They had gone into their big Bergen tent, amid the bags and mats on the floor, and he had told her about Trango. He and his friends had climbed a route called the Norwegian Pillar to the top, and had become the first people to return alive. It was an infamous route in Norway; two Norwegians died on it in 1984.
When they had spoken on the phone while he was in Norway, Skog had joked that he might want to bring some furniture from Stavanger to brighten the tent at Base Camp. Now, she saw, he had kept his promise. He had brought a plastic inflatable Ikea couch, sky blue with pink spots. She hugged him. It was a lovely gesture and so typical of Bae.
In the warmth from a fifteen-pound gas heater, they had sat on the couch and over the next weeks, when the rest of Base Camp turned in after nightfall they entertained friends from other expeditions. McDonnell came over. Eric Meyer, too. They sat watching cheap DVDs on Bae’s Mac, movies like Basic Instinct and Legally Blonde, which Skog had bought in Kathmandu. The whole team was happier once Bae had arrived.
After walking for another hour down the summit snowfields, the three Norwegian climbers approached a stump of ice where on the way up Skog and Nessa had stashed a spare 120-foot coil of rope. Nessa had been given it by one of the Sherpas when they were cutting the lines at the base of the Bottleneck in the morning. After the Traverse, they had calculated they wouldn’t need it on the summit snowfields.
Skog had to remind Nessa that it was behind the stump of ice. “Sure we’ll need it?” he said, skeptically.
“Who knows if an ice screw will fail or something,” Skog said, and they walked over to retrieve it.
Then they went on quickly, aware that Bae’s oxygen was gradually running out and that the air around them was getting darker.
At 8 p.m., they came to the start of the fixed ropes that led down into the Traverse. They had made Bae’s deadline of arriving at the ropes before dark, but only by a few minutes. The western sky over the Karakorum was blooming pink.
The three climbers had to clip on and rappel diagonally down about one 120-foot rope length to the first belay stance before they could duck along the Traverse under the serac. Soon, they thought, they would be back in Base Camp.
Nessa dropped down the rope first, followed by Skog and then Bae. Skog couldn’t help thinking how well they were working together as a team.
They paused for a moment on a ledge where they could stand quite comfortably. The air around them was growing dark and shadowy. The two men switched on their lamps, which were secured around their helmets with elastic headbands and clips. Skog and Nessa waited for Bae to tell them what to do next.
Skog wanted to make sure her headlamp was functioning at full strength, so she unscrewed the back of the lamp to change its batteries.
Nessa asked Bae whether he wanted him to go first.
Bae’s reply came from the dark. “No, I’ll lead, and I want Cecilie to be between us,” he said.
Skog watched her husband shift his clip across the rope and he shuffled quickly down into the darkening well of the Traverse, disappearing from sight.
Soon Skog had finished screwing on the back of her headlamp. She rappelled down another rope length but had to stop again when the rope became badly twisted by the force of her descent just before the next ice screw and she spent a minute getting past it. Then she continued her climb down, staring forward into the darkness with the cone of her lamp. It was another ten or fifteen minutes before she saw Bae’s light. He was probably about eighty feet ahead of her.
They kept that distance between them for close to an hour. Lars Nessa followed somewhere behind Skog. Then Bae reached a spot, Skog calculated, that was somewhere in the middle of the Traverse.
Until that moment, there had been no movement or sound above them. But at that point, the mountain began to shake. There was a precise crack and roar. Cecilie lurched off balance against the ice wall. She felt the rope pull taut, then it snapped back again. In the convulsion, her headlamp went out and she blindly gripped the ice in terror until the shaking stopped.
She stared ahead of her along the Traverse but Bae’s light had disappeared, too.
“Rolf?”
She called out, tentatively at first but more loudly as her alarm grew.
Lars Flato Nessa was climbing carefully down the Traverse, checking the rope as he pulled himself along, when he heard the rushing sound of ice falling.
