The Koreans took photographs of themselves with their sponsor flags. They called their sponsor, Kolon Sport, in Korea and a press release was sent out to announce that Flying Jump had successfully made it to the top. They were going to wait for the slower climbers in their team, who were still coming up the summit snowfield; Skog said good-bye. The heat of the day was ending and the air was cooling. She wanted to get down to her husband.
On the way up the long snowfield from the Traverse, Wilco van Rooijen hadn’t been sure he was going to make it. He was not using supplementary oxygen like the Koreans or Norwegians, so it was hard going at twenty-eight thousand feet. He felt emptied. Everything he had was gone.
All he could do was focus on the tracks in the deep snow in front of him and on going forward. Somewhere nearby he heard the high-pitched voice of the Sherpa from the American expedition, Chhiring Dorje, shouting out that they should hurry. Unless they wanted to be buried in a sea of snow.
“There is avalanches here sometimes,” Dorje shouted.
Van Rooijen tried to speed up but it was hard. The route seemed to take them up one hill of deep snow after another. It wound to the left up a steep ridge. Almost there, he thought.
He leaned forward to see if any of the specks up ahead had reached the summit yet. The top, still hours away, was rounded against the deep blue sky.
After the ridge, he arrived at a steep climb, so steep he could no longer see the top of the mountain. As he got closer, he heard a voice encouraging him from somewhere out of his range of vision. He recognized it: Cecilie Skog. “Keep going.”
His Dutch team members were spread out up the slope. He summoned what strength he had and followed behind them, taking ten steps, then resting, leaning on the shaft of his ice axe or on his knee in the snow, then starting again. Finally he dropped to his hands and knees and crawled.
And then at last he came over the top onto the summit and he staggered to his feet.
It was wonderful. Gazing around him, he could hardly believe it. Years of frustration had come to an end. Seven-thirty p.m. After seventeen hours of climbing.
“K2!”
Letting go of his backpack, he raised his arms in victory. Then he started to cry.
The whole Dutch team was standing in front of him. They rushed together in a group hug, dancing, a jumble of snowsuits and ski poles, framed by the white churned-up ridge of the summit and the blue dome of the sky. Van Rooijen, Van de Gevel, Gerard McDonnell, Pemba Gyalje.
It was late, but the joy of reaching the summit was on everyone’s face. They had joined an elite club, the nearly three hundred mountaineers in the world who had now scaled K2. He and Van de Gevel were only the third and fourth Dutchmen to reach the top. Gerard McDonnell was the first Irishman. Pemba Gyalje and Chhiring Dorje were among the first Sherpas to have done it without the help of extra oxygen.
Cas van de Gevel spoke on the radio to Base Camp to let the rest of the team know the good news. They heard whoops and handclapping.
On the way up, Van Rooijen had kept his satellite phone switched off in the folds of his jacket to keep it warm and to preserve its charge. He knelt down now and took it out, and he called Maarten van Eck at the Dutch team’s home base in Utrecht.
“Maarten, we are standing on Kaay Tooo!” he shouted. The news would be immediately relayed to the world via the Dutch team’s website.
Van de Gevel filmed his friend and they panned the scenery with their HD camera. Talking to Base Camp, they learned that Dren Mandic had died. It was sad but they didn’t let his death dull the mood for long. They couldn’t get over how beautiful it was up on the summit.
Gerard McDonnell was especially fired up. He had removed his helmet and was also crying. The air was colder now but he took off his big climbing gloves and pulled an Irish flag from the pocket of his coat. He arched his back and unfurled the flag with two hands above his head.
He tried to call his family in Kilcornan but for some reason the satellite phone wouldn’t work and he couldn’t get through. But he spoke to his girlfriend, Annie, in Alaska. They talked just for a few moments. “I’m feeling great,” he said. He was elated.
While McDonnell was celebrating, Van de Gevel strode across to congratulate Hugues d’Aubarède. “Very good that you did this at your age!” the Dutchman said to d’Aubarède. Despite running out of oxygen, the Frenchman had made it to the top and was taking photographs of the spectacular scenery.
