They dunked his hands in a tin basin of warm water and soaked his feet in a bowl but repeatedly he dozed off, trying to stretch out, and pulling his hands and feet out of the water. Chris Klinke had to keep lifting them back in.
Looking in a concerned fashion at both men, Meyer said, “I hope they will keep their digits.”
After a few hours, the only thing left that Meyer could do was bandage the two men up and prepare them for their departure. It was about 3:30 a.m. There was talk of helicopters flying up from Skardu to airlift them out.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Monday, August 4, 8 a.m.
Helicopter transportation for injured climbers is being organized for tomorrow morning,” Maarten van Eck wrote in an update on his website late on Sunday night.
At K2 on Monday morning, Roeland van Oss thought the helicopters would not arrive until late, but at eight o’clock one of the military liaison officers at Base Camp rushed to his tent with the news that they were only forty minutes away. The Pakistani military had established a private company precisely with the aim of plucking injured mountaineers out of the Karakoram, and it had choppers stationed at the military airport at Skardu. Van Oss had spoken by satellite phone with the owner of Jasmine Tours, the Dutch expedition’s organizer, and he had made the arrangements.
Suddenly Van Oss had much to do. He scurried to collect Van Rooijen’s and Van de Gevel’s bags. The Dutch climbing leader sat upright in the mess tent shooting instructions at Van Oss about all the jobs he had to do after Van Rooijen was gone, such as paying the porters and dealing with the remaining food barrels.
Away from the tents, about three-quarters of a mile down the glacier toward the southeastern shanks of the mountain, the Serbian team’s liaison officer and a team of helpers shifted rocks to build a landing pad for the helicopters. They marked it with flags and a windsock.
At nine o’clock, two former Pakistani military Eurocopter Ecureuils, or Squirrel helicopters, flew in from the south, casting shadows against the mountainside. They came noiselessly at first but then thudded above the glacier near the tents.
Almost everyone left in Base Camp took turns in the scrum helping to lug Wilco van Rooijen over the rocks on a red stretcher. After they set him down, Chris Klinke shielded the Dutchman’s head with his arms as the chopper blades billowed gusts of wind over the rocks. Then they lifted Van Rooijen through the helicopter door and the chopper hovered into the air and flew away.
Roberto Manni persuaded the pilot of the second Squirrel to take a detour up the Abruzzi ridge to attempt a long-line cable and harness rescue of Marco Confortola. The arrangement was that Confortola would climb down onto a flat space below House’s Chimney, but when the helicopter got up to 19,000 feet the pilot could not see him. Confortola hadn’t managed to descend to that point yet. The weather forced the chopper to wheel away without waiting.
The Squirrel flew back down to the Godwin-Austen glacier for Cas van de Gevel. His hands bandaged, the Dutchman walked from the tent to the landing strip.
The trip was a stunning hour back down the Baltoro glacier, past Masherbrum and Trango Towers, to Skardu. There, Van de Gevel was reunited with Van Rooijen, and the two men were hooked up to monitors in the military hospital, a one-story complex of run-down cream-colored buildings beneath the hot, sandy hills on the outskirts of the town, where military officials strode the grounds and loudspeakers repeatedly called people to prayer.
Back at K2, more porters were arriving to carry away the teams’ gear. Mules waited around on the rocks. The big South Korean team climbed down to Base Camp, and Nawang, the cook from Nepal, prepared a special meal in the mess tent. His bibimbap—warm rice mixed with vegetables, chili, and meat, when they had some—had become a favorite of the Flying Jump team. Now he cooked the meal even though he had lost two friends from his own region, Jumik Bhote and Big Pasang. From outside, people heard him crying.
Chhiring Bhote was preparing to return to his village near Makalu to observe two months of mourning for Jumik.
The Korean climbers drank suji, which they had brought to K2 intending to celebrate Go Mi-sun’s birthday. Instead they were marking the deaths of their two Sherpas and three of their own climbers. The Koreans were not going to wait around. They were crushed by the deaths. They rolled up their flags and their gear. Then the survivors walked out of Base Camp and left the tents standing for the porters to dismantle. They walked for two hours down to Broad Peak Base Camp, which was at a lower altitude for the bigger helicopters they had ordered up. Then the sky was full of helicopters, which flew them out of the Karakoram toward Islamabad.
