Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day (11 page)

Karim embraced his wife and his children, grabbed his pack, and left the house he’d built. He walked down the irrigation channel, crossing barley fields cloaked in
waki sholm wush
, a yellow wildflower. Karim’s father, Shadi, met him by the jeep track that runs through the village. Shadi also tried to convince Karim to stay.

No Shimshali has ever died on K2, Karim replied. Then, to make the assurance ironclad, he added, “Father, I’m going with Shaheen.”

As he listened to his son, Shadi stared at the riverbed and remembered how three glaciers—the Khurdopin, the Virjerab, and the Yukshin—had once conspired to exterminate the village. Slow-flowing rivers of ice, the glaciers drain their summer meltwater through a subterranean channel. A natural ice dam constricts the flow, blocking a torrent. In 1964, the dam broke. Snowmelt gushed down, and the river rose 90 feet. It uprooted apricot orchards, hurled homes down the valley, and washed away half the settlement. Villagers scrambled to higher ground. The water tore through the gorge that leads out of Shimshal and demolished the village of Passu 40 miles downstream. Nature had devastated Shadi’s family once. He knew it could happen again.

Shadi looked back at his son and tried to reason with him. “I said, ‘You don’t need to climb K2 again.
What about carpentry?
’ But Karim smiled and told me: ‘Father, I can’t stop yet. Just this one summit, then maybe.’ ”

When Karim left that afternoon, Shadi watched the jeep disappear down the river basin, kicking up sand. He stayed fixed on the spot long after his son was gone.

“Insha’Allah,” he prayed—if God wills it.

PART II

CONQUEST

Shimshal to K2:
From Shimshal, the climbers drove to Askole, the village where the trail to K2 begins. This trekking path is too treacherous for jeeps, so climbers employ hundreds of low-altitude porters, who ferry food and supplies to Base Camp.

6

The Approach

T
he Karakorum Highway, barely two lanes wide, rolls through the intersection of the Karakorum, Himalaya, and Hindu Kush. The builders of the original road faced tribesmen who stalled construction by “
rolling down avalanches
of rocks upon them.” Blasting a modern highway from the cliffs was nearly as treacherous. It took twenty years and cost nine hundred lives—about a life a week. Today, jeeps bumping down the highway dodge pits and boulders, swerve around hairpin turns, and squeeze between trucks tricked out like pinball machines.

In June 2008, Karim Meherban left Hunza in a baby-blue Jeep Scrambler and jostled down the Karakorum Highway. He passed miners scraping rubies from the hillsides, children panning for gold along the river, and guards flaunting Kalashnikovs at military checkpoints. Near the town of Skardu, he passed an airfield and military compound best known as the home of the Fearless Five. Its hangar was emblazoned with a snarling snow leopard and a pentagram, signifying the squadron’s five tenets: sacrifice, courage, devotion, pride, and honor. The Fearless Five command a fleet of helicopters used to defend Pakistan’s borders and to airlift injured soldiers and avalanche survivors. Karim hoped he’d never need them.

Splashing through the milky-green water of the Shigar River basin, his Jeep then moved onto a rutted track, joining vehicles from other expeditions. Eight hours after leaving Skardu, Karim stopped at a dirt patch in Askole, the village at the end of the road. As the driver switched off the engine, local men mobbed the vehicle. Shouting welcomes and stirring a dust storm with their feet, they pulled supplies to the ground, unloading the cargo into snaking rows of stoves, tables, lawn chairs, blue plastic barrels, and duffels crammed with mountaineering gear.

These laborers are called
low-altitude porters
, or
LAPs
. Less expensive than mules, they ferry supplies across terrain too treacherous for jeeps. Pakistan’s Ministry of Tourism estimated that, in 2008, low-altitude porters were hired to carry 5,600 loads from Askole to peaks such as K2, Broad Peak, Trango Towers, and Gasherbrums I and II. A seven-member expedition to K2 might hire 120 LAPs a season, spending $10,000. Low-altitude porters “are your umbilical cord during a climb,” said Rehmat Ali, a porter coordinator for Nazir Sabir Expeditions. “Mountaineers don’t have a shot at the summit without them.”

