“Let’s stay here,” he said.
He wanted to be certain that what lay beneath their boots was firm snow and not a crevasse. In addition, there were constant avalanches from these heavy snowfields, big, powerful falls that would crush them if they got caught up in one. Sure enough, minutes later Confortola heard a roll of thunder coming from the serac in front of them, then distant cries and shouts from beneath it. Then silence.
What was that?
I don’t know.
Confortola wasn’t entirely sure that what he had heard was an avalanche or ice collapsing from the serac but now he felt convinced they were right to stay where they were. They were going to have to bivouac, the term for staying outside without proper shelter under the night sky.
The two climbers sprawled on the steep balcony of snow. McDonnell was wearing his red climbing suit, gray balaclava, and climbing goggles. He was tired, Confortola could see. Confortola wanted to make sure he was making the right decision for them both. He wanted a second opinion, so he took out his satellite phone and called Agostino da Polenza, the president of the Italian Everest-K2 committee, and a friend and mentor. Da Polenza was in Courmayeur, Italy. Confortola explained that he felt uncomfortable about the direction they were taking and that they could not find the ropes. He said he had heard what was probably part of the serac falling.
Photographic Insert
Photographs by Mike Farris (top) and Bruce Normand, courtesy of SharedSummits.com
The two main approaches to the summit of K2, the Abruzzi and Cesen routes, converge at the Shoulder. From there, climbers must navigate the Bottleneck and the Balcony Serac, an overhanging glacier, before reaching the top. (The New York Times/Michael Farris/Bruce Normand)
On the morning of August 1, 2008, two mountaineers, Marco Confortola and Gerard McDonnell, climb up the Shoulder toward the Bottleneck. In the background is Camp Four, the last camp before the summit. Within a few hours, the crush of climbers at the top of the Bottleneck would lead to the first death. (Lars Flato Nessa)
Climbers grip fixed ropes to ascend the Bottleneck, a steep and dangerous gully, and then rest before crossing over toward the Traverse. At over 26,000 feet, the expeditions enter the so-called Death Zone, where balance, concentration, vision, and other human body functions break down rapidly under the searing effects of altitude. (Lars Flato Nessa)
Jahan Baig, a Pakistani high-altitude porter. The HAPs, drawn from northern villages in Pakistan, were employed by foreign expeditions as guides and carriers on the mountain. They were often cheaper alternatives to Nepalese Sherpas. (Hasil Shah)
The Bottleneck and the steep ice face of the Traverse lead the climbers beneath the overhanging serac, which glistens ominously in the midday sun. In past years, serac collapses sent huge chunks of ice hurtling onto the Traverse and down the Bottleneck. Climbers did not like to imagine what would happen if they got in the way. (Lars Flato Nessa)
The Serbian climber Dren Mandic, shown in foreground at right in one of the mess tents at K2 Base Camp in 2008. Mandic fell to his death among the crowds at the top of the Bottleneck on the morning of August 1. (Predrag Zagorak)
After the first two deaths, the line of climbers continues on the diagonal ascent beneath the serac toward the summit snowfields. The Basque mountaineer Alberto Zerain, the first to summit and the only climber to descend in daylight, is visible at top left. (Chris Klinke)
Two South Korean climbers struggle to climb the last ice lip from the route beneath the serac onto the summit snowfield. Three members of the South Korean expedition and one of their Nepalese Sherpas would die on the descent; another Sherpa would lose his life trying to rescue them. (Lars Flato Nessa)
Climbers arrive at the summit of K2 in the late afternoon of August 1. After fifteen hours or more of continuous climbing, the descent is one of the most dangerous parts of any attempt on K2—of the nearly 70 men and women killed on K2 over the course of its history before 2008, more than a third died on the way down after having successfully reached the summit. (Lars Flato Nessa)