He stopped, wondering what it could be. He had no sense for how far away the sound was. It could have been miles below him, lower down the mountain, or just a few feet away.
An instant later he heard Cecilie yelling for Rolf. Then he knew that whatever had happened was close by. From the sound in her voice it was serious.
He rappelled down and found Skog leaning in the darkness against the ice wall.
“Cecilie, are you all right?”
“Where is he?” Skog said. “Where is he, Lars? Where did he go? What just happened? I want to see him. Where is he?”
“Wait here,” he said.
Nessa had no idea what he would find as he climbed out fearfully into the darkness. He followed the rope for ninety feet until he reached the ice screw where the South Koreans had abandoned their cluster of empty oxygen bottles on the way up. But there the rope ended abruptly, as if cut off by a knife.
“You there, Rolf?” he said, peering forward with his lamp.
He could see clearly that there had been a big ice fall on this part of the Traverse. The violence of it was obvious, as if there had been a battle. The snow had been packed down afresh; ice had battered down from above, obliterating any trace of bootprints from earlier in the day.
Nessa knew that his friend Bae was dead. He looked over the precipice and knew that his body was down there somewhere. They could try to find him but they would probably die trying.
When he got back to Skog, she looked at him imploringly.
“Tror du det er haap?” she said. Do you think there’s hope?
No, Cecile, no hope, he thought. They were on the side of a mountain at more than 26,000 feet, surrounded by a cone of unforgiving darkness. Bae had been their leader, but he wasn’t there for them now. Nessa wanted to make sure Skog realized there was no chance they would get her husband back.
“Nei,” he said. No hope.
“We have to find him, Lars.”
Nessa was not a full-time climber like Skog and Bae. The twenty-eight-year-old nurse was the junior member of the expedition. The two stars, Skog and Bae, had offered him a place on the team at the last minute. He had agreed to come to Pakistan almost on a whim to see how high he could climb, to see what this great marvel, K2, was like. He had never thought he would get so far. But he had done better than he had anticipated and now he surprised himself again. He expected to feel overwhelmed and instead he felt calm and rational. He looked at Skog, who was still clinging to the side of ice, and knew she needed his help if she was going to get down alive.
He told her they couldn’t afford to mourn for Bae. “Something terrible has happened,” he said. “We have to stay focused. There’s no time for mourning.”
But what were they going to do? They could wait for daylight. But in the Death Zone? On the other hand, they had no rope. Any fumble or misstep meant death.
Nessa reminded himself that it was not unusual to be on an expedition in Norway and discover they had forgotten some of the ropes or belays or screws. They just had to be creative and find some other way out of this problem. And then he remembered the coil of rope that they had stashed and collected again on the summit snowfield and which was in his backpack.
He brought it out and ran it through his hands. In fact, it was two lengths knotted together, one white length and one colored. He also realized he had a reliable ice screw to attach it to—the one that was still screwed into the ice of the Traverse. It had been tested by an avalanche and had held.
He climbed down again and tied the rope and when he came back he told Skog he was going to rappel down to look for a
way out. She was in shock, but she nodded and seemed to understand what he told her.
Skog’s headlamp was still not working. After she had changed the batteries, she had not fitted it together again properly and the batteries had fallen out when the avalanche hit. Letting himself down on the rope, Nessa watched as Skog was swallowed by the darkness.
He rappelled down diagonally to the right over broken rocks, bracing his legs to avoid swinging back vertically like a pendulum, and watching carefully for the end of the rope. In the darkness, he was unsure where he was heading but after about forty yards he recognized the rocks around him and realized he had reached the Bottleneck.
He yelled back up to Skog and soon he felt her weight moving down the line. He held the end of the rope tightly. Five minutes later, Skog’s legs appeared out of the darkness and within a moment she stood beside him, only slightly out of breath.
The first thing she said to Nessa was “Have you found him?”
He shook his head.
“When will we find him?” she said.
“Cecilie, he is gone.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Look, we can search tomorrow when it’s light. You won’t see anything now anyway.”
