been on it at all. In the best case, you’re slammed by extreme exhaustion. The thin air can knock you out, just as it does to a fighter pilot with a failing oxygen mask. Cerebral or pulmonary edema can set in, filling the brain and lungs with fluid. In a worst case, the body revolts with acute vasospasm as arteries constrict, cutting blood supply to the organs. Within three minutes of acute vasospasm, cells wither in the heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, and brain. Within twenty minutes, the organs degrade to medical waste, and the climber does too.
Pasang could see headlamps fanning out below. Sucking a guilty breath from his regulator, he trudged forward and crouched beside Mr. Kim. Pasang’s boss was too tired to waste words. Kim tapped the side of his oxygen canister and pointed to the gauge, which registered empty. Pasang understood what was expected. He gestured for Mr. Kim to hold still. Kneeling down, he detached Kim’s empty cylinder and swapped it with his own.
His oxygen now gone, Pasang braced for the shock. It hit, but he remained functional, still able to climb and think. It may have helped that he was Bhote—a carrier of genotypic variants for NOS3, a gene that codes for an enzyme that helps modulate blood flow to the lungs—and was perhaps less susceptible to acute vasospasm. His clients, however, were at higher risk.
He and the rest of the Flying Jump had at least three hours to go before reaching the fixed lines on the Traverse, so Pasang decided to take a shortcut. He descended in a straight shot toward the Snow Dome, the massive lump that signaled the start of the Traverse and the fixed lines. The new route allowed the climbers to bypass the summit ridge, but the Snow Dome also had a sheer drop on one side. With no moonlight or stakes for direction, there was no discernible path. Climbers scattered in the darkness.
Pasang spotted a man veering left above the Snow Dome. It was Karim. He never turned around. Now heading away from the Traverse, he would end up on top of the seracs; instead of descending toward the Bottleneck, he’d climb high above it.
If the descent continued like this, Pasang knew delirium would pull his team apart. He herded the Flying Jump together and devised a plan to keep them from stumbling and falling. Pasang tied a Figure-8-on-a-bight, the first climbing knot he’d ever learned, and looped it over his axe. Plunging his axe into the snow, he handed the rest of the rope to Jumik, who uncoiled it while descending ahead of the group. When the line payed out, Jumik tied it to his axe, anchored in the snow. The rope, now strung between two axes, resembled a clothesline.
It led in the direction of the Traverse. The climbers gravitated toward this rope, clipping in and clutching on. Once they’d reached Jumik’s end of the clothesline, Pasang pulled out his axe, coiled the slack around his elbow, and raced ahead of the pack. Pasang and Jumik created and re-created this rope system about a dozen times, lower and lower toward the Snow Dome.
It served to guide the group, more or less. The rope caught the climbers when they slipped and kept them from making the disastrous left turn that had led Karim to the crown of the seracs. “It was saving lives,” said Chhiring, who used it. But the system was slow. After each step, men slumped over their ice axes or ski poles to rest and shivered for warmth. By sea-level standards, the night was frigid, about minus four degrees Fahrenheit; by K2 standards, it was moderate. On an ordinary evening, the jet stream would have tossed t
hem to China, but August 1 was relatively windless, so the cold merely seared exposed flesh.
As Pasang anchored the last stretch of rope, he thought about his axe. More climbers, all clearly in need, had attached their Figure 8s to the line dangling from it. Pasang couldn’t recover his axe without dismantling a rope system that was serving as a lifeline.
Shivering, he waited, punching his fists out for warmth. More figures materialized in the darkness and attached to the line. Occasionally one climber stalled, forcing those behind him to wait. Pasang’s headlamp dimmed, and he was no closer to getting his axe back. “I had to make the decision: Take the axe or leave it.” He radioed his boss for approval to ditch the axe and descend.
Mr. Kim agreed that the axe wasn’t crucial: With fixed lines through the diagonal ridge, the Traverse, and the Bottleneck, Pasang could manage without one. Pasang started down and soon overtook Jumik, leaving him behind with several clients. Descending without an axe would be tough, Pasang thought, but not deadly.
Rolf was shivering uncontrollably when his wife reached him, but he smiled when he saw her. Debilitated by altitude, he had waited 300 vertical feet below the summit as Cecilie reached the top at 5:45 p.m. Now, about an hour later, the newlyweds were reunited. Lars, the third member of the Norwegian team, videotaped their exchange, one of their last:
“Are you freezing?” Cecilie asked.
