Directly above the Bottleneck was the serac—the blunt overhanging end of a hanging glacier—a shimmering, tottering wave frozen as it crashed over the mountainside, a suspended ice mountain six hundred feet tall, as high as a Manhattan apartment building and about half a mile long. It was smooth in places but large parts of it were pitted with cracks and crevasses.
This was the way to the summit, and for the whole of the Bottleneck and most of the Traverse, the mountaineers had to climb beneath the serac. There were other ways to the summit of K2—via the north side from China, for example, or on a legendary, nearly impossible route on the south face called the Magic Line—but the path up the Bottleneck and beneath the serac was the most established route, the easiest, and possibly the safest, as long as the serac remained stable.
The glacier moved forward slowly year by year. When it reached a critical point, parts of the ice face collapsed, hurling chunks down the Bottleneck. No climber liked to imagine what would happen if they got in the way. In past decades, there had been many reports of icefalls from the glacier, but in recent years the Great Serac on K2 had been quiet.
The strengthening daylight revealed the changing shapes and textures of the glacier, transforming its colors from gray to blue to white as the cold shadows receded. It revealed to Meyer and Strang the serac’s true nature, something the earlier climbers would have missed because they had entered the Bottleneck in darkness. It looked to Meyer like giant ice cubes stacked on top of each other, and the ice had pronounced fissures running down it.
“Man, that’s broken up!” Meyer said in awe.
They had studied photographs in Base Camp taken a month earlier, which had shown cracking, but this was far worse.
As the outline of the mountain emerged from the dawn, Meyer could also make out clearly for the first time the snaking line of climbers up ahead. He had expected to find an orderly procession of bodies moving up the gully and already crossing the Traverse. Instead he was met with a sight that stopped him short: an ugly traffic jam of people still in the lower sections of the Bottleneck.
Only one climber seemed to have made good progress. He was sitting near the top of the Bottleneck in a red jacket, waiting for the muddle to resolve itself below.
What had caused the delay? As Meyer and Strang approached, there were distant calls from above for more rope.
“The rope is finished!”
Eventually it became clear: The advanced group had not yet managed to fix rope to the top of the gully, and the climbers following behind had already caught up to them.
During the previous two weeks, the expeditions had convened cooperation meetings down in the tents at Base Camp. They had made an agreement detailing the sequence of who would climb when. The crack lead group of about half a dozen of the best Sherpas, HAPs, and climbers from each team would fix ropes up through the Bottleneck and the rest of the expeditions would follow rapidly through the gully without delay. The arrangement was meant to avoid overcrowding in the Bottleneck. They knew it was critical to get out from under the serac as fast as possible.
Well, thought Meyer, so much for that.
Everyone seemed to be staring at one another and wondering what to do next. After a few minutes some of the climbers at the bottom began bending to cut the ropes and pass them higher. Soon the wait was over and the line was edging on up again, though still slowly.
Until that moment, Meyer had not appreciated the sheer number of people trying to climb the mountain: one of the highest concentrations of climbers to attempt a summit of K2 together on a single day. A few were already turning back, because they were feeling cold or sick or today was not to be their lucky day. Probably about twenty-seven or so were still heading for the summit. It looked like being another busy day, like the ones in the 2004 or 2007 seasons when dozens reached the top. Meyer imagined the conditions up there. Everyone getting in the way. Koreans, Dutch, French, Serbs, and a string of other nationalities. Few speaking the same language. And they were probably so intent on avoiding one another that they were not focusing on how late it was nor were they looking up at the glacier to study it properly. Damn. They were not seeing how dangerous it looked.
Meyer watched the line of climbers struggling higher and had an uneasy feeling in his stomach. Beside him Strang said it out loud.
“Shit, it’s late.”
They took off their backpacks and sat in the snow, staring up at the serac and, below it, the Bottleneck.
“There’s no way around that crowd,” said Meyer. “We’re going to get stuck behind them.”