Before they left, Lars Nessa spoke to Go Mi-sun. She was distraught at the deaths in the Korean team and she offered her commiserations for Rolf Bae. But she was not going to give up climbing; she was leaving to move on to the next peak in her quest to reach the top of all fourteen 26,000-foot mountains. She would die a year later on Nanga Parbat, another tough mountain in northern Pakistan.
Nessa thought about what he had learned from K2. The human costs of mountaineering. Not just those costs inflicted on a climber caught up in a tragedy like this, but the pain for the families left behind.
The Serbs from Vojvodina were leaving. Without Dren Mandic. Predrag Zagorac and Iso Planic intended to sell the team’s spare oxygen cylinders and give the money to Jahan Baig’s family.
Cecilie Skog had left earlier on Monday, trekking out alone with a single porter to reach Askole as quickly as possible, planning to barely stop to eat. Sixteen months later she would trek across Antarctica, her love for the wilderness undimmed. Nevertheless, her burden was heavy. And, Nessa thought, was it fair on his own family, his parents, who were farmers near Stavanger, or his girlfriend? Nessa had decided he would climb again but never on a killer mountain like K2.
After Van Rooijen and Van de Gevel had gone, Roeland van Oss left a lot of what he couldn’t take with him for the porters to burn. Wastepaper, his Alistair MacLean and Tom Clancy novels, all the other garbage. He would never return to K2, never again face those weeks of climbing, all that danger, just to stand on a summit. What did it mean? Most of the people who died had been victims of bad luck, he thought. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As the remaining Dutch climbers were packing up the equipment in Gerard McDonnell’s tent, they discovered a bottle of beer among his belongings. That night, a group gathered in the Americans’ mess tent and toasted the Irishman. They went around the table reminiscing about him.
“He was a gift to the world,” said Eric Meyer in his toast. “He was a gentle, kind spirit.”
A Serbian climber borrowed two tin plates from the kitchen tent and punched out the names of the dead. It took him five hours. He made a mistake with one plate and had to go back for a third.
Lars Nessa also made a plate for Rolf Bae, using a hammer and chisel.
Before they left K2, the climbers scaled the brown cliffs at the western edge of Base Camp to hang the plates on the Gilkey Memorial.
One of the oval plates was for Dren Mandic. It read:
DREN MANDIC
13.XII.1976–01.VIII. 2008
SUBOTICA
SERBIA
The Serbs sprinkled whisky on the plate and knocked some of it back themselves in honor of Mandic.
Another plaque was for Gerard McDonnell.
GERARD MCDONNELL
20.01.1971–02.08.2008
LIMERICK
IRISH
Rolf Bae’s plate had a cross hammered above his name:
ROLF BAE
19.01.1975–01.08.2008
NORWAY
On Monday morning, Marco Confortola had woken up alone at Camp Three, anxious because he had to navigate the Black Pyramid on his own. His feet throbbed as if they had nails in them, he feared he had frostbite in his left hand, and his penis was frozen.
He heard the sound of a helicopter and saw it rising from below, but then it went away and its buzzing faded. As he got down the Blac
k Pyramid, clouds and snow blew in, and out of the mist he saw the three figures of the rescue party from Base Camp approaching. It was George Dijmarescu and two Sherpas from the Makalu Valley, Rinjing Sherpa and Mingma Sherpa. They gave him extra oxygen. They helped Confortola down to Camp Two, where he borrowed Dijmarescu’s satellite phone so that at last he could call Luigi. He told his brother he was alive.
Confortola limped down to an area below House’s Chimney where Dijmarescu and the two Sherpas had cleared a landing space for the helicopter. Confortola was excited that he was finally going to be delivered from his torment. But then Dijmarescu’s radio blurted out the dispiriting news from Base Camp that the helicopter was canceled because of poor weather. Confortola’s suffering was not going to end quickly and he realized he had to find yet more energy from he knew not where to keep going down.