In 2008, the low-altitude porters carried all kinds of things to K2: ropes, tents, orthopedic pillows, Cajun popcorn, chickens, skin mags, hand warmers, raspberry liqueur—whatever their clients paid for. The Flying Jump had its porters bring in a jug of pickled seaweed; Nick Rice, a climber from California, had porters shoulder a seventy-pound generator so he could power his laptop and access his blog—which, by the end of the climb, would receive two million hits. The porters weighed the loads on a hand scale and, when possible, divided them into fifty-four-pound piles, the limit established by their union. With strips of fabric, they bound the loads onto wooden frames and hoisted them onto their backs, beginning the sixty-mile slog to K2.

As the low-altitude porters weighed in and left, the climbers exchanged satellite-phone numbers and audited each other, counting the peaks they’d bagged and the friends they’d lost. They told each other to quit climbing, but not yet. Some Serbians who had been soldiers compared leaving Askole with marching off to war. Beyond this outpost, there would be no more orchards, no more children, no more laws.

The hundreds of porters, trudging one behind the other, formed human trains stretching for miles. At noon, nearly everyone stopped while the Muslims dropped their packs to perform
salat.
Turning southwest toward Mecca, they pressed their foreheads to cloth laid on the scree, bowing to praise Allah. Then the work continued.

Thrashing through an undergrowth of scrub and wild rose, the porters brushed against spines as long as sewing needles. When temperatures scorched to 115 degrees, the men doused their heads in the side creeks and balanced along tracks cut in the cliffs. After two days, the poplars vanished, then the grass. The Baltoro Glacier, a thirty-five-mile tongue of ancient ice, rippled ahead. To the north stood the earth’s tallest rock walls, the Trango Towers. Beneath the ice, a rush of subglacial melt could be heard, feeding the Braldu River. Sometimes the sun punched through the clouds, and from a single point in the sky, amber beams radiated downward in columns.

Within a week, the climbers had reached Concordia, where the Baltoro Glacier collides with the smaller Godwin-Austen Glacier. As the buckling ice cracked like rifle shots, K2 stood before them, a dusty carpet of ice and scree rolling off its slopes. Framed by lesser peaks, the pyramid seemed to prop up the weight of the sky.

The Approach to K2:
The week-long trek from Askole to K2 runs up the icy tongue of the Baltoro Glacier. Near Base Camp, 18,000 feet above sea level, a makeshift cairn known as the Gilkey Memorial commemorates those claimed by the mountain.

On this, his third attempt of the mountain, Karim must have admired K2’s symmetry and dreamed of the summit. At Concordia, still a day and a half’s walk from K2, he pitched his tent next to the Sherpas’. Buddhist chanting was audible. As an Ismaili Muslim who believed in no god but Allah, Karim would never have prayed to a vacant mountaintop. To him, K2 wasn’t a goddess—just a vicious piece of rock.

The low-altitude porters and the foreign climbers spent a week together but kept their lives segregated. “I don’t remember any of their names,” said Marco Confortola, a climber from Italy. It was a challenge even to discuss practical issues with them, such as work he wanted done. Most porters spoke uncommon languages, such as Balti, Khowar, Wakhi, Shina, and Burushaski. Marco spoke Italian. Cultural barriers, such as Marco’s appreciation of salami, made matters worse. Keeping
halal
according to Quranic dietary rules, the porters avoided pork and its by-products. As Muslims, some considered it immodest when Western women wore shorts and were disconcerted when the climbers showed a gay romance on DVD. “
Brokeback Mountain
shocked me,” said
Yaqub
, a twenty-seven-year-old porter from Gulapur. He watched it anyway.

Like most of his peers, Yaqub ate and socialized away from his clients and slept out in the open. The porters even had their own latrines. “It felt a lot like separate but equal,” recalled Nick Rice, “but I preferred the porter toilets. The white guys got sick and made a mess in theirs.”

Low- and high-altitude porters found the cultural exchange educational and downplayed their employers’ transgressions. “I was amused,” said Shah Jehan, a fifty-three-year-old from the village of Kuardo. He had overheard a couple from the Flying Jump having noisy sex in their tent. “We don’t encounter that kind of thing in Pakistan, but why should I mind? That’s how they do it in Korea.”