“Not especially,” her husband replied.
Lars had removed the bunny ears he’d worn on the summit. He zoomed in on Rolf’s face. “Long day?” he asked.
They’d been climbing for seventeen hours, but Rolf’s tone sounded as though he were denouncing a desk job: “More than average.” With shaking fingers, he manipulated a chalky tablet of Dexamethasone, trying to bring the steroid to his lips. He dropped it, and the tablet hit the ice. “Oh, hell,” he said, “it broke.”
The newlyweds were the first to start down after Alberto. Behind them, Hugues seemed to be applying risk assessment: Out of oxygen, in pursuit of thicker air, he was moving down rapidly. Next in line was Cas van de Gevel, of the Dutch team, who, climbing even faster, caught up with Hugues along the Traverse. “It never occurred to me to ask Hugues, ‘Where’s your porter? Where’s Karim?’ ” Cas recalled. “When you see two people climbing together, then one is descending alone. . . . I would have known to ask if we’d been at sea level.” But the problem eluded him in the rarefied air.
Hugues stepped aside. “You are quicker,” he said. “You go first.”
Cas nodded, slid around Hugues, and resumed his descent.
When Cas arrived at the mouth of the Bottleneck, he was 30 feet in front of the Frenchman. That’s when he heard a noise—a scratching, like a rat in a wall. Cas looked back. Hugues, who had probably snagged a crampon, shot toward him. “I couldn’t see his face at such high speed,” Cas recalled. He only recognized the yellow-orange blur of Hugues’s downsuit whizzing past within an arm’s length. The insurance salesman with dazzling teeth was gone.
Just as a sealed glass jar full of water shatters when left in a freezer, refreezing meltwater in the seracs’ fissures was expanding, wedging apart the glacier’s interior cracks. As the pressure built, the seracs let off slow, elastic, electrified zoings. A percussion of pops, snaps, creaks, and booms accompanied the breaking ice. These sounds—high and low, short and long, soft and loud—overlapped in rhythm.
Pasang’s cousin Jumik was tied to two exhausted clients, wading through snowdrifts. As he approached the Traverse, the seracs hulked above him. As the zoings amplified, Jumik would have moved as fast as possible, frantically dragging his clients along, urging them to rush. But the two Koreans with Jumik could barely walk. Speed wouldn’t have mattered much, anyway. To avoid the falling ice, the three men needed a miracle.
The mountain announced its intentions with a drum roll: Crrrrrk-crrrrk-crrrk-crrk-crk-ck. The men would have looked up as the seracs crumbled, dropping chunks large enough to transform the terrain. One of these chunks sped toward Jumik, gouging out fixed lines. The three men, still attached to these fixed lines, were yanked downward.
Jumik’s boot tore off. His gloves flew away. One Korean’s German Rollei camera split open and his skull crunched. Down jackets ripped open, snowing feathers. Jumik may have thought he was going to die and been surprised when he didn’t. One of the anchors above him held. The rope cinched tight. The three men jerked to a standstill, coming to rest on a precipitous snow slope.
Dangling from the line’s end, Jumik hung upside down, blood pooling in his lungs and head. The rope had wound around Jumik’s trunk, binding him, and he was too tangled to adjust his clothing or cover his bare hands. Squirming free would have been impossible, and he would have only been able to see the ice two inches in front of his face.
At 9 p.m., about 50 yards from the Bottleneck, Rolf was hit by a serac fall. As chunks of hard ice sailed over the Traverse, one came so fast he had no chance to shout. It must have hit him head-on, severing the rope and burying him under tons of ice.
Twenty yards behind him, the tremor knocked his wife flat. Cecilie slid several feet, but the fixed line caught her. As she scrambled to stand again, the batteries shot out of her headlamp. Cecilie clutched the rope with a gloved hand, felt the limp end, and realized it no longer linked her to her husband. She scanned the slope for the glow of his headlamp. It had disappeared.