They made a calculation. At the expeditions’ current speeds, they would reach the summit in the afternoon, perhaps early evening. Sunset. The climbers would be coming back down through the Bottleneck in the dark.
As far as Meyer was concerned, that multiplied the risk a thousand-fold. It was already the most dangerous climb in the world. Descending in darkness through the Bottleneck was a no-no. He knew that everyone up there had a deadline for reaching the summit no later than three or four o’clock in the afternoon. What were they thinking?
He felt his courage drain away.
Yet turning back was hard, so bitter after the weeks of toil on the mountain. Like everyone else, he had invested thousands of dollars and nearly a year of his life preparing to come to Pakistan.
He might be able to return to Camp Four and try again the following day. But in reality, climbing up to these altitudes sucked so much out of a person, exposed a body to such pain, that they would have to descend to lower camps to recover before trying again. But the climbing season was ending. They had already pushed back this summit attempt because of bad weather. There was no time left. It was probably going to be the only shot Meyer had. If they failed today, they would have to wait another year. And who knew if he could ever return?
Together, he and Strang went through all the scenarios. They had made it to the Shoulder of K2. Were they throwing away a lifetime’s chance to climb the mountain of their dreams?
Strang unpacked his camera and started to film the serac and the climbers beneath it. Meyer took some snapshots. The climbers in the Bottleneck were still barely moving.
They remembered the rain that had fallen in their first week in Base Camp, an odd event for K2 in June. Then there had been the weeks of winds and the overcast sky and snow piling up. And today the sun had risen into a clear blue heaven. It would be baking hot up there soon. If the serac was going to crack, it was because gravity was pulling it lower. The ice was also susceptible to the differences between the heat of day and the cold of night, which could cause the ice to expand and then contract, making an avalanche more likely. They didn’t trust the serac.
They packed up and slogged one and a half hours back down through the snows of the Shoulder to their tent at Camp Four. It was around 10 a.m. The day was perfect. Around them, hundreds of mountains stretched away in all directions, white and shining in the sun.
The camp was still and quiet. It perched on a flat part of the Shoulder and, relatively speaking, there was enough room for all the tents here, more than in some of the lower camps, where space was rationed and tents hung on ledges or were reinforced against the winds by ropes and poles.
They had expected to find a dozen or so climbers milling around the colored domes of nylon tents, taking in the rays, sharpening crampons, waiting around. Down at Base Camp, some mountaineers had said they thought the good weather was going to hold and so they had planned to climb up to Camp Four a day later than everyone else to avoid the main crowd and try for the summit on August 2. The second Korean team would be coming up soon, along with two Australians: one of Meyer’s colleagues, and another from the Dutch expedition who had been left out of the first summit ascent by his expedition’s leader.
But the other climbers were either inside their tents or still grappling with the slopes up from Camp Three. Meyer and Strang saw only one other person, an Italian. He had turned back earlier because of altitude sickness. Now
he stuck his head out of his tent, next to theirs. His climbing jacket was plastered with “Fila” and other sponsors’ logos. He waved and then closed his tent.
Meyer could not help but peer back at the Bottleneck over his shoulder. Nearly a mile away, the climbers were distant dots, filing upward. They were higher on the gully now, about two-thirds of the way up. They were still crowded together dangerously. From this distance, they seemed to be not moving at all. Surely they would turn around soon. Did they have a death wish?
The two men ducked inside their tent. It was only four feet high, with no room to stand. They peeled off their down suits, the linings damp from sweat. They took out the radio, as big as a large cup of coffee, and crashed on top of the two sleeping bags that were spread parallel on the floor. They gulped at a bottle of melted water. It was hot in the tent. They didn’t feel like talking much. Soon they would have to start thinking about descending. It would take them a full day to get down.
About twenty minutes later, they were resting when they heard a faint cry outside. It came from far away. Strang thought he heard it again.
They went out of the tent to check the mountain but nothing had changed from when they had last looked. The line of climbers was still stuck in the Bottleneck. The radio was quiet.
Then the Italian stumbled over. His name was Roberto Manni.
