No Way Down

by Graham Bowley

  Among the burble of drinkers in Kate Kearneys, a nearby pub, Falvey balanced a wallet on top of a beer glass and tipped it, flopping the wallet onto the table to demonstrate the effect of the serac falling. As we drove back in his Land Rover, I asked whether Gerard McDonnell had ever thought he was going to die. I expected Falvey to say, Of course not. But he shrugged and with an air of resignation said, “Everyone who ventures into the Death Zone knows they are dicing with death.”

  The following morning I drove back north to McDonnell’s hometown for McDonnell’s wake. A big white tent covered a rainy parking lot behind the Kilcornan school. Inside the tent, more than a thousand people dressed in their Sunday best stood at the edges or sat in rows in front of a long, white table. It was the first time many of them had heard the name K2. Behind the table hung a framed picture of McDonnell—a blue shirt, blue tie, a lick of brown hair, his enigmatic smile.

  I was struck by how bewildered the people of McDonnell’s village seemed to be. What exactly had motivated their son and brother to travel four thousand miles across the earth to risk his life on a mountain? they wondered. Was it worth such a cost?

  The priest, Father Joe Noonan, uttered a few words through the microphone.

  “We know we are here to honor Gerard, to praise him, and welcome Gerard to his heavenly home. Gerard, who died on the K2. That is his burial place, and in a sense where he wished to die.”

  McDonnell’s mother, Margaret, a small woman dressed in black, was helped from the front row to the table to light a single candle that stood for her son’s absent body. As she turned back, her un-comprehending loss seemed to ripple across the faces of the whole community.

  “It was on a mountain that Moses communicated with God,” Father Noonan went on. “It was on a mountain where Jesus was transfigured. It was on a mountain that Gerard achieved one of his life’s ambitions. It was such a spiritual experience that he even referred to it as being an honor to die on a mountain.”

  A friend of McDonnell’s read William Butler Yeats’s poem “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.”

  Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths,

  Enwrought with golden and silver light,

  The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

  Of night and light and the half light,

  I would spread the cloths under your feet:

  But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

  I have spread my dreams under your feet;

  Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

  Then, one by one, people who had known McDonnell carried gifts to the table. A drum, a picture of his home in Kilcornan, a Kilcornan flag to illustrate Ger’s love of his parish, a passport. An Irish flag, a book for his love of literature, his late father’s wristwatch. Annie Starkey, his girlfriend from Alaska, a trim young woman with dark curly hair, carried Tibetan prayer flags.

  “Ger was a brave one,” said his older brother, J.J., who also stood up to speak. “Ger, we miss you and we will love you. The future will be hard to face without you. Ger, God bless you, and may God have mercy on your brave soul.”

  Clearly, or at least it seemed to me, few of the people present could comprehend what drove McDonnell to K2. I encountered the same yearning for understanding, the void at the center of things, when I visited Hugues d’Aubarède’s family in Lyon, France. In the elegant dining rooms of his friends, I listened to the stories of his love for the mountains and came to grasp the fascinating alter ego he had carefully constructed through his pursuit of distant peaks. But as well as the love, I witnessed the anger—in his partner, Mine, a wondrously robust woman who at first refused to talk to me before spending hours describing Hugues, and in his thirty-one-year-old daughter, Julia. Julia, who remained silent, carefully listening to my questions to others about her father’s death only five months earlier, while Hugues’s grandchild played at her knees.

  I visited the dead, but I also had to confront the living. One morning in late November, I landed in Milan with an agreement to meet Marco Confortola. That evening he was to travel to Rome to receive a medal from the Association of Olympic Athletes of Italy. I was two hours late flying into Malpensa and by the time I was sprinting across the station platform at Milan’s grand main station, the train was leaving with him on it. My phone beeped with a text message from his agent, Barbara Baraldi, explaining that he could not wait around any longer because his feet hurt so much. It had been only a month since his toes had been amputated.

  In Rome, later that evening, at the Hotel Torre Rossa, I finally got my chance to meet Confortola. A young man emerged from the crowd, hopping awkwardly on crutches, broad-shouldered, wearing a white top and jeans, with a shaved head and a long sunburned face. An earring shone in his left ear.

  “I am Marco,” he said.