The four men climbed down to Camp One, where they spent the night.
The next morning, Tuesday, they climbed down to Advance Base Camp, where a welcoming party hiked out from Base Camp to meet them, Red Bull, Coca-Cola, and salami in hand. The group included Eric Meyer, Chris Klinke, Chhiring Dorje, and the members of another newly arrived American expedition. They were carrying a stretcher but it was too difficult to walk with it on the rocks. They had heard he had been hit by an oxygen bottle, and Dijmarescu had radioed down that Confortola had also been caught in a rockfall. But Confortola was not in as terrible shape as they had feared, and his mood was improving now that he was convinced he was going to survive.
The weather was turning again. It was cold and damp, and a mix of snow and rain was coming down. Confortola sat on the rocks. The others gathered around while Meyer tried to diagnose his frostbite and they attempted to work out how they were going to carry him back to Base Camp. But Confortola soon lost patience and after ten minutes he stood up and started walking, and the others scrambled to catch up.
They walked slowly on the path between the mangled walls of the icefall. Despite his eagerness, he was unsteady on his feet and they coaxed him on for the three miles to Base Camp.
Halfway to Base Camp, he met another Italian climber, Mario Panzeri, who had hiked across from Broad Peak after news of the K2 disaster spread. Seeing someone he knew burst something inside Confortola, it seemed to the others, and he broke down. Sipping Red Bull, he sat for half an hour with Panzeri.
When the group reached Base Camp later on Tuesday, Confortola was surprised by how many of the tents had been taken down. The long strip of rocks was much barer. He learned about the number of people who had died. He hadn’t known.
The Americans helped him inside the large, comfortable domed tent he shared with Roberto Manni, and Meyer treated him there, filling him with pain-relief drugs. He took off his boots and there was a purple line across his toes as if they had been burned. His worst fears were borne out. It was the damage wreaked by frostbite.
Confortola looked up at the doctor. “What a disaster,” he said in astonishment.
Meyer shook his head. “I don’t know,” Meyer said uncertainly.
Confortola was angry at his HAPs, and at the whole country of Pakistan. One of his HAPs came to the tent and spoke to the other climbers. The Americans’ Sherpa, Chhiring Dorje, chided him for not doing enough to help Confortola, for showing no respect to the people who employed him. The HAP went away looking embarrassed.
Meyer had no tPA left over since he had used both doses on Wilco van Rooijen and Cas van de Gevel. He would not have given it to Confortola anyway because of the blow the Italian had received to his head at the bottom of the Bottleneck, which increased the risk of internal bleeding. Instead, the only thing he could do was scrub Confortola’s skin clean and try to kill the pain as much as possible.
Klinke thawed Confortola’s feet in warm water, careful with the ribbons of frozen flesh that were peeling away. The feet didn’t look as bad as Van Rooijen’s or Van de Gevel’s had but if the frostbite worsened, Meyer said, it could lay bare tendons and bones. They wrapped iodine-impregnated gauze around his toes.
As they worked on him, Confortola tried to talk about some of the things that had happened up above Camp Four. The story of his terrible experience was boiling inside him, they could see. Starting to cry, he talked about stopping to help the Koreans and he mentioned Jesus. But he was so emotional and exhausted that Meyer and Klinke could not understand much. They felt sorry for him.
“What do you know about Gerard?” Meyer said.
“I am grateful for you helping me,” Confortola said.
The next day, Wednesday, August 6, a helicopter came up the valley and took Confortola away. He spent a night at the military hospital in Skardu, where he related the story of his rescue of the Koreans to the Italian embassy staff. Then he caught the Pakistani Airways flight back to Islamabad. From there he flew via London to Milan.