He looked tired but he was happy.
“Yes, but I was using oxygen,” said d’Aubarède. “So not so good as you, Cas.”
After talking to Van de Gevel, d’Aubarède walked across the little ridge to greet Pemba Gyalje from the Dutch team. The two men had met at Base Camp when Gyalje helped him arrange some prayer flags around his tent. They had talked about Buddhism, and the political situations in Nepal and Tibet.
The Sherpa was well-traveled and knew the world; he had spent time in France, the Netherlands, Britain.
Before they had set off from Base Camp for the main summit ascent, Gyalje had warned d’Aubarède to take four oxygen bottles with him. But d’Aubarède had insisted two would be enough. The Sherpa didn’t say anything now about the oxygen though he could see that d’Aubarède’s tanks were empty.
Instead, the Frenchman handed the Sherpa his video camera. “Will you take a picture of me talking to my family?” he said.
While Gyalje filmed him, d’Aubarède took out his satellite phone and called his partner, Mine Dumas, in Lyon.
D’Aubarède had come to climbing relatively late in life. His infatuation had begun in 1972 when he glimpsed the summit of beautiful Kilimanjaro from an airplane window as he returned from Madagascar on military service. He had never forgotten it. Back in Lyon, he had gotten on with his life, marriage, two lovely daughters, and his job at the Audiens insurance company. His wife didn’t really approve of climbing, so he rarely went to the mountains, even though Mont Blanc loomed just over the horizon. But in 1993, they divorced; a year later, at the age of forty-seven, he had traveled with Mine back to Kilimanjaro.
“The summit is so beautiful,” he said now, shaking his head at the beauty of it all. “The scenery. I am so happy.”
D’Aubarède had discovered he had an exceptional ability for high-altitude climbing. On May 17, 2004, he became only the fifty-sixth Frenchman to climb Everest. But his family didn’t climb with him in the really tall mountains of the world, and Mine and his daughters worried about him during the time he spent away. One day, he might not return.
With the satellite phone pressed to his lips, he promised Mine this would be his last climb. “Next time, I will be near the sea with the family!”
He said he kissed her over the phone but she told him to save his breath and to return home to France quickly. His daughter, Constance, was getting married in September in Chamonix.
“I will call you when I get down,” he said.
The sun’s light was fading and the temperature was dropping. They spoke for a couple more minutes and then d’Aubarède telephoned the director of Audiens in Lyon, Patrick Bezier. In recent years, d’Aubarède’s work had become a sideline, compared to his climbing, but he was featured in the company newsletter and his adventures were a favorite talking point among the clients. The company gave him time off from work for his mountaineering and helped sponsor his expeditions.
He reached an answering machine. “This is Hugues d’Aubarède,” he said, speaking quietly into his phone. “It’s minus twenty. I am at eight thousand, six hundred and eleven meters. I am very cold. I am very happy. Thank you.”
When he had finished talking, he offered the phone to Gyalje, who was still standing beside him.
“Did you contact your wife from up here?” d’Aubarède said. “You have to do this, Pemba. Please. You can use my satphone.”
But the Sherpa was serious and said they were already late. “It’s time we climb down,” he said.
“Yes, I agree, but we have reached the s
ummit!”
When Gyalje still refused, d’Aubarède took back the camera and spent a few more minutes snapping more photographs.
One of the Sherpas did call home, however. Jumik Bhote, the lead Sherpa in the South Korean team, had left his cell phone with his partner in Kathmandu. He borrowed the Koreans’ satellite phone to call her. When he got through, Dawa Sangmu told him she had had the baby, a boy.
Bhote closed his eyes and thanked her. I love you! Say hello to everyone. I will be back soon.
He was so happy. He was going to name his son after his own late father, Jen Jen.
After the celebrations, the expeditions packed up their gear for the descent—cameras, telephones, water bottles, flags. The radios and the satellite phones each weighed about a pound. Gerard McDonnell handed his phone to Pemba Gyalje to lighten his load.