Nessa remembered Bae’s three iron rules. He knew he had to get Skog and himself home. They could not take the risk of looking for Bae. Now they saw that in addition to cutting the rope in the Traverse, the avalanche had also swept away or buried the lines fixed in the Bottleneck. The gully was littered with large chunks of ice. There was nothing to do but to turn their faces to the slope and descend without rope.
“We must go,” Nessa said.
Skog nodded.
Nessa went first, punching grips with his ice axe and the teeth of his crampons. Every few feet he stopped and pointed his headlamp upward, trying to give Skog as much light as he could. He waited until she made it down to him, and then he climbed another few feet lower.
It was a slow, laborious way of descending the mountain; they were tired and their nerves were raw from Bae’s death. Nessa called out encouragement to Skog and tried to guide her and she tried to concentrate and be patient, though the broken chunks of ice around them made the way perilous.
Skog doubted whether she could make it to the bottom. She climbed automatically, moving one axe down and then her boot. Axe and boot.
Half an hour later, the ice gully flattened out a little, and Skog and Nessa were able to turn and stand up straighter and walk down slowly in single file. They bent forward tentatively because the ice was still slippery, and held the blades of their ice axes in their hands and thrust the handles before them into the crust of the snow.
They were still walking amid the blocks of ice that had crumbled from the serac when Skog’s boot caught on a brick of ice and she fell.
The surface was hard and slick and Skog slid fast, tumbling and rolling over and crying out for Nessa to help her. She was on a slope and she couldn’t see where she was going. After sixty feet, she flung out her axe and slammed the point into the ice, which brought her to a jolting stop.
She gasped for breath. Her ski pants were ripped down her leg. But she was alive.
Nessa scrambled down to her.
“I thought I was gone,” she said, still breathing heavily, as he helped her up.
“So did I,” he said.
She was bruised and shaken and feeling more weak and exhausted than ever, but they continued making their way down. The wind was picking up.
After another hour, the line of fixed rope appeared suddenly and they clipped on to it. Ahead, a small, strong light was flashing on and off from the direction of Camp Four. Someone had put out a beacon. They fixed their compass to it.
As they approached the camp, Skog grew convinced that Bae would be in the tent waiting for her. Of course he was in Camp Four, she thought. Her husband was the one who constantly worried about safety. He never took risks. Safe and sure. Get back home. Nothing could have happened to him. She was late and he would be worried about her by now, she thought. Cecilie, where have you been? Skog told herself she must hurry. She had to get back.
At Camp Four, Skog and Nessa went straight to the tent of Oystein Stangeland, the fourth member of the Norwegian team. Stangeland had turned back after the Traverse. As Skog opened the tent flap, she looked immediately to see if anyone was sitting with him, but he was alone.
Inside, Stangeland asked where Bae was and Nessa shook his head.
“Rolf got lost,” Nessa said.
That was all he had to say. It was short and brutal and all three climbers knew what it meant.
The night before, Skog and Bae had slept together in one of the tents at Camp Four, while Nessa and Stangeland had shared the second tent. Now Skog walked to her tent and went inside. Bae was not there either.
Nessa brought in a bottle of water that Oystein had melted for them. Skog felt thirsty but she was not hungry. She was cold and tired and sad. Nessa helped her remove her crampons. She left her boots, her thick climbing suit, and everything else on.
The two climbers lay down on the mat under the sleeping bag and Nessa held her.
CHAPTER NINE
The violent, shape-shifting nature of K2 was dramatically revealed during an expedition to the mountain in 1953.
A year before Desio, Lacedelli, Bonatti, and Compagnoni made their pilgrimage from Italy, a team of seven Americans and one Briton arrived on the slopes. They were led by a thirty-nine-year-old doctor from New York named Charles Houston, a Harvard graduate and a legendary figure of American mountaineering, although this would be his last climb. His team included a twenty-seven-year-old climber, Art Gilkey, who was a graduate student in geology at Columbia University in New York, and twenty-six-year-old Pete Schoening from Seattle.