  He immediately swung around and moved awkwardly back into the crowd, greeting well-wishers and pulling off his socks to show off his bandaged feet. Over dinner, he was treated like a rock star. Women flocked to the table. When I finally asked him what it was like on the summit of K2, he glanced up at me with sullen brown eyes as if he had been waiting for my question.

  “Did it fill you with joy?”

  “No. People died,” he replied in his poor English. The conversation was over before it even began.

  The next morning at Rome’s Olympic stadium he gave a speech in front of five hundred people. He praised Gerard McDonnell. “It is important to say that Gerard, because he stayed too long above eight thousand meters, he went out of his mind. He is no longer with us. He gave his life. I was lucky not to go out of my mind. A part of this medal is also his.”

  Just as it was getting interesting, he cut the talk short. There was loud applause and then to my surprise I was called to the front to give my own assessment of the 2008 climb and of Confortola’s heroics. Even as I spoke, staring at the rows of intent faces eager for further praise of their national hero, it struck me as implausible that I was speaking at all. Confortola stood at my side, listening, too, as if he were waiting for some sort of judgment about himself and the mountain.

  On the journey back to Milan, he was less than keen to talk. Grimacing, he placed his feet on the table and massaged them through his socks. He hid behind his iPod earphones, insisting he wanted to sleep. Barbara looked embarrassed. She said he had been bombarded with media interviews. I felt both that he was wasting my time and that I was intruding on a terrible memory. But just when I felt like giving in, Confortola removed his earphones. He stretched out his legs and for the rest of the way to Milan sketched detailed scenes from the mountain on a napkin and gave me a blow-by-blow account of his fight to save the two Korean climbers and Jumik Bhote. His mood improved. We ended our journey standing in Milan Stazione, eating grilled cheese and ham sandwiches, while he pointed out the tallest stilettos on the women striding by and grinned at me.

  He talked for hours, but even then there were questions he would not answer, and parts of his account already felt rehearsed, as if he were not telling the whole story. Two days later, we traveled north to the Alpine village where he grew up, and I saw another side of Confortola. By now it was clear to me he was a wily survivor, a full-time mountaineer who climbed to make money. I met his father, a plain, pleasant man. Marco was liked in his village, even if he was regarded as something of a hothead. We sat on the lawn in front of his house in Via Uzzi. He did not invite me inside. Tibetan prayer flags fluttered from the roof in the breeze. His nephew, who had Down syndrome, played with a dog, Bobby, and Confortola occasionally showed off his strength by tussling with them. He grew taciturn again and shook his head when I asked questions, such as whether his Pakistani high-altitude porters were responsible for forgetting essential equipment at Camp Four, just before the main summit push. Baraldi said he would not be able to climb for a long while and he needed to find other ways to make money. When we said good-bye, he joked about the amazing strength of his arms. I expected a crushing handshake but his hold was surprisingly weak. He
dropped my hand quickly.

  I was relieved when I returned to New York to receive an email from a friend of Cecilie Skog, who said that she would talk to me. She had granted no other interviews. I expected to be flying to Norway but instead I was told to meet her in Denver, Colorado. There, two weeks later, a small, beautiful woman dressed in a white blouse with lace cuffs stepped into the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza.

  Only sixteen weeks after the death of her husband on K2, she had traveled to the Rockies to return to the mountains. She had brought her ice axe with her and was planning on going ice climbing near Boulder.

  “I will see how I feel,” she said, shrugging as she sat opposite me in the booth in the hotel restaurant, explaining that she had just wanted to get away from Norway.

  Skog began to cry as she poured forth her memories of how the mountain shook that night in the dark beneath the serac, how she called for Rolf Bae until Lars Nessa finally urged her to go down, and she talked of her guilt about leaving Bae behind.

  “We did look for him,” she said, wiping her eyes on her red napkin. “For so long, I regretted going on. I still do sometimes. I ask myself sometimes. I don’t know how I got down.”

  Despite her grief, Skog communicated something that I found infectious. It was a powerful joy for the outdoors—she called it a “devotion to the outdoors”—a love of life in the open. I saw this same physical joy in the Spanish climber Alberto Zerain when I visited him at his home in a small village about forty miles outside Bilbao. We talked for hours on the sofa in his living room, watching the homemade film of his K2 trip—bizarrely set to the soundtrack of the Who’s “Baba O’Riley.”