“I see!” he said, pointing at the mountain, his face red. “I see!”
Half a mile away, at the base of the Bottleneck, about six hundred feet below the main chain of climbers, a body was tumbling down the ice. A climber had fallen.
The small black figure slowed down and came to a stop just beneath some rocks.
Meyer and Strang ran a few yards and stared up intently at the Bottleneck.
The figure lay with its head pointing down the slope.
Immediately, excited chatter started up on the radio.
“Very bad fall!” Meyer heard someone say. “He is alive. He is still moving. It is one of the Serbs.”
Part I
SUMMIT
Friday, August 1
“I wish everyone could contemplate this ocean of mountains and glaciers. The night will be long but beautiful.”
—Hugues d’Aubarède, K2, July 31, 2008
“K2 is not to be climbed.”
—Filippo de Filippi, from the authorized account of the Italian 1909 expedition
CHAPTER ONE
Walk east along dusty tracks from the village of Askole and within three days you will glimpse in the distance a wonder of the world, the rock-strewn Baltoro glacier and a giant’s parade of ocher and black granite mountains, topped with snow and wreathed in clouds.
Eric Meyer and the other teams traveled this route in 2008, entering the inner Karakoram, the heart of the tallest mountain range in the world. The Karakoram range is part of the western Himalayas and forms a watershed between the Indian subcontinent and the deserts of Central Asia. Here, four peaks higher than 26,000 feet stand within fifteen miles of one another. Walk deeper into this dominion of ice and moraine and finally, after another three days, above all these lofty giants suddenly appears K2, the second-tallest mountain in the world.
K2’s naming has become legend. In September 1856, a British surveyor of the Great Trigonometric Survey of India, Lieutenant Thomas G. Montgomerie, laden with theodolite, heliotrope, and plane table, climbed to a peak in Kashmir, his job to fix the imperial border of the Raj.
One hundred and forty miles to the north he glimpsed two formidable mountains, which he sketched in his notebook in ink, above his own wavy, proud signature. He named them K1 and K2. Montgomerie’s “K” was for Karakoram. (He would log K1 through K32, and recorded K2’s height at 28,278 feet, only about 30 feet off.) K1 was later discovered to bear a local name and became fixed on the maps as Masherbrum. But K2 didn’t and so Montgomerie’s name stuck.
Five years after Montgomerie’s visit, another tough, steely British empire builder, Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen, came closer to K2, becoming the first European to ascend the Baltoro glacier. In recognition of his feat, in 1888 a motion was proposed about K2 at the Royal Geographical Society in London that “in future it should be known as Peak Godwin-Austen.” The motion was rejected but the name persisted, even into the middle decades of the twentieth century on some maps and in newspaper accounts. It carried colonial overtones, however, and in the end, “K2” won out, although Godwin-Austen’s name still marks the glacier at the foot of the mountain.
After the imperial surveyors, Western explorers and travelers soon followed, encroaching ever deeper into this wondrous realm in hobnailed boots, tweed suits, and skirts. Two prominent visitors—an American couple, William Hunter Workman and his wife, the New England heiress and suffragette Fanny Bullock Workman—were making a bicycle tour of India in 1898 when they decided to visit the Himalayas. Years later, they explored the Siachen glacier to the southeast of K2, and they made first ascents of several Karakoram summits. The couple was notorious. William was a retired surgeon who believed no one could survive a night above 22,000 feet, and Fanny had an irritating habit of carving her initials and date of passage on mountain walls, as well as clearing foot traffic with whip and revolver.
