Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day (18 page)

Thinking about the goddess reminded him of the rice and barley in his pocket. Still suspended from an ice screw beside the Bottleneck, he removed the Ziploc bag and flung the contents into the air. They shimmered in space. Suddenly a gust of wind grabbed the grains and spat them back in his face. The offering had been rejected.

It took until 2 p.m.—the planned turnaround time—for the members of the Flying Jump to break through the Bottleneck. “We were too slow,” Pasang recalled, “and we were burning through our oxygen too fast.” But he didn’t raise these concerns with his boss. Mr. Kim had already been clear enough: Pasang wasn’t hired to retreat; he was hired to lead. In this spirit, Pasang, now in front of the pack, blazed the trail above the Bottleneck. Seventeen people followed him.

Trying to make up for lost time, Pasang pushed himself but struggled with the terrain. He was now on the Traverse, the steep, exposed ridge that cuts under the seracs, tracing the mountain’s southeast face. As he climbed, his crampons scraped and clicked against the granite. To maintain purchase, Pasang had to deliberate over each step. “I told myself concentrate, concentrate, concentrate. Only think about the next step.”

About two hours later, he reached the Snow Dome, the lump of ice that bridges into snowfield below the summit. Pasang waded in and sank to his hips. Plowing forward, he checked his oxygen pressure gauge and turned the flow to low, below one liter a minute. He climbed faster, probing for weak snow bridges. It was 4 p.m.

His legs pumped forward, making a deep furrow in the snow, but he wasn’t on solid ground. One of Pasang’s boots punched through the crust, the ice around the ankle broke away, and his leg dropped into a crevasse.

His reactions were quick. As he sank, Pasang fanned out his elbows, spreading his weight. He dropped slowly, and by the time he stopped sinking, he’d been swallowed only to the waist. One boot dangled into space. Keeping his weight on his arms, Pasang wriggled left and right, flipped his knees to his chest, and belly-flopped over the lip of the crevasse. He clawed himself out and away.

Once standing, he patted his body to see if he’d lost any gear. It was all there, but his thoughts were scattered. The dip into the crevasse had left him shaken. If the crust he’d stepped on had been any thinner, he’d have fallen inside a splinter of ice and shattered his limbs. Unable to clamber up or make himself heard, he might have waited in the stillness to die.

Pasang wanted to ensure that this didn’t happen to anyone, so he pulled out a wand with a flag, marking the snow bridge he had broken. Before starting the climb again, he scanned his surroundings. Ahead of him, a solitary red suit was tromping down the mountain. Pasang recognized Alberto Zerain, the Basque climber on the lead team who had surged ahead of everyone at the Bottleneck. Alberto flashed a zinc-oxide–streaked grin, and Pasang recognized the look: summit glow. “I was thinking, ‘How is this possible?’ ” Pasang recalled. Alberto had soloed up the rest of K2, topping out at 3 p.m., hours ahead of everyone else. Now he was on his way down. “That guy made K2 look easy.”

Alberto dug his heels into the slope, advancing on Pasang, but he was approaching a crevasse. “I tried to get his attention,” Pasang recalled. “I waved my hands and yelled, ‘Not this side! Crevasses! Not this side!’ ”

Alberto waved back but also stepped forward. The buttress beneath the snow bridge gave under his weight, and he lurched in. Unfazed, he wriggled out like a worm, and, a moment later, was descending again, digging his heels into the slope just as before.

When the two men met, Pasang shook Alberto’s hand, congratulating him for a successful summit. Although there had been radio chatter, Pasang didn’t brief him about the deaths in the Bottleneck. It would have ruined the moment. “If I had witnessed those falls, I wouldn’t have cared about the mountain anymore,” Alberto later said. “I’d have lost the pleasure.” Both men were in a hurry, and they went in opposite directions.

Pasang envied Alberto, who was heading down to hot soup and a sleeping bag. Pasang watched him weave through the pack of climbers. As Alberto passed, several Flying Jump members motioned to him as if asking directions on a motorway. They wanted to know how many more hours to the top. Alberto shrugged, barely slowing. “I wasn’t going to try to predict how long it would take them to reach the summit,” he recalled. Climbers move at different speeds. Alberto assessed their pace and wanted to suggest a U-turn, but he hesitated. Turning around was a personal decision, he decided, between a mountaineer and his maker.

It was 4:45 p.m., and Pasang realized he was wasting time watching Alberto. Annoyed with himself, he turned away and resumed kicking steps. The summit reared ahead of him like a cobra’s hood. Sundown would bring a temperature plunge that wouldn’t stop until dawn. Pasang was late, at a time when every second counted. The slower he went, the deeper he would climb into the night.

