K2 Read online

  The window of clear, windless weather arrived at the very end of July. In the group of thirty who set out early on August 1 to go for the top, there were no superstars. Many of those climbers, however, had previous experience on the world’s highest mountains. A Norwegian couple, for instance, had climbed Everest together in 2005; they had also reached the north and the south poles the same year. The Dutch leader, who had made it to the top of Everest without bottled oxygen, was on his third expedition to K2. Besides Norway, Holland, and France, the mountaineers came from an assortment of countries, including Korea, Serbia, Singapore, Italy, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. There were also several Pakistanis and a number of Sherpa from Nepal.

  Nearly all those climbers set out on August 1 from Camp IV, situated on a broad snow ridge known as the Shoulder, at about 26,000 feet. The Shoulder is the last place on the Abruzzi Ridge where you can reasonably pitch a tent. In 1992, Scott, Charley, and I placed our own Camp IV as far along the Shoulder as we could, just below where the snow slope steepens toward the start of the Bottleneck couloir. Last summer’s climbers, however, pitched their tents on the lower, southern end of the Shoulder. The difference may not seem like such a big deal, but we had good reasons for camping where we did. At altitude, in soft snow, it can easily take a full hour to trudge from one end of the Shoulder to the other. That’s an hour we saved over last summer’s climbers. That’s an extra hour added to their grueling summit day on the way up, and at least twenty minutes on the way down.

  If there was one guy last summer who really had his act together, it was the Basque mountaineer Alberto Zerain, who started his own summit push from well below the Shoulder, leaving Camp III at 23,600 feet. Operating as a soloist without teammates, Zerain got moving by 10:00 P.M. on July 31, and he climbed the 2,400 feet up to the Shoulder in the astonishing time of only two hours. When he reached the other climbers’ Camp IV, he found them still struggling to get ready. According to Freddie Wilkinson, who covered the tragedy for the magazine Rock and Ice, “Zerain called out to the others still in their tents, trying to cajole them into hurrying up to leave with him. He received few responses…. After an hour of waiting, Zerain finally continued alone.”

  I must admit that when I first saw photos from last summer, I was shocked. There those guys were, still crossing the Shoulder, and it’s already broad daylight! As I said, I’m generally not comfortable criticizing other climbers’ decisions. But that late start on summit day meant that the climbers had reduced what was already a small margin of safety by that much more.

  It’s easy to succumb to high-altitude lassitude. You lose your motivation. It takes longer not only to do something but even to think about doing something.

  It’s no fun getting off in the middle of the night from a high camp on an 8,000er. You’re in this closet-sized tent with your buddy. It’s dark, it’s cold, there’s ice everywhere. You have to brew up a drink—something warm, like a cup of tea. And that seemingly simple task alone can consume an hour of precious time. If your partner has to take a crap, you have to move aside and let him go out and do that. Then you have to put on your boots, your overboots, the rest of your clothes, and your harness. I always sleep with my boots in my sleeping bag, though not on my feet. Lots of climbers don’t. So in the morning they have to put on cold boots, which will instantly suck precious warmth from their feet, whose blood circulation is sorely taxed to begin with. That contributes to a bad start.

  On my expeditions, I’ve always been the clock-watcher. I always have a plan. I want to be in control of the time. In a way, that’s just part of my nature—I tend to be punctual. The night before, I’ll remind my partners, “We need to be out the door by one or one-thirty A.M.” Other climbers seem to have the attitude of “Oh, I’ll leave when I’m ready.” Next thing you know, they’ve lost two or three hours.

  So I have to think that a crucial mistake made by nearly all the climbers on August 1 was getting off late from Camp IV. That delay was compounded by what happened when the first climbers reached the bottom of the Bottleneck.

  As you head up that steep couloir, you’re excruciatingly aware of the huge ice cliff hanging over you. It’s a monstrous-looking thing, some 400 feet high, and the whole time you’re under it, you can’t help wondering, What’s holding that damned serac in place?