Cecilie was stunned, too horrified to move. This was supposed to be her honeymoon. From behind, Lars touched her shoulder. Cecilie stayed frozen. Lars said something as he stepped around her, but Cecilie heard him as though she were underwater. Dazed, she watched him shuffle in front. Lars examined the cord cut by the ice fall, pulled a 50-meter coil of thin rope from his pack, and secured it to one of the surviving ice screws. Then he rappelled down until his headlamp dimmed to a pinpoint.
Cecilie remained fixed in place. Without Lars’s light, darkness enveloped her. The ice creaked and the breeze whistled. She wondered why she was there. “I hadn’t seriously prepared myself for coming home alone without Rolf,” she recalled. “It was not something I could have prepared for. It’s a pain you can’t simulate.” She couldn’t climb—she didn’t want to. The desolation was complete and unbearable.
Lars’s voice jolted her out of contemplation. “Come here!” his cheerful tenor exclaimed from below. Had he found Rolf? Cecilie knew that climbers had survived worse falls. Maybe her husband had landed relatively unharmed.
“Rolf?” she yelled. “Rolf!” Her hope revived, she rappelled down the Bottleneck, repeating her husband’s name and shouting at Lars to tell her more. When the rope ended, Cecilie focused on climbing so she could reach her husband sooner. Axe, front point, front point. Axe, front point, front point. Chuck, shink, shink. Chuck, shink, shink.
She couldn’t see her boots without the headlamp. Slipping once, she heaved her weight onto the axe and stopped herself. As she got closer to Lars, he shined his headlamp to guide her down. Finally, she could see Lars’s face. He looked crushed.
“Where’s Rolf?” she asked him, out of breath.
Lars wouldn’t lie to her now. “Rolf is gone.”
Despite the pain, Cecilie appreciated what her friend had done: “He had tricked me into descending.” Still, she held out hope that Lars was mistaken. Maybe Rolf was alive, somewhere below the Bottleneck. She kept calling for him and hoping, praying that he might be limping to camp on his own.
Shattered blocks of ice littered the mountain, and the trail made earlier that day had been obliterated, but she saw a red strobe blinking in Camp 4, far below. Lars took a compass bearing in case they lost the beacon, and he and Cecilie continued toward the Shoulder.
When Cecilie reached camp at 11 p.m., she went directly to her tent. Crawling inside, she hoped to see her husband. His sleeping bag was empty.
“It was quiet,” she later wrote. “No wind. Just stars and loneliness.”
Pasang Lama squinted into the darkness as three lights streaked down like sho
oting stars. What had happened to the headlamps behind him? They had turned a corner or dipped below a rise, he told himself. Pasang waited for the lights to reappear, but they didn’t. “I knew what it was, but I didn’t want to know,” Pasang recalled. Too tired for analysis, he suppressed the thought of an avalanche. He told himself he was losing his mind, and for a time he found that idea reassuring. Perhaps the streaks of lights were a hallucination of his oxygen-starved brain? Trying to ignore the loose ice, scuttling like insects, he waded blindly toward the Traverse.
Soon Pasang felt his boots breaking fresh powder. The terrain, once so familiar, now seemed alien. K2 was another mountain. The route to the Bottleneck had disappeared, along with every landmark. Cursing under his breath, he concluded that he’d missed a turn, just as Karim had, and strayed into China. Disoriented, Pasang backtracked, miserably plodding over the steps he’d just made. Pasang recognized nothing around him.
Finally, he squatted in exhaustion and studied his tracks. The ruts were too deep, the steps too varied, to have been trod by his boots alone; obviously others had climbed along the same route. Pasang decided he had been following the path to the Traverse all along. This meant that fixed lines were nearby. He patted the slope above the track, dug around, and felt something snaking through the ice: ropes, dusted in snow. He excavated them and attached his Figure 8, sliding along a diagonal ridge leading into the Traverse.
As the slope steepened, Pasang rappelled down and across slick ice. Then, unexpectedly, the rope frayed and stopped short.
This seemed inconceivable. The fixed line shouldn’t end here. Pasang stared at the tattered end. Confounded, he dropped the rope and glanced around for another section. To his right, he spotted a slender line dangling from an ice screw. The original fixed lines had run horizontally; this one dropped vertically. Pasang didn’t know where this strange rope led or how it had gotten here, but he loved the sight of it. Relieved, he threaded his Figure 8 through and rappelled down another 50 yards into the mouth of the Bottleneck.
Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day Page 16