Some of the teams had arrived later than the rest and some chose to spend longer than the others on the summit. By now there was a haze in the air, and it was clear evening was coming on. The sky was a deeper blue. In the valleys, some of the distant craggy peaks stuck up through mist like sharks’ fins. Cumulus clouds lined up like trains on the horizon.
The teams gazed down toward Camp Four. It was a distant, alluring pinpoint, beyond the summit plateau, beyond the serac and the Bottleneck.
The two Norwegian climbers were the first to descend. Skog knew that Bae was waiting for her somewhere on the snowfield. She was impatient to share the good news with him. He had insisted on setting a deadline of being back at the Traverse and clipped onto the fixed ropes before nightfall. Once they were on the ropes, they would be fine. It was easy—they could just follow the lines back to Camp Four.
Since leaving the Traverse, Skog had been climbing without the aid of extra oxygen but she felt she needed some now. Nessa was carrying their only remaining cylinder, and he pulled the two pipes from his nose and passed them back over his shoulder to her. In that fashion, one closely following behind the other, they climbed down over the eastern side of the summit ridge.
Directly in front of them, the late afternoon sun cast the shadow of the mountain over hundreds of miles of land. The shadow was stark and huge, a perfect triangle, and so long that it rose above the horizon.
The sight made them suddenly realize the size of the mountain. The second-tallest mountain on earth. And they were at its very pinnacle. They waited for a moment and Nessa took a picture.
At nearly 8 p.m., the Dutch team quit the summit. Everyone else had already left and it was empty.
They began what everyone knew would be one of the most dangerous parts of the climb—the descent. This was true on any mountain—the climbers were exhausted and the light was failing. On K2, this fact was illustrated by a telling statistic: of the sixty-six people killed on K2 in the past seven decades, twenty-four died on the way down after having successfully reached the summit.
Now, it was late and the sun was already sinking fast below the horizon. Just as the Dutch team was leaving, however, they met Marco Confortola, the Italian, who was still on his way up. Confortola said he needed someone to take a few photographs of him on the top and he asked Cas van de Gevel to wait.
“You take my camera?” he said.
Urging Confortola to be quick, the Dutchman agreed to stay behind. Confortola removed his hat and goggles and knelt in the twilight in his black and green suit. He held his ski pole aloft above his head with two flags tied to it, the Italian and Pakistani. The evening was so dark that Van de Gevel had to use a flash to take the picture.
They took five photographs, and then Confortola switched on his satellite phone to call his main sponsor, Miro Fiordi, the president of Credito Valtellinese, a local Italian bank.
“I am at the top,” he said. He couldn’t say much more. “I have to go,” he said. “It’s late.”
Putting the phone away inside his jacket, he followed Van de Gevel down onto the dark summit snowfield.
Part II
DESCENT
Friday, August 1–Saturday, August 2
“There’s no time for mourning.”
—Lars Flato Nessa, K2, 2008
“No ropes! No rope left on the Bottleneck. Big problem. Many danger.”
—Chhiring Dorje, K2, 2008
CHAPTER EIGHT
8 p.m.
There are several types of major snow avalanches but two are probably the most common—the loose snow avalanche and the slab avalanche.
Both are caused by weaknesses in the layers of snow in the snowpack. Both are triggered by an energy disturbance such as heat, or movement.
In the loose snow avalanche, the fault point lies close below or at the surface. Loose, powdery snow sloughs away in an inverted V shape down the slope, like grains of salt cascading down a huge salt mound.
The slab avalanche is more dangerous for mountaineers. The weakness is deeper in the snowpack; a large, cohesive snow plate sometimes hundreds of yards wide and several yards deep fractures with a distinctive whumph and shears away.
If an avalanche accelerates over an abrupt change in slope, it becomes a powder snow avalanche. This type of avalanche has a small mass but can travel at 150 miles per hour, moving far along a valley bottom and even up the base of an opposite mountainside. Some of these avalanches are followed by an air blast that sucks up snow and has been known to blow people to their deaths.