  In 1992, I nicknamed the ice cliff “the Motivator.” It certainly motivated Scott, Charley, and me. It threatens you the whole time. You don’t want to stop, you can’t take a break, and as you kick steps up the couloir, you’re literally holding your breath while you climb as fast as humanly possible. Your muscles almost scream from oxygen deprivation.

  The first mountaineer who ever came to grips with the Motivator was the great Fritz Wiessner, in 1939. He was so leery of it that he chose to climb a different route, on the rock bands well to the left of the Bottleneck, even though that forced him onto much more difficult terrain.

  Before our 1992 expedition, I’d studied every photo I could find of that serac. Oddly enough, the Motivator looked much the same year after year. It seemed to be pretty stable. It had a fairly smooth face—there weren’t big broken chunks that looked ready to plunge with the first gust of wind. And in more than fifty years, no one had ever reported seeing ice calve away from that face.

  Since we had the Bottleneck to ourselves in ‘92, we climbed it as fast as we could. That was a luxury 2008’s climbers didn’t have. As soon as the guys in the lead reached the bottom of the couloir, the whole procession stalled. The climbers lined up, one after another, but no one could move faster than the slowest man. The climb quickly turned into a traffic jam. On top of that, matters were made much worse by the climbers’ common assumption that they needed fixed ropes to get up and down the Bottleneck safely.

  Afterward, some of the survivors lashed out at other climbers on the mountain, accusing them of making mistakes that led directly to the tragedy. No one was more critical than Wilco van Rooijen, the forty-year-old leader of the Dutch Norit K2 expedition. “Everything was going well to Camp IV,” he told the press from his hospital bed, “and on the summit attempt everything went wrong.” To a reporter from Reuters, van Rooijen elaborated: “The biggest mistake we made was that we tried to make agreements…. Everybody had his own responsibility and then some people did not do what they promised. With such stupid things lives are endangered.”

  Since there were so many different teams on the mountain, their leaders had crafted the “agreements” to which van Rooijen referred. The plan was for nine climbers to string almost 2,000 feet of rope up the Bottleneck and across the leftward traverse that leads to easier ground. On August 1, however, the available supply of rope was at least 300 feet short—causing the leaders to doubt whether there was enough to equip the whole dangerous passage. In addition, as van Rooijen complained to Men’s Journal correspondent Matthew Power, several of the nine lead climbers “just didn’t show up.”

  Then, to make matters worse, the rope fixers started stringing their lines too low, on the relatively easy ground before the Bottleneck really commences. By the time they got to the most hazardous part of the climb, they were out of rope. “We were astonished,” van Rooijen later told the Associated Press. “We had to move [the fixed ropes]. That took, of course, many, many hours. Some turned back because they didn’t trust it any more.” Speaking to Power, the Dutchman was even more scathing: “We lost many, many hours because of this stupid thing, which we already talked about many, many times at Base Camp.”

  I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy it. Van Rooijen claims he couldn’t climb because the ropes had not been fixed in the right places. Well, whose fault was that? Does your success depend on what other people do? Van Rooijen blames the others for the delay. Why didn’t he get out and do something?

  Meanwhile, the solo Basque climber, Alberto Zerain, was hours ahead of all the others. He had cruised up the Bottleneck and across the traverse without even thinking about f
ixed ropes. Zerain would reach the summit at 3:00 P.M.—the only climber that day, in my opinion, to top out at a reasonable hour.

  Some 1,600 feet lower on the mountain, the traffic jam had ground to a halt. According to Power, “A decision was made to cut a lower section of the rope and use it to protect climbers as they made their way across the traverse [leading leftward from the top of the Bottleneck]. A knife was passed down to cut the rope near its bottom anchor, and the rope was pulled back up to the head of the line.”

  At around 11:00 A.M., the first fatality occurred. Somewhere in the middle of the traffic jam, a Serbian climber, Dren Mandic, unclipped himself from the fixed rope. Afterward, all kinds of explanations about what Mandic was attempting to do appeared in print and on the Internet. Among other things, he was accused of trying to leapfrog past other climbers. The most accurate account was probably that offered in the public announcement by the Serbian team, mourning the loss of their comrade. In broken English, the team leader reported, “Wishing to replace himself with climber behind him DREN undo his assurance. Fix-rope relocated suddenly. DREN loosed his counterbalance and fell down to 8020 m [26,300 feet] where his body was stopped.”