Frenchman Hugues d’Aubarède pictured at K2 Base Camp with Qudrat Ali (left), the American climber Nick Rice (right), and Karim Meherban. Most climbers work as members of a larger expedition. D’Aubarède traveled to K2 as an independent climber, though he employed three Pakistani high-altitude porters and joined forces with Rice at Base Camp. (Raphaele Vernay)
Cecilie Skog and her teammate Lars Flato Nessa stand together on the summit of K2. Skog was the first woman to summit the tallest peaks on all seven continents, and reach both the North and South Poles. (Lars Flato Nessa)
The Basque climber Alberto Zerain gazes up toward the serac. On his way down from the summit, Zerain passed the line of climbers still ascending. He warned them the ascent was going to be difficult. (Alberto Zerain)
Representatives from different expeditions pose for a team photograph after one of the cooperation meetings at Base Camp. Wilco van Rooijen, the Dutch leader, kneels in the front row, fourth from right. The American Eric Meyer is middle row third from left; Chhiring Dorje stands to his left. Go Mi-sun kneels front row, third from left. Rolf Bae of Norway stands on the back row at far right. After the meeting, Bae commented to Lars Nessa that he had a feeling something was bound to go wrong. (Lars Flato Nessa)
Early evening, August 1: from left to right, Hugues d’Aubarède, Karim Meherban, Gerard McDonnell, and Wilco van Rooijen celebrate at the summit. Only one of the four would survive. (Wilco van Rooijen)
At 61, Hugues d’Aubarède was the second oldest person to summit K2. From the top of the mountain, he called home to Lyon: “It’s minus 20. I am at 8,611 meters. I am very cold. I am very happy.” (Raphaele Vernay)
The Italian climber Marco Confortola. Italy had a long association with K2: in 1954, two Italian climbers were the first to reach the summit. (Marco Confortola)
Gerard McDonnell holds an Irish flag aloft on the summit. In 2006, during an earlier attempt on K2, he was caught in a rock fall and had to be airlifted from the mountain. (The family of Gerard McDonnell)
Cecilie Skog and Rolf Bae had been married for little more than a year when they came to K2. Unlike other mountaineers who left spouses or partners behind for months on end during expeditions, the couple saw exploring and traveling as a way to be together. (Cecilie Skog/cecilieskog.com)
Norwegian climber Lars Nessa came to the Karakoram curious to see K2, but with no fixed plan of making it to the summit. In the end, he made it to the top of the second tallest mountain on earth. (Lars Flato Nessa)
Kim Jae-soo, the leader of the South Korean Flying Jump expedition. The Korean team, the largest on the mountain, included fifteen members. (Karrar Haidri/saltorosummits.com)
Kim Jae-soo and the star climber from the South Korean team, Go Mi-sun. Go would die a year later on Nanga Parbat, another mountain in northern Pakistan. (Karrar Haidri/saltorosummits.com)
Jumik Bhote, pictured here in Kathmandu, had recently been promoted to chief Sherpa of the South Korean Flying Jump team. His son would be born while Jumik was climbing on K2. (Virginia O’Leary)
Jumik with his brother, Chhiring. Chhiring and other family members from their village in Nepal also worked as Sherpas for the South Korean team. (Virginia O’Leary)
Members of different expeditions at Base Camp carry Wilco van Rooijen on a stretcher to the helicopter emergency landing pad on August 4. (Chris Klinke)
Dutch mountaineer Cas van de Gevel waits for helicopter evacuation from K2 Base Camp. Helping rescue his friend Wilco van Rooijen, he spent the night bivouacking at 24,000 feet. (Chris Klinke)
Marco Confortola is helped by military officials from a helicopter in Skardu, northern Pakistan. Badly frostbitten, all his toes would later be amputated. (The Associated Press)
The leader of the Dutch Norit K2 team, Wilco van Rooijen, survived two nights without shelter on the mountain and called his wife in the Netherlands to help him find his way down. He lost nearly all his toes from frostbite. (Wilco van
Rooijen)
Sherpa Pemba Gyalje. A commercial mountain guide from Nepal, he joined the Dutch team as an independent climber in his own right. He wanted to become one of the first Nepalese Sherpas to reach the summit of K2 without the aid of supplementary oxygen. (Wilco van Rooijen)
The gregarious Gerard McDonnell called his girlfriend in Alaska from the summit. He was the first Irishman to reach the top of K2. (Wilco van Rooijen)
