Ger, meanwhile, approached Jumik and raised his head to help him breathe. Then he tried to rotate the hanging man above him. “They were like puppets on a string,” Marco recalled. One would straighten and another would bend back. To help get the man upright, Marco wedged a ski pole under his armpit.
Sometime after 9:58 a.m., Ger turned and, without a word, climbed up the slope. Marco shouted after him, using his messianic nickname: “ ‘Jesus,’ I cried. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ No answer. He didn’t even turn around. . . . Nothing. He continued toward the top of the serac.”
Marco continued with the rescue effort. He hammered his axe into the snow and attached the fixed line, creating a backup anchor so the chain of climbers wouldn’t slide. He spent more time trying to free them—maybe an hour, but the passage of time was hard to calculate—and eventually he could do no more. He left. With only a ski pole for balance, he climbed along the Traverse and descended into the Bottleneck without an axe. “I clawed down by my fingernails,” he recalled.
By the time he made it through the Bottleneck, Marco could barely walk. After that, he crawled, “moving with his hands and legs like a horse,” recalled Tsering Bhote, who encountered Marco below the Bottleneck. “He had his buttocks up in the air. Sometimes, he slipped and crawled with the help of his hands.”
Tsering and Big Pasang offered Marco oxygen. Gesturing, Marco indicated that he would never touch the stuff. Before he continued down, the Italian took a chocolate bar from his jacket and handed it to Big Pasang. “It was nice of him, but weird,” Tsering recalled.
As Marco crawled toward the Shoulder, his mind, like his body, began to fail. The Death Zone does that to everyone. Scientists suspect it’s the lower pressure that makes blood vessels leak, causing the brain to swell. Brain cells receive less oxygen and short-circuit. Neurons misfire. Climbers see and hear things. Marco heard an avalanche roar. A man wearing yellow La Sportiva boots surfed past him. Before he lost consciousness, Marco saw the man’s blue eye pop from its socket. It rolled into his palm like a gumball, and Marco was certain it belonged to Ger.
Ger kept his eyes and his wits. At Camp 4, two digital cameras were zoomed in on the upper slopes. Although observers couldn’t see his rescue effort by naked eye, their memory cards capture some of what happened.
Evidence suggests that Jumik was freed. A photo taken at 9:58 a.m. shows a figure in a lime downsuit—Marco—and another in a red downsuit—Ger—working on the ropes binding Jumik. Another photo taken later shows the ropes, but Jumik is gone. Two eyewitnesses, Tsering and Big Pasang, spotted him near the Bottleneck around 3 p.m., and a photo from 3:10 p.m. shows Jumik, dead, below the Bottleneck.
Jumik couldn’t have slid out of the rope tangle and down to the location where his body was found; he would have had to traverse 300 yards to get even near that trajectory. And Jumik was too entangled to have rescued himself. Clearly, Ger, the only able-bodied person in the vicinity after Marco left, helped him. Here’s how it could have been done.
Sometime after about 9:58 a.m., Ger lumbered up the 50-degree slope, leaving Marco and the three tangled men below. Ger probably couldn’t hear Marco shouting at him. Snow muffles sound; down hoods block it. Ger, according to Marco, continued up without turning around, climbing in the direction of the anchor point of the fixed line.
The upward slog would have been long, perhaps a hundred yards, and, given Ger’s condition, might have taken him an hour. At least one ice screw had been gouged out by the falling serac, and Ger went up high enough to disappear from Marco’s view. Trudging up the mountain, Ger would have paused to pressure-breathe, resting every few steps.
Many rescue techniques require a climber to reach the anchor point of the rope, and Ger had practiced rescues of this kind in the mountains of Alaska. Once at the anchor point, he would have studied the ice screw to assess how well it was holding. Depending on what he saw, he might have jammed it deeper into the ice, the goal being to establish a stable rope system that releases tension on the main line.
Unlike rescues dramatized by Hollywood, actual mountain rescues are slow-paced, technical affairs that prioritize risk management over speed. They commonly involve tying a complex series of knots. Ger’s hands would have been clumsy from the cold as he tied and retied knots he knew by rote.