In 1902, a six-man expedition made up of Swiss, Austrians, and Britons made the first serious summit attempt on K2. Among them was the English climber and occultist Aleister Crowley, who a few years later would assume the name “666,” and whose wild-haired antics earned him the title “Wickedest Man in the World” in the British press and a place years after his death on the cover of the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Following a nine-week trek, undertaken while carrying three tons of luggage, including volumes of Crowley’s library, the expedition made as many as five attempts at the summit. Crowley preferred a route up the southeast spur of the mountain but the other climbers argued for a switch to the northeast ridge. They reached about 21,000 feet on K2’s side. But the effort broke down when, among other things, one of the Austrians collapsed with pulmonary edema—an acute mountain sickness involving a buildup of fluid in the lungs. A disappointed and semidelirious Crowley, suffering himself from malarial fevers and chills, threatened one of his colleagues with a revolver and was disarmed by a knee to the stomach. The expedition made its retreat in disarray, although they had climbed higher on K2 than anyone before.
The mountain cast a wide spell. In 1909, seven years after Crowley’s attempt, it was the turn of Prince Luigi Amedeo of Savoy-Aosta, Duke of the Abruzzi. A son of the king of Spain, and grandson of a king of Italy, Amedeo was a mountain climbing fanatic who a decade earlier had carried ten bedsteads up onto Alaska’s Malaspina glacier. (He also hailed from the part of Italy that two decades later would be made famous by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms.) When the duke visited the American Alpine Club at the Astor Hotel in New York, the ballroom was decorated in his honor: “great blocks of ice fashioned like mountains, with men roped climbing their steeps,” according to a report in the New York Times. He chose K2 because it was relatively unmapped, but he had another objective. He wanted to set the world altitude record, which at the time was held by two Norwegians.
Surrounding his trip in great secrecy, he traveled incognito to London for supplies. Presumably the secrecy was due to the fact that he didn’t want anyone to reach K2 first. But he may also, according to some history books, have been fleeing a very public (in the American press) romantic entanglement with Katherine Elkins, the rich, auburn-haired, horse-riding daughter of a United States senator from West Virginia, Stephen B. Elkins. The duke had likely met the Elkinses in Rome, where they traveled in the summer to buy antiques, but the romance was opposed by both families.
The duke set sail from Marseille on the P&O steamer Oceana with six and a half tons of luggage, bound for Bombay and thence to K2, for the glory of Italy and the House of Savoy. He was accompanied by a fifty-year-old mountain photographer, Vittorio Sella, whose glass plates and emulsions w
ould yield some of the most beautiful pictures ever taken of K2.
The duke’s ten-man team passed through Srinagar, where he was seen off by the local British governor with a royal escort of brightly decorated shikaras, or riverboats, each rowed by fifteen oarsmen. He traveled in luxury: The expedition’s four-layered sleeping bags consisted of one layer of camel hair, one of eiderdown, one of sheepskin, and an outer layer of waterproof canvas. He first caught sight of the mountain from Concordia, a junction of two sweeping glaciers a few miles away at the center of an amphitheater of peaks. The duke’s awe shines through his description. It was, he declared, l’indiscusso sovrano della regione: “the indisputable sovereign of the region, gigantic and solitary, hidden from human sight by innumerable ranges, jealously defended by a vast throng of varied peaks, protected from invasion by miles and miles of glacier.”
Supplied from Urdukas, a camp several miles away down the Baltoro glacier, with a stream of fresh eggs, meat, water, fuel, mail, and newspapers, the duke and his entourage ascended partway up the southeast ridge, a rock rib rising directly above what would be named the Godwin-Austen glacier. The route he followed would become the main path for future ascents of the mountain and would forever bear the duke’s name, the Abruzzi Spur. In his wake as he passed, he named other K2 landmarks in his expedition’s honor, like a modern Adam discovering a new world: the Negrotto Pass, after the duke’s aide-de-camp; the Sella Pass; and the Savoia Glacier.
The duke eventually set the world altitude record by climbing partway up another, nearby peak, Chogolisa. But he was frustrated by K2’s seemingly insuperable steepness, and turned back at 20,000 feet, declaring that K2 had defeated him and it would remain forever unconquerable.
“After weeks of examination, after hours of contemplation and search for the secret of the mountain, the Duke was finally obliged to yield to the conviction that K2 is not to be climbed,” wrote Filippo de Filippi, a biologist and doctor who accompanied the duke and authored the expedition book.
No Way Down Page 2