  Afterward we drove to a nearby highway restaurant for a late lunch. He was a gentle, polite man who had bonded most strongly on the mountain with the Pakistani high-altitude porters and said he wanted to write a book about the region from their perspective. I told him I would send him Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea.

  Like all of the climbers I met, Zerain was extremely fit, and when I asked him how long it would take him to prepare if he wanted to go back to K2, he pushed back his chair and clenched his fist demonstratively. “I would go back now!” he said, in a surprisingly loud voice, gazing through the window as if the mountain were already calling him.

  But while Zerain exuded the same physical passion as Skog, there was something Skog and Bae shared in their love for the outdoors that the others lacked. The mountains were the place where Skog and Bae could be together. It was where and how they expressed their love for one another. In contrast, Zerain’s wife, Patricia, a teacher, glanced over uneasily when he talked about his plans to spend months away again on Kanchenjunga; and in the case of Hugues d’Aubarède, frictions with the loved ones he left behind ran through his life. When Skog discussed their life at Base Camp—the conversations with friends, the days side by side on the slope—it made me think how the couple had brought their relationship to the wilderness and imposed it there, a very human urge. Cruel then that K2 had cared nothing for that and wiped it blithely away.

  One January morning, I flew to the Netherlands for what I considered would be my most difficult interview, with Wilco van Rooijen. I had talked to him at the wake in Kilcornan, where he had sat erect in a wheelchair, his bandaged feet pushed out in front of him. His wife, Heleen, sat beside him looking weary of the attention, and a bit resentful. At that time, Van Rooijen had told me he had no time for involved explanations of what went wrong on K2.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “It’s K2. You know it is going to happen,” he said, referring to the collapse of the serac. “Some people had bad luck.”

  His subsequent emails were abrupt, though eventually he offered a time and a date for another meeting. One evening I found myself in the east of the Netherlands near the German border, walking across a plowed field in the dark on the outskirts of a village called Voorst. Even now, I was worried that Van Rooijen would slam the door in my face. How could I presume to pry into the inner experiences of his profession? A white Land Rover, splashed with mud and sponsors’ logos, was parked outside the old straw-roofed farmhouse into which he had recently moved.

  When he opened the door, wearing slippers and holding back a golden retriever, he looked me up and down and seemed both surprised and impressed that I had managed to find him at all. He switched on the kettle for tea but it went unpoured for four hours as he stood before me and gave a fevered, nonstop recounting of his horrific experiences on K2. He sat on the stone floor, legs crossed, to demonstrate how he had bivouacked, and paced across the room as he waded through the deep snow and the whiteout below the Shoulder. I listened in wonder and gratitude for the time he was giving me.

  At 1 a.m., my tea cold, Van Rooijen stopped. My notebook was full as he called a taxi for me.

  I heard a faint crying, and when we opened the door to the hallway his young son was screaming.

  By now my taxi driver, a young man from Afghanistan, had arrived.

  I asked Van Rooijen if his wife was with his son but he said no, it was her night off. He was in charge.

  “But she must be in the house.”

  “No, in Utrecht.”

  I wondered how long the boy, about a year old, had been crying.

  Van Rooijen sold me a book about his expedition to K2 in 2006 and I left.

  The taxi driver, a doctor, had been watching all of this. “He is a focused man, if I may say so, egocentric,” he said as we drove away toward the highway in the dark. I had to agree.

  Still, Van Rooijen had given me insight into mountaineering psychology. Before I left, he had said something unsettling. Leaning back in his chair, he shook his head. “Shame about Marco, though, that he got it all wrong. He was exhausted. His mind was obviously gone. He may have…exaggerated.”

  He was referring to the story that Confortola had recounted on the train from Rome to Milan: the struggle beside Gerard McDonnell to free the two trapped South Koreans and Jumik Bhote; McDonnell subsequently wandering away in a hypoxic haze; his subsequent death in the avalanche. It was one of the most devastating chapters of the entire tragedy. But recently, McDonnell’s family had begun to dispute it.