  As he fell, Mandic slammed into the next climber on the fixed rope, Cecilie Skog. (Skog and her husband, Rolf Bae, were the experienced Norwegian couple trying to climb K2 together.) Skog was knocked off her feet but managed to stay attached to the fixed rope. According to Wilco van Rooijen, as reported by Matthew Power,

  Still falling, Mandic grabbed wildly at the rope, jerking two other climbers off their feet. He then lost his grip and tumbled down the steep couloir, pinwheeling hundreds of feet back down toward the Shoulder. “Just one moment, and he was gone,” says Wilco.

  Uncertain whether their teammate was still alive, two Serbians and a Pakistani porter descended to his body. By the time they got there, Mandic was dead. According to Power, however, over the radio from base camp, the Serbian team leader ordered that trio to try to haul the body back to Camp IV. As they began the effort, the porter, Jehan Baig—described by Power as “inexperienced”—suddenly slipped and fell. Eyewitnesses claimed that Baig never tried to self-arrest with his ice ax. Instead, he cartwheeled down the slope and plunged out of sight over a cornice.

  If Power is correct in his assertion that the body recovery was ordered by the team leader, that directive strikes me as questionable at best. It’s hard enough to help a sick or wounded climber descend under his own power from 26,000 feet on an 8,000er; it’s virtually impossible to haul a dead body from such a perilous perch back to camp. It’s not clear what the ultimate point of that mission would have been, since the body could never have been taken all the way down the mountain. That order, if in fact it was given, cost Jehan Baig his life. It’s curious that in his public announcement, the Serbian team leader made no mention of Baig’s death. Instead, he wrote, “We muffled our friend’s body in the Serbian flag, secured it with pickaxe and put it on 7,900 m [25,900 feet] to the right from direction C4-Bottleneck. Our friend rest near the heaven. Let God bless him.”

  It’s also unclear how many of the climbers stuck in the traffic jam were even aware that Mandic had fallen to his death. Almost certainly, none of them knew about the second fatal accident down below. In any event, now that the rope salvaged from the bottom of the Bottleneck had been fixed in place on the culminating traverse (the hardest part of the whole route), most of the climbers in the traffic jam kept plodding, ever so slowly, upward.

  One of the few in the crowd who had decided to turn around and give up his summit attempt, the American Chris Klinke took an amazing photo of the upper mountain from Camp IV just after noon on August 1. (The shot, which captures in a single image the fiasco that was unfolding on K2 that day, was run splashed across a two-page spread in Men’s Journal.) The picture is so sharp that you can clearly see twenty-two tiny, insectlike human figures on the route. At the bottom of the photo, well below the Bottleneck, two of them are engaged in the effort to recover Mandic’s body, only minutes before Baig would fall to his death. Most of the climbers have finally escaped the Bottleneck and the traverse, but the traffic jam is alive and well: nineteen of the climbers are so tightly bunched that it looks as though each one is on the verge of stepping on the heels of the climber in front of him. Far, far above even the leader of the traffic jam, a solitary climber—Alberto Zerain—rests in the lee of a small serac before starting on to the summit.

  In my view, many of those climbers still heading upward ought to have thought a little more seriously about turning back. Turnaround times aren’t an ironclad rule on K2, but I believe in them for myself. On our own summit day, Scott and I got moving from Camp IV at 1:30 A.M. Charley, who started a little later, caught up with us, having followed the tracks we’d kicked in the deep snow. I had resolved that if we didn’t summit by 2:00 P.M., I’d turn around. As it was, we topped out at noon.

  In August 2008, I suspect, summit fever took over in the traffic jam. All those climbers were piled together. They were slow together, and they were late together, and that probably rationalized their decision to continue toward the summit together, so late that the sun would be setting as they topped out. Only a few of them thought better of it and turned around. On a mountain like K2, nobody gives you credit for making the smart decision to give up the summit and go down.