Matt Szundy, founder of the Ascending Path guide service in Alaska, taught and tested Ger on rescue techniques. He speculated that Ger “rigged a secondary anchor near the first, using an ice screw in his pack.” Then, using a Prusik hitch and a Munter hitch, Ger would have created a series of pulleylike knots and loops that, thanks to friction and leverage, provided some slack and a strong backup anchor so that when he freed the tangled men, their bodies wouldn’t go sledding down the mountain.
After creating the rope system, Ger descended toward the men. Now that he had enough slack to work with, he would have begun untying the climbers and equipping the people he freed. Jumik was missing a boot. Ger might have yanked a boot off another man and given it to him. Photos suggest Jumik was eventually worked free and able to stand.
Ger could do nothing for the man at the top of the tangle. He couldn’t be revived, according to Marco and Wilco, the last living witnesses to see him. A grainy photo taken at 7:16 p.m. shows his body splayed in the same orientation as it appears in the morning photos.
But Ger may have rescued the man in the middle of the knot. The evidence is inconclusive. In the three grainy photographs of the rescue site—taken at 8:06 a.m., 9:58 a.m., and 7:16 p.m.—the man’s position appears unchanged. But two eyewitnesses believe they saw him that afternoon with Jumik and Ger on the Traverse. Perhaps the shape in some of the photos is something other than a body, such as a pile of discarded rope.
Although the Korean was injured and weak, it is possible that he revived enough to climb. Mountaineers have gone from comatose to ambulatory under similar circumstances, as Texas mountaineer Beck Weathers did in 1996. Beck was in the upper reaches of Everest when a blizzard engulfed him in 80-mile-an-hour winds. His friends had left him in a hypothermic coma, assuming he would never wake. But, sometime the next morning, Beck opened his eyes, struggled to his feet, and began climbing toward camp. “I am neither churchly nor a particularly spiritual person,” he later wrote, “but I can tell you that some force within me rejected death at the last moment and then guided me, blind and stumbling—quite literally a dead man walking.” The Korean was injured and Jumik’s foot was severely frostbitten, frozen to the ankle, but the two men may have felt the same way that Weathers had as they climbed up to the Traverse with Ger.
Somewhere along the way, a fourth man joined them, according to Big Pasang’s radio calls. Who was he? It’s hard to rule out a third Korean who hadn’t been seen since the night before, but it is also possible the man was Pakistani high-altitude porter Karim Meherban. Photos suggest that Karim, after spending the night alone in the cold, slid down the crown of the serac, self-arrested, and managed to retrace his steps to the junction at the Snow Dome. There he could have met Jumik, Ger, and the Korean climber before they reached the Bottleneck.
Whoever they were—Jumik and Ger were among them, but it’s impossible to identify the others with any certainty—four men were hobbling along the Traverse, driven by a force that rejects death.
After accepting Marco’s chocolate bar, the Bhote cousins resumed climbing toward the Bottleneck in search of survivors. By 3 p.m., Big Pasang had pulled ahead of Tsering by 900 feet. He looked up ahead and jubilantly reported on the radio what he saw: “Jumik is alive,” he exclaimed, “and behind him are three men in red downsuits.” He couldn’t tell who they were.
Stowing the radio, Big Pasang may have waved and shouted at the men coming toward him and must have been overcome with relief. As Big Pasang approached the climbers, he may have heard a crack as an ice block fell. It bludgeoned one man—probably Ger, based on Big Pasang’s description on the radio—and knocked him off the Traverse. “One man in a red suit with blac
k patches was hit by falling ice,” Big Pasang shouted over the radio to Pemba Gyalje and Tsering. “Now there are only three men descending.”
Big Pasang probably tried to pick up the pace, eager to lead the three survivors out of the fall zone. Jumik was in front, so Big Pasang would have reached him first. Maybe the cousins embraced. Perhaps Big Pasang offered him some of the contents of his pack: water, bottled oxygen, and juice. He definitely attached Jumik to a rope.
As the two other climbers in red suits approached him, Big Pasang might have yelled up, reassuring them. All his effort was in vain. A thunderous boom ricocheted off the mountain.
Contrary to legend, you can’t start an avalanche by yelling or yodeling, but almost anything that deforms the snow can set one off: falling rocks, melting ice, rain, hail, an earthquake, a footstep. In nine out of ten cases, victims trigger the avalanche that kills them.