In the next few weeks, he became increasingly upset, and on some days he drove around the roads near his hometown and he didn’t know where he was going, sometimes in tears, unable to come to terms with the deaths on the mountain, until he went to a friend for help. His feet were in a bad way by then but he was given emergency medical treatment. About six weeks after he left the mountain, he was treated in a hyperbaric chamber at a hospital in Padua. It was one of the best hospitals in Italy for frostbite and burns. The people around him assured him he was going to be all right but he knew his condition was bad, and in the end all of his toes were amputated.
After packing up at Base Camp, what was left of the Dutch team trekked out in a line down the Baltoro glacier, passing quickly through the camps at Concordia, Goro II, and Paiju, and skirting the big rock at Korophone, until in a few days they reached the muddy campsites at Askole.
From there they sped in dirty blue jeeps on the mountain road, packed tightly, swaying through the dust clouds thrown up by the Toyotas’ wheels. Sajjad Shah, the team’s bearded Base Camp manager, had traveled to K2 with the team on this same road two and a half months earlier. Now he gazed at the seat left empty by Gerard McDonnell.
The once polite, talkative Pemba Gyalje watched the ravines sullenly. When a fall of rocks blocked the road, Sajjad stayed with the equipment while the climbers switched to jeeps sent up from the western side. They drove four hours to the hotel in Skardu, to its cold showers and hard beds, delights after the mountain, and to the attentions of the international media. Wilco van Rooijen was already freely airing to the press his conclusions about what had gone wrong. When he returned to Europe, he would lose all the toes on his left foot and almost all the toes on the other. But a year later he would tell people he was considering another return to K2.
To the climbers left behind at Base Camp, the spine of rocks where the tents had stood seemed eerie and silent. The rocks were spotted with muck from the donkeys. Since the emergency helicopter evacuations, the crowds of fifty or more had fallen to less than a dozen people in a few days. Porters were taking down the Koreans’ tents and burning the garbage. Eric Meyer and Chris Klinke’s team was one of the last to leave, and before he walked out, Klinke left Meyer and Fredrik Strang and climbed a few hundred feet up to the Gilkey Memorial.
From high on the lonely promontory, he gazed down at the foot of K2, the spits of black and brown rock stretching onto the rubble of the bare glacier. The air was cold, still, and loud with the cawing of ravens. On the memorial, the metal plaques to the dead lined the wall, tied together with wire and tinkling slightly in the breeze.
Klinke was preparing to return to America and the real world. Before he came to Pakistan, he had split with his girlfriend, and he wasn’t sure where he was going to live when he got back. He would find a job or join another expedition to somewhere else in the world.
Now that he was leaving K2, he thought of the people who were staying behind.
Before he had traveled to Pakistan and to K2 this season, the names on these plaques had been just that, names. But now there were new plates. Some of the names belonged to friends he had come to know
. They had chosen to venture toward the ultimate prize, the summit of K2, and they had paid a terrible price. They had become a part of its history.
As he turned away, he saw their faces, heard their voices, remembered their kindnesses.
THE DEAD
Dren Mandic
Jahan Baig
Rolf Bae
Hugues d’Aubarède
Karim Meherban
Gerard McDonnell
Jumik Bhote
Pasang Bhote
Park Kyeong-hyo
Kim Hyo-gyeong
Hwang Dong-jin
EPILOGUE
My own journey to K2 began in Kilcornan in western Ireland. I flew from New York to Limerick and, in a jet-lagged haze, drove one hundred miles to the southern mountains to meet McDonnell’s climbing mentor, Pat Falvey, a fast-talking Irishman in his fifties who organized climbing expeditions and had taken Gerard on his first climb of Everest. We sat in front of his computer and he pointed out the Bottleneck and the serac on photographs of K2. Scraps of climbing gear cluttered his house. A helmet. Boots. In the kitchen he tied a rope between two wooden chairs and clung on, demonstrating how the climbers on K2 had progressed up the Bottleneck and how Dren Mandic had unclipped from the fixed line. Falvey’s own life had been hurt by his passion for climbing, he explained. His wife had left him; his sons called him names for risking his life. Behind him on the wall he had hung a painting of McDonnell beside one of Ernest Shackleton—“another Irish hero,” he said.
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