Then there is another type of avalanche altogether, which can be more lethal still. Involving not snow but glacial ice, it can be caused when the leading edge of a glacier breaks off, and blocks shear away like children’s bricks toppling from a tower. The technical term is “calving,” a term that does not do justice to the violence of the event.
Some of the blocks can be as big as footballs, some as big as refrigerators or cars or houses. The blocks drop fast, bouncing, grinding, colliding down the cliff or slope like rocks in a rockfall. (Glacial ice is a type of metamorphic rock.)
The icefall is pursued by a turbulent dust cloud hundreds of feet high. The cloud can have a runout miles past where the icefall stops.
The most prominent hanging glacier on K2 is the one that sits brooding over the Bottleneck. It is a serac—defined, in the dictionary, as an irregular-shaped pinnacle of ice on a glacier, formed by the intersection of crevasses, or deep-running fissures. The name derives from the nineteenth-century French word for a compact, crumbly white cheese.
Through the years the serac above the Bottleneck had come to be called the Balcony Glacier or Balcony Serac. It was always an ominous sight. In 1993 a Canadian disappeared below the Bottleneck; his fellow climbers turned around and he was gone, and they believed he could have been hit by falling ice.
No one knows when a serac will collapse. It could depend on the heat, snowfall, or earthquakes but mostly on the speed of movement of the glacier, which can vary between many inches each year to yards.
In recent years, the Balcony Serac on K2 had been stable.
“Rolf! Rolf!”
As she had climbed down from the summit behind Lars Flato Nessa, Cecilie Skog had called out for her husband. Where was he? The snowfields were quiet and still. Her voice carried a long way over the waves of crusted snow.
After less than an hour, Skog saw him at last. He was sitting on one of the small hills of snow, and she sped up to reach him. They hugged and then she gazed into his face, feeling proud. His decision to stop after the Traverse proved he was more interested in the climbing, the teamwork, the just being there in this wilderness, than in reaching the summit. Not many mountaineers would have turned back after getting so close.
Some of the other climbers in Base Camp had felt slightly in awe of Bae before he had arrived on the mountain. He had an impressive track record. They knew about his reputation as a proficient rock climber, and they feared he would be aloof. But he had joined in and encouraged the others, which climbers like the Americans appreciated. He told them they just had to try their best. Be safe, but enjoy yourself.
Now,
Bae congratulated his wife warmly. “Nice that it was a success,” he said. His voice became more serious. “But now we have to get down safely.”
Bae said he felt better than he had a couple of hours earlier. But his oxygen cylinder was nearly empty again. Skog had been breathing Lars Nessa’s supply of oxygen since the summit, and she passed the tank to Bae. He was a cautious expedition leader; he did everything he could to reduce the risks his team faced, insisting they use oxygen even when the other teams criticized it as cheating.
Now, as always, the Norwegians marched in single file, watching for crevasses and drifts of snow.
Skog knew she was lucky in having the life she had always yearned for. On an expedition with Bae, she could be outside under the open sky with the simple goal of reaching camp and getting warm, and when she was warm, she was happy. That was all she wanted. All she needed. She and Bae had none of the tensions other climbers experienced with spouses who resented the months apart and the risks they took with their lives. When they were in the mountains or other wild places, they were home.
During the weeks on K2, when Bae had been away climbing Great Trango Tower, Skog had missed her husband. She had worked the slopes beside the other teams, but despite the crowds the mountain still felt empty. After Trango, Bae had first returned to Norway for a guiding course in the north of the country, which meant they were apart for even longer.
Occasionally, around Base Camp, Marco Confortola blew her a kiss and greeted her across the rock fields. “Cecilie! The most beautiful woman in Base Camp!” Other times, the three Serbs called to her, though she didn’t care to remember what they said to her.
She was lonely.
Then one evening in July, she had come down from one of the higher camps, sweaty and tired, and someone across Base Camp had called out, “Cecilie, there is someone here for you!” It was Rolf, and she had run to him.
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