Avalanches can take various forms—ice, loose powder, heavy wet snow, rock and glacial flows—but the terrain the climbers traversed on the morning of August 2 was ripe for a dry-slab avalanche. Climbers on the mountain reported that each time they stepped on the snow, they heard a distinctive creak, and cracks shot across the snow’s surface. They were climbing down a slope of about 40 degrees, an angle well within the 25- to 45-degree range that’s common with dry slabs. Snow had been piling up for weeks, and the temperature had spiked over the previous few days, helping loosen layers of snow.
Skilled climbers will notice these danger signs, but predicting avalanches is imprecise even with the most sophisticated equipment. The chances of a flow depend on the snow’s stickiness, the size and density of the ice crystals, how well those crystals are bonded, the steepness of the slope, the shape of the terrain, the temperature, the humidity, the location and force of the trigger. In broad terms, a slab avalanche occurs when a top layer of snow slips over a lower layer. Anything that makes the space between the two layers more slick (such as watery or ball-bearing ice crystals), or anything that adds pressure on the top layer (such as more snow) increases the likelihood of an avalanche.
Many people imagine an avalanche as being a lot of loose snow and ice tumbling down the mountain like a bunch of BBs rolling down a slide. When an avalanche starts, it’s more like a plate sliding off a table. At first, a slab of snow breaks free from the mountain and moves down the slope. As it picks up speed, the slab shatters, breaking into increasingly smaller pieces that eventually become so tiny they flow like water. The material at the bottom of an avalanche is as fine as powdered sugar. Most avalanches flow at around 70 miles per hour; the big ones can reach 200 miles per hour and flow on for miles, washing up and down hills and valleys and striking with enough power to take out trees, houses, and entire towns.
The last, deadly avalanche of the day began all at once, with an enormous, thundering crack. Karim would have known what the sound meant. The men had about a second and a half to get off the snow slab. That wasn’t enough time.
A moment after the crack, the slab slid out from under them. Within a second, the snow would have been moving at about 10 miles per hour, breaking into giant pieces. Two seconds later, the avalanche would have been sliding between 10 and 30 miles per hour, with chunks further fragmenting. Faster-moving snow at the surface of an avalanche carries more force than the slower-moving snow below it, causing a tumbling motion. For the next five seconds, the slide accelerated, the snow churning like the surf after a wave breaks. At this point, the men would no longer have known which way was up. When this happens in water, surfers sometimes call the condition “being washing-machined.”
The snow, mixing with air, packed into the climbers’ lungs and plugged their mouths, ears, and noses. Their goggles, hats, and mittens were ripped off. Big Pasang and Jumik were short-roped together. They spooled and threaded around each other, becoming tangled ever more tightly. This apparently broke their necks. Around 3 p.m., Pemba saw Big Pasang and Jumik tumble past him. They were dead at 3:10 p.m. when he photographed their bodies, tightly wound together in ropes. The snow around them was streaked with blood and tissue.
The flow would have reached its maximum speed, somewhere between 40 and 80 miles per hour, after roughly eight seconds. And then it would have begun to slow. Once it did, it probably took less than a few seconds to stop. The other two climbers were never found, suggesting that the avalanche sucked them down and buried them. The snow probably would have cushioned them so that they remained conscious.
A trained climber would have tried to clear a space around his face, creating an air pocket before the slide halted completely. Then he’d have flailed out his arms and legs so his body would be easier to find.
Once the flow stopped, the snow would have compacted so tightly around him that he couldn’t move even his fingers. Spitting to see which direction was up wouldn’t have helped. The snow feels like concrete, too hard to dig without a shovel. In that situation, all a climber can do is wait, hope, and cough out the snow in the lungs, trying to relax and consume less oxygen.
More than enough air can diffuse through densely packed snow to keep a human alive, but warm breath causes the snow around the face to melt. Inevitably, that melting snow refreezes. This forms a capsule of ice around the climber’s head, preventing fresh air from cycling through. As a result, he is forced to inhale and exhale the same air, with increasingly lower concentrations of oxygen. The climber, buried alive, slowly asphyxiates.