For six weeks the team climbed steadily, defeating the most difficult landmarks of K2, including House’s Chimney and the Black Pyramid, and discovering the empty tents of Wiessner’s expedition. K2’s notorious weather had already begun to blow in: In a violent storm, Houston’s team was trapped in the tents at the expedition’s Camp Eight at 25,500 feet, three thousand feet from the summit. They could not light the stoves easily, so the climbers struggled to melt water to drink, and to cook. They passed the time reading aloud to each other, painting, or writing diaries. Four days later, after one of their three tents had been pummeled by the storm, the wind dropped slightly and they staggered outside. Art Gilkey, however, had developed swelling in his left leg. He collapsed and passed out.
When Gilkey came around, he insisted he was only suffering from a cramp. “I’m all right, fellows; it’s just my leg, that’s all,” he said. “I’ve had this Charley horse for a couple of days.”
But he had developed thrombophlebitis, or blood clots, in the veins of his left calf. He could certainly climb no higher and was unable to descend alone.
Another storm swept in, confining the team once again to their tents, and the clots spread to Gilkey’s right leg and eventually his lungs. Gilkey apologized for being a burden but his six teammates gave him a shot of morphine and then quickly composed a makeshift stretcher from his sleeping bag, a tent, a rucksack, and a cradle of rope.
The route they had followed on the ascent had become a major avalanche risk, so in the howling wind they tacked to the west, down a steep rock rib, dragging a now blue-faced Gilkey through deep snow. When the slope steepened, they lowered him down it with a rope tied to the stretcher and anchored from above by Pete Schoening. This involved Schoening’s securing his ice axe in the snow behind a boulder, using the rock to support the axe, and looping the end of the rope once around the axe handle and around his waist.
Delicately, they lowered Gilkey until they reached a place where they began to cross the rocks to Camp Seven. But at this point, one of them lost his footing and slipped. He was roped to a teammate who in the force of the fall was also wrenched off his feet. The pair then crashed into the rope between Houston and another climber. Within a moment
all four were hurtling down the slope toward the precipice. They snagged a fifth climber, who was attached by a rope to Gilkey’s stretcher, and he too began to slide. Entangled, they were going to fall thousands of feet, it seemed, and they were going to die.
But Schoening was still supporting Gilkey from above and the incredible happened. Even as the weight of six mountaineers jolted onto his rope, Schoening’s strength held the falls.
As he strained, the train of falling men stopped, hanging above the drop. Slowly, one by one, the mountaineers righted themselves. One had lost his gloves and his hands were frozen; another had a cracked rib and a large gash in his leg; a third had a nosebleed. Houston was unconscious and had to be revived by the reminder that if he didn’t climb up now he would never see his wife and daughter again.
The climbers anchored Gilkey on the slope with two ice axes and explained that they would return to fetch him soon.
“Yes, I’ll be fine,” Gilkey said. “I’m okay.”
The mountaineers crawled across to the small ledge where one member of the group was already erecting two tents. As they did so, they heard Gilkey calling out to them from his stretcher 150 feet away. Ten minutes later they returned to collect him, but he was gone.
At first they assumed an avalanche had taken him, but in the following years some wondered whether Gilkey had cut himself free so that his teammates would not have to carry him down. Had he sacrificed himself so that they could live? As they continued the descent over the next few days, they found no sign of Gilkey except for a tangle of ropes, a torn sleeping bag, the shaft of an ice axe, and blood-streaked rocks. They all studied the remains but none admitted until later that they had seen them.
K2 had its close Italian connection, thanks to the Duke of Abruzzi and the triumph of Compagnoni and Lacedelli. But down the years, after an American expedition in 1938, Wiessner’s ill-fated attempt in 1939, and Houston and his colleagues’ expedition in 1953, it also became known as “America’s Mountain.”
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