The expedition was also paying him good money. The average Pakistani worker earns $2.81 a day; Shah Jehan and other low-altitude porters made $9 a day, or about 90 cents an hour, assuming that every day they crossed two camps and worked ten hours. The porters could earn even more by pocketing a cash allowance for boots, socks, and shades. Expedition companies used to provide their porters with this crucial equipment, but many porters resold it the same day. “If you don’t scratch the sunglasses, you can get 100 rupees [$1.20] for them at the bazaar in Skardu,” said Shujaat Shigri, a thirty-six-year-old low-altitude porter from Gulapur. “That’s a lot of money.”

Now all porters receive the equivalent of a signing bonus intended for gear. Some buy adequate equipment. Some buy the minimum. Some buy nothing at all. Porters often walk barefoot or use cheap flip-flops to preserve the soles of their better shoes. Others wear mismatched sneakers discarded by former clients. When snowstorms hit, expeditions hand out charity supplies on a last-minute, as-needed basis, but there’s never enough, and some porters would rather suffer and resell the gear than actually use it. Toes freeze and eyeballs, seared by ultraviolet rays bouncing off the snow, flush to the color of pomegranates.

Low-altitude porters can earn more by moving quickly. If they’re fast and the weather cooperates, they can manage five or six round trips to K2 in a season. “If I carry three loads, I can earn enough to last the whole year,” said Zaman Ali, a nineteen-year-old low-altitude porter from Tisar village, where he farms barley, peas, and wheat. Some loads, he explained, are better than others. “Tents and pots are the most prestigious” because they are needed throughout the trek in, he said. He carried the mess tent for the Serbian team in 2008. If he had carried rice, it might have been consumed en route, and he would have been sent back early and earned less.

Although porter strikes used to be routine, they were rare in 2008, because “all the expeditions agreed to our pay scale and standards,” said Jaffer Wazir, president of the porters’ union, Khurpa Care. To discourage expeditions from renegotiating these terms, porters carried laminated Khurpa Care ID cards and brochures that explained their civil rights.

Nonetheless, two-thirds of the porters heading to K2 were uninsured, despite Pakistani regulations that say expedition outfitters must insure them all, said Syed Amir Raza, general manager of Islamabad’s Alpha Insurance, the only company that insures Pakistan’s porters. The policy costs the equivalent of $1.75 per month and pays out $1,200 for deaths due to “visible accidents.” If no one witnesses the death—as commonly happens when porters are spread out or lost in a crevasse—the policy is void. On average, two insured porters die a qualifying death every year. Nobody tracks the deaths of
the uninsured
.

The foreign climbers also had to take their chances: Their lives were
uninsurable
. Even specialized insurers, such as Patriot Extreme, decline to extend coverage to climbers for accidents and deaths above 14,760 feet. That’s lower than K2 Base Camp.

Medical evacuations for the critically injured aren’t automatic, either. Pakistan used to provide emergency airlifts for the injured whenever Fearless Five pilots could land, but nobody reimbursed the army for these trips. It cost Pakistani taxpayers an arm and a leg so foreigners might save a toe, said Brigadier M. Bashir Baz, chief executive of Askari Aviation, which dispatches the choppers. Now the government requires every mountaineering expedition to register with Askari and to deposit a $6,000 refundable bond, but only three-quarters of the 2008 expeditions did this, he said. “And if you don’t pay the deposit in advance,” he said, “we won’t pick you up.”

In his office in Islamabad, Brigadier Baz displays a bumper sticker beneath the glass on his desk and directs climbers to read it: “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.” When climbers refuse to pay, he shakes his head in disgust, visualizing the quixotic legions, unbonded and uninsured, marching toward the Savage Mountain.

The 2008 expeditions pitched Base Camp on a rocky glacier two miles from the foot of K2, a safe distance from avalanches. Green and yellow domes sprouted from the ice like mushrooms, sponsorship banners flanking their sides. By late June, Base Camp had swelled into a multicultural tent city, population 120. Laughter and rock music piped out of the tent flaps. Generators whirred amid snarls of power cables. Damp socks steamed in the sun. Solar panels baked.