Fredrik Strang at Concordia on the trek toward K2. The Swedish climber turned back from his own attempt on the summit when he saw the delay on the Bottleneck. Later, he helped bring down Dren Mandic’s body. (Chris Klinke)
The American Eric Meyer poses with Chhiring Dorje, a Sherpa from Nepal who was a member of the American team. Meyer, an anesthesiologist from Colorado, almost died when his rope snapped on his descent. Dorje helped another Sherpa climb down the Bottleneck in darkness. (Chris Klinke)
Using binoculars and a telescope, the American climber Chris Klinke sighted Wilco Van Rooijen wandering on the southern face of K2 on the afternoon of August 2, leading eventually to van Rooijen’s rescue. (Chris Klinke)
A close-up of metal plates at the Gilkey Memorial, located a few hundred yards above K2 Base Camp. The memorial is named for an American climber, Art Gilkey, who died on the mountain during an expedition in 1953. Most climbers visit it but few imagine they will end up immortalized there themselves. (Graham Bowley)
Confortola didn’t expect anyone to climb up to rescue them. He knew what he was doing. Back in Italy he had trained in high-mountain safety and rescue and earned extra euros helping stranded climbers stupid enough to venture onto the steep slopes above his house. He brought them in with curses, sometimes snapping their poles over his knee for good measure.
Da Polenza agreed with him. Be patient. “Stay there. Wait for the morning.”
Confortola switched off his phone and slid it back into his jacket. “Jesus, let’s wait,” he said to McDonnell, using the nickname—Jesus—he had given the Irishman, and McDonnell agreed.
Da Polenza had warned him to keep warm; there was a danger of frostbite, which was feared by all mountaineers but common in these cold regions of high altitude. As a person’s body cools, it directs blood away from the extremities to preserve its inner heat; even when skin temperature falls to 10 degrees, tissues numb, cells rupture. Hands, feet, nose, cheeks are most vulnerable. In 1996, Beck Weathers, an Everest mountaineer, lost his nose and most of his hands to frostbite.
Confortola felt better after talking to da Polenza. To keep themselves warm and to have a perch on the side of the mountain, the two climbers scooped seats out of the snow with a pole and the picks of their ice axes. Confortola made McDonnell’s seat slightly larger so he could lie back down. They also made room for their boots.
Even though McDonnell looked exhausted, Confortola knew that on such a steep slope they couldn’t allow themselves to fall asleep. The slope was 30 to 40 degrees and it would be easy to roll down.
“If you want to rest, I’ll take care of the situation,” he said.
McDonnell lay back, his blue water bottle hanging from his belt and his black and yellow boots planted in the hole they had cut in the snow.
Confortola turned off his headlamp. It was strange to be up there alone. It was dark and cold. The entire world was stretched out below in shadow. He watched the distant lights of Camp Four, and the single powerful light flashing near the tents. The camp seemed so close. They just could not get down to it. He was convinced they would be able to find the ropes easily in the morning.
At Base Camp, Confortola had gotten to know McDonnell during the final weeks of bad weather. When the storms roared in, the Italian was usually doing nothing much but sitting around in the two-man tent, listening to disco music on his iPod, chewing gum to help with the altitude, or taking long walks across the glacier to keep fit. He started calling in at the Dutch tent to discuss strategy, sometimes bringing bresaola to share, while Wilco van Rooijen or Cas van de Gevel prepared the basic cappuccinos.
He liked them all but he got along best with McDonnell, the handsome Irishman with the wonderful smile. McDonnell had let his hair grow long and had grown a beard, so Confortola had given him the nickname Jesus. McDonnell invited Confortola into his tent and showed him some of his photographs on his laptop—of the waxing moon over K2 or of his girlfriend, Annie, in Alaska or of Ireland. McDonnell took his photography seriously. Neither spoke much of the other’s language but they understood climbing.