  In 1990, an acquaintance of mine, Greg Child, an outstanding Aussie mountaineer transplanted to the United States, climbed K2 by its north ridge, a considerably harder route than the Abruzzi. Recently I reread Greg’s account of the climb, published as “A Margin of Luck” in his collection of essays Mixed Emotions. Greg has a sardonic, even self-mocking style, so some of the things he writes in that piece may be tongue-in-cheek. Even so, it’s clear that he had a desperate time on summit day.

  At 27,500 feet, only 750 feet below the top, Greg and his partners Greg Mortimer and Steve Swenson discussed what to do. It was already past 4:00 P.M.

  Swenson looks down: “Should we go for it?” A long pause follows. Nothing could be more uncertain.

  “Yes!” Mortimer finally shouts, prodding us into action and out of this inertia of doubt.

  “This is crazy,” I think to myself. “A storm is moving in and we’re going for the summit, without oxygen, without bivouac gear.” But, I rationalize, this is our last shot at the mountain. If we go down now, we’ll never climb K2. A little more luck is all we need.

  That exchange is incredibly similar to the one I had in 1992 with Scott and Charley as heavy snow began to fall. We, too, were above 27,000 feet. I remember asking, “Hey, what do you guys think?” “Whaddya mean?” Scott answered, and Charlie chimed in, “We’re going up!”

  In 1990, Greg Child reached the summit only at 8:05 P.M. He didn’t start down until 9:00. That descent in the dark—”staggering, falling in the snow”—turned into what climbers mordantly call “an all-out epic.” Greg started to have hallucinations. Finding an empty oxygen cylinder in a circle of rocks, he fantasized:

  I’m seeing an image in my mind of me hunkered among the rocks, warming my hands over a campfire. “That’s right,” I think, “I’ll build a fire down there. When Mortimer arrives we’ll get nice and warm.” I’ve got it all worked out.

  Only 300 feet short of the tent, Greg became “completely apathetic” and collapsed. He literally crawled the last stretch to safety.

  Man, I thought, as I reread Greg’s essay, that was scary, to go that long and that late. I wouldn’t have done that. Greg’s a really strong climber. A weaker mountaineer wouldn’t have survived.

  Messner himself is famous for having wild hallucinations on the 8,000ers, especially when he was climbing alone. But I’ve always felt that if I started to hallucinate, I was doing something wrong.

  The fourth member of Greg’s team in 1990, Phil Ershler, did turn back. And Ershler, as a senior guide at Rainier Mountaineering, Inc. (RMI), had been one of my most important mentors. On our own summit day in 1992, as I carried that
knot in my gut and couldn’t make up my mind whether to go up or down, I kept thinking, Well, Ershler turned around.

  As he headed down from the summit in August 2008, Alberto Zerain passed no fewer than eighteen climbers still going for the top. According to Men’s Journal:

  Though he doesn’t speak English, [Zerain] claims he tried to tell the others that it was getting too late to continue. “As I descended,” he explains, “everyone stopped to ask me how far it was to the summit. Did I tell the people to turn around? No, you can’t. There are a lot of people, and they are all going up together. It’s the majority against you.”

  (There’s a succinct definition of summit fever!)

  Some of the climbers that day may well have pondered turning around. But one of the more experienced, the Italian Marco Confortola, tried to rally them onward. “I started shouting,” he later told reporters. “I told them that the first person to reach the summit of K2 [in 1954] did it at 6:00 P.M., so let’s move!”

  At least one climber in the throng, the Norwegian Rolf Bae, stopped below the top. Only 300 vertical feet short of the prized goal, Bae waited for his wife, Cecilie Skog, and another teammate to tag the summit and return.

  Besides Zerain, seventeen others reached the top. Their arrival times ranged from 5:20 P.M. to after 7:00 P.M. For some, this meant that they had been going for twenty hours since leaving camp that morning. They were already pretty worn out.

  By the time those summiteers got back to the diagonal snow ramp that leads down to the tricky traverse and the Bottleneck, it was pitch-dark. And most of them were exhausted.