During asphyxiation, the heart initially beats faster. Breathing speeds up. People revived from this state commonly recall seeing a ray or tunnel of light. Many consider it a religious experience. Scientists have an explanation as well, but it hasn’t been tested in a laboratory: Oxygen deprivation causes peripheral vision to decline, narrowing the field of view and giving the illusion of an ever-contracting tunnel of light. Survivors have described it as heavenly.
After about four minutes of asphyxiation, the brain goes into a manic version of REM sleep. Some researchers believe that this brain-wave pattern delays damage to neurons. Victims revived from these moments often remember seeing their entire lives flash before their eyes. They report feeling relaxed, falling into a Zen-like trance that has been known to turn atheists into believers.
After that, the heart, starved of oxygen, slows; the pulse drops to roughly thirty beats a minute. Then the heart beats erratically and soon stops completely, quivering in place, jellylike. Breathing slows, then ceases. The body cools. Electrical activity in the brain diminishes and the central nervous system gradually shuts down.
If the climbers buried by the avalanche didn’t form an air pocket in front of their mouths, they died within thirty-five minutes. With an air pocket, death could have taken about ninety-five minutes. If their bodies cooled quickly, they might have survived for hours in a state of suspension between life and death; hearts stopped, brains partially on, they could be summoned back. Doctors at a state-of-the-art hospital might have been able to revive them.
But the men buried by the avalanche on August 2 were never found. Their bodies stayed interred, cooling beneath the snow.
When Tsering Bhote, climbing 900 feet below Big Pasang, saw the avalanche sliding toward him, he darted to the nearest rock, wrapped his arms around it, closed his eyes, ducked his head, and prayed. The snow hit the rock and parted, roaring past him on both sides, shooting over him. The noise resembled a jet engine at takeoff. Grains of ice sprayed him, blasting him with powder. He screamed but couldn’t hear his own voice. Snow particles gusted into his mouth and nose.
As the roar continued downslope, gradually subsiding, Tsering opened his eyes and wiped them with his glove. All he saw was snow emulsified in air. Again he yelled, but the whiteness swallowed the sound, creating a hollow silence. He sucked in to breathe and felt the suspended ice crystals cake his throat. He coughed and snorted, panting. Still hugging the rock, he braced for more.
The powder around him drifted down and the sun tunneled through the dense white. As his ears stopped ringing
, Tsering shook his head to dislodge the ice coating his hair. He relaxed his grip on the boulder and looked around, seeing only raked snow, bleak and featureless. Far below, a field of debris fanned into an embankment. Tsering recognized the contours of a mass grave. He hunted for a red splotch, something to signify a downsuit. He saw only chunks of ice and snow, no hint of where the men were buried. He yelled out for the other climbers, calling Jumik and Big Pasang by name, but “the goddess had hidden them well.” So he moved downward, mindlessly placing one boot in front of the other, not caring what came next. He barely noticed Pasang Lama climbing toward him. When the two men met, Pasang was breathless. He explained that he and Pemba had ascended from Camp 4 as swiftly as they could to help the survivors. “What survivors?” Tsering replied. Unwilling to describe what he’d seen, Tsering turned away and traversed the slope to a rock outcropping and slumped down, shaking.
Pasang followed, crouched next to him, and held out a water bottle. Tsering refused the liquid and stared into the reef of clouds, contemplating the sky above and the sky below. “I didn’t think I would lose my family,” he said. “Somewhere in my heart I felt I would meet them below.”
14
The Fearless Five
Soon after giving the Bhote cousins chocolate, Marco collapsed. Exhaustion had beaten him, and now, splayed out below the Bottleneck, he rested his head in the snow. An avalanche could have barreled down the slope at any moment and swallowed him alive, but he slept on, wavering in and out of consciousness.
Around 3 p.m., a hiss jolted him awake. Something dark glommed onto his nose and mouth like a slug. He knew instinctively to yank it off. Coughing, he tossed and turned his head and tore at the slug’s rubbery hide. Unable to pull it from his face, he pried his fingers beneath its lip. The thing came loose, finally, releasing the suction around his cheeks, but then an oblong shape—a wrist—pressed it back into place. Marco tried slapping and pinching, but now the thing wouldn’t budge. The hiss amplified to a wheeze, and dry air blew into Marco’s throat and down his windpipe, inflating his lungs.
Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day Page 19