Outside his tent, above a string of Tibetan prayer flags, McDonnell hung a big Irish flag. He had had it hand-stitched by a tailor in Skardu. Confortola liked to joke with him: “It’s just the Italian flag, all mixed up,” he said, poking his friend in the ribs.
Now, as the night deepened on the mountain, Confortola forced himself to shiver to stay warm, gently shaking his arms and legs and clapping. Confortola’s body bore the history of his mountaineering life. Tattooed around his right wrist was a Tibetan prayer from his 2004 Everest ascent. Another tattoo across the back of his neck spelled out Salvadek, or wild animal, which was how he liked to think of himself. He always wore a ring in his left ear. A self-styled “pirate of the mountains,” at home he was known as a risk taker and head-strong. He liked fast bikes and speed skiing. In the mountaineering community, he was known as a wily survivor, a man with a big heart and good intentions, if also a little vain. Back in Italy, some other climbers called him, half in mocking jest, “Santa Caterina Iron Man.” Around his right bicep he had a ring of six star tattoos celebrating the six peaks above 26,000 feet he had climbed so far in his life—soon now, there would be a seventh for K2.
Away to his left stretched the undulating top of the Great Serac. To his right the slope curved around to a huge gray buttress of rocks and the northern side of K2. In front of him hung the great emptiness beyond the serac.
Somewhere below was the way down into the Traverse. He could still see the light flashing at Camp Four. Everyone else who had made it to the summit must have climbed down onto the ropes and were probably back at their tents by now, he thought. The climbers down there had no idea where they were and if they were alive or dead. He and McDonnell were alone. He didn’t know if anyone was still behind them on the summit snowfield.
Confortola was not worried. They were not going to die. They would escape their aerie in the morning. It was uncomfortable, that was all. Cold. To keep his blood circulating, Confortola stood up a few times and walked around the two holes he and McDonnell had dug in the snow.
Then the time passed slowly. The two men were both so cold and exhausted that Confortola was afraid they were in danger of falling asleep. To keep them awake, Confortola began to hum one of his favorite songs, a song from Italy, from the mountains. “La Montanara.”
Lassu’ per le montagne (Up there in the mountains)
fra boschi e valli d’or (among woods and valleys of gold)
fra l’aspre rupi echeggia (among the rugged cliffs there echoes)
un cantico d’amor (a canticle of love).
Beside him, McDonnell seemed to respond to the singing and moved his body.
“Don’t give up, Jesus,” Confortola said, and he was saying it to himself as well.
McDonnell was a singer, too. During the bad weather in Base Camp, when many of the climbers feared they would have to cancel their climbs, the Dutch team’s camp manager, Sajjad Shan, an impish twenty-nine-year-old Islamabad taxi driver, organized a party to lift the depressed mood. He pushed together three large mess tents and paid an assistant cook to sing, although the cook knew only two songs, one in Urdu and one in Balti. The porters started drumming on the food barrels. Some of the climbers began to dance. An expedition had arrived in camp with seven cases of beer and whisky. The Serbs paid a runner to fetch twenty-four half-liter cans of beer from Askole. Stepping forward into the silence, McDonnell sang a Gaelic ballad that moved some of the fifty climbers packed into the warm tent to tears.
They
said the song had to be about the love of a boy for his lass. But McDonnell said, “No, it’s about the yearning of a shepherd for his goat.”
McDonnell liked Confortola but then he liked most people at Base Camp. He loved the beauty and isolation of the mountain, but the camaraderie of expedition life also appealed to him. The Dutch team’s bulbous tents were perched on the rocks close to the camps of Hugues d’Aubarède and Cecilie Skog. Around Base Camp, McDonnell often carried his video camera, with its small microphone boom, and he filmed the teams’ strategy meetings.
On free afternoons, he regularly walked over for a chat with Rolf Bae or with Deedar, the cook for the American expedition. Deedar had cared for McDonnell when he suffered the devastating rock blow to his head on K2 in 2006. Among the Dutch team, he was especially close to Pemba Gyalje and had helped the Sherpa to build a small rock altar for a puja ceremony when they arrived on K2; they played chants from an MP3 player.
No Way Down Page 14