  Confortola stuck tenaciously to his story, but McDonnell’s family put forth a rival account, the rewriting led by Annie Starkey, McDonnell’s partner in Alaska. She could not believe that McDonnell would walk away from the trapped climbers, no matter what pressure his mind and body were under. In fact, she insisted it was McDonnell who had stayed and Marco Confortola who had climbed down. It was not McDonnell whom Confortola saw killed in the avalanche but instead another climber entirely, Karim Meherban, Hugues d’Aubarède’s high-altitude porter. She had photographs she believed showed Karim on the top of the serac before he fell. McDonnell had freed the trapped mountaineers and was descending behind them when he was thrown to his death by a separate avalanche.

  For evidence, Starkey relied, among other things, on a radio call that Pemba Gyalje said he had received from Pasang Bhote. In the call, according to Gyalje, the Sherpa reported having reached the trapped climbers and that he was guiding them back down toward Camp Four, just minutes before they were swept away in the serac collapse. Pasang also said he had seen a climber in a red and black suit following behind. In Gyalje and Starkey’s view, this was Gerard McDonnell, who had just freed the Koreans and Jumik Bhote.

  When I sought out the opinion of Chris Klinke, the American climber who had been closely involved in coordinating the rescue attempt from Base Camp, he said, “I don’t believe Gerard freed the Koreans; they had been hanging there for twenty-four hours, and you don’t just get up and walk down after that, though he may have rescued Jumik Bhote. I believe however it was Gerard that Marco saw killed.”

  I also called Michael Kodas, a climber and author who writes about mountaineering and who knew some of the people involved in the tragedy. He said he had studied the photographs of the serac and Bottleneck on the morning of August 2, purportedly taken by Pemba Gyalje and publish
ed on the website ExplorersWeb, which Starkey claimed showed Gerard working to free the climbers. But Kodas was unconvinced. The narrative Starkey and ExplorersWeb had imposed on them was just “too perfect,” he said. In a follow-up email, he said that the “evidence—Pemba’s supposition that the man described in a radio call from a now-dead colleague was Gerard, tiny dots in photos that can’t be identified for certain as climbers, much less as specific climbers engaged in a rescue, and a faint line in the top of the glacier—one of scores of such marks—was inadequate “to contradict the description of the only living eyewitness to the events,” Marco Confortola.

  It is possible that McDonnell stayed or returned after Marco Confortola descended and helped the two Korean climbers and Jumik Bhote begin their journey down. If it is true, it could be one of the most selfless rescue attempts in the history of high-altitude mountaineering. Confortola would be right in his speech in Rome to say McDonnell deserved at least part of his medal. Even the fact that, in Confortola’s account, McDonnell stayed for one and a half hours alongside the Italian to try to free the climbers is unimaginably brave. It sits alongside other acts of heroism over those three days, such as Chhiring Dorje’s descent tied to Little Pasang, Fredrik Strang and Eric Meyer’s ascent to try to resuscitate Dren Mandic, the decision by Pemba Gyalje to retrieve Marco Confortola. And, perhaps most of all, the willing climb by Big Pasang Bhote, and behind him by Chhiring Bhote, into the terrifying dangers of the Bottleneck to reach their cousin and brother Jumik, only for Big Pasang to lose his life.

  It is a terrible sadness that McDonnell died. It is made worse that we will never know for sure about those last minutes of his life, just as we will never know for certain what Big Pasang found at the top of the Bottleneck.

  This was the point in the story about which there was sharpest disagreement, but it was not the only one. In piecing together the tragedy, I had expected a clear narrative but I found myself in some postmodern fractured tale. For example, I put it to the Serbs that in the final ascent to the summit, their HAP had turned around and that important equipment he was carrying was left behind below Camp Four. They retorted that this was ridiculous. The lack of equipment for the summit bid was someone else’s fault. Chhiring Dorje, the Sherpa in the American expedition, told me how he caught Wilco van Rooijen when the Dutchman slipped on his way up in the Bottleneck, and several others corroborated this version of events; but Van Rooijen reacted with surprise when I asked him about the incident. Many people I have interviewed claimed that it was under the Korean team’s influence that the ropes were set low before the Bottleneck and that their climbers were responsible for the extremely slow progress across the Traverse. But when I caught up with Go Mi-sun and Kim Jae-soo in a guesthouse in Islamabad, they claimed that the ropes on the Bottleneck had been set too far to the right—this had nothing to do with the Korean team and it was this that had caused the delay. And the real reason for the late descent was that exhausted climbers from other expeditions were using their ropes on the way down and holding everybody else up.