After so much fantasy and anticipation, the summit was unglamorous. When he summited at 5:30 p.m., Pasang stood atop the pinnacle of a 100-foot snow ramp, with a ditch to the west where exhausted climbers had defecated. That was it. Unlike the summit of Everest, no prayer flags lay in weathered clumps. The snow beneath his boots looked like any other snow. Nevertheless, Pasang recalled, “it was the most perfect place.”

Stepping to the highest point of the ridge, he slung off his pack, crowed and whooped. For an instant, exhaustion evaporated. The panorama dizzied him. The sun was slipping like a brass coin into a pocket behind K2, which cast a triangular shadow into the dark hills of Asia. A dusky band of purple swept around the horizon, and shadows snuffed out the lacy cornices of Chogolisa and Masherbrum. Down the Baltoro Glacier, the scree-paved glaciers at Concordia merged like a freeway interchange. At his back was China; to his face, Pakistan; and above, infinity. At 28,251 feet, Pasang was the highest human on earth.

He pulled a Sony camcorder from his pack and switched it on. He panned over the violet shoal of clouds and peaks and focused on the climbers marching up the summit ridge: his cousin Jumik; his boss, Mr. Kim; and the rest of the Flying Jump: Ms. Go, Park Kyeong-hyo, Hwang Dong-jin, and Kim Hyo-gyeong. Just ahead of the Flying Jump were two Norwegians, Lars Nessa and Cecilie, who had climbed the last stretch without her husband. In all, eighteen people topped out on August 1. As the sun set, the celebrations continued for as long as ninety minutes.

Wilco, the irritable Dutchman, replaced his pout with a beatific grin. He bear-hugged his teammate Ger, who howled: “We are on the summit of Kay-Toooo!”

Mr. Kim lit a cigarette, took a drag, and passed it to Jumik. Lars put on bunny ears and hopped. Karim prayed, taking in the divine sweep of earth and sky.

“I’ll never leave you again,” said Hugues, into a satellite phone. His girlfriend was listening. “I’m finished now. This time next year, our family will be
at the beach!
” He trained a camera on his teeth to satisfy the dentist in Lyon. Both Karim and Hugues were losing it. “They had used up their bottled oxygen and barely responded to our congratulations,” Wilco recalled.

Coughing and crying, the climbers yanked pageantry from their packs. Ger, the first Irishman to summit K2, dropped on one knee and hoisted Ireland’s tricolor flag in triumph. Chhiring, who summited at 6:37 p.m., unfurled his flag, kneeling with the double pennant before him like an apron.

Last on the summit, Marco waved a ski pole strung with the flags of Italy and Pakistan, plus two pennants representing his sponsors, the Métis temp agency and Credito Valtellinese bank. In the weak light, Marco removed the shell of his glove and punched twelve numerals into his sat-phone keypad. Battery life was short, so he kept it brief as he told his banker, Miro Fiordi, general director of Credito Valtellinese, the news. The bank’s sponsorship investment had paid off.

Like Marco, others felt similar obligations to sponsors who had subsidized their climb. Mr. Kim and Ms. Go modeled Kolon Sport, high fashion for 28,251 feet; Chhiring promoted ColdAvenger face masks; Wilco’s mango-colored downsuit displayed the triangular logo of Norit Group, a water filtration company that had provided a healthy six-figure contribution. Nearly every summit photo contained a logo or product placement. These mountaineers documented their triumph not only for posterity but also for publicity. The photos advertised their businesses, their skills, and their sponsors.

Fredrik, part of the team sponsored by ColdAvenger, had once estimated how much summits could be worth. On his website—under the heading “The Value to You!”—he explained to potential sponsors that a $120,000 investment could generate a $4.3 million public-relations value and brand recognition. “We can guarantee a PR ratio of 10 times the invested money,” he wrote, basing his estimate on the value of the resulting advertising. Corporate interests had been speculating on a K2 summit. On August 1, they hit pay dirt.

The high-altitude porters and the sherpas also cashed in when their clients topped out. For each mountaineer they ushered up, they earned a bonus of $1,000 or more. This money encouraged them to push clients who were unfit to continue. “When your family needs that money,” Pasang acknowledged, “sometimes you don’t insist a weak climber turn back.”

But summits also have a cost, and by 7:45 p.m. on August 1, the human price was becoming apparent. The Flying Jump started lurching down the mountain like lushes leaving a bar—reveling, swearing, and puking on their boots. The summit party was over. Now they needed to find the way home.

PART III

DESCENT

Summit to Camp 4:
As the climbers descended in the gathering darkness, an avalanche severed the ropes through the Bottleneck. Some climbers tried to make it down without the fixed lines; others spent the night in the Death Zone.

10

Escape from the Summit

A
s Pasang left the summit, his head throbbed so relentlessly he could hear his pulse in his ears. Ahead of him, Mr. Kim squatted in the snow, waving his arms like a wizard casting spells. He had run out of oxygen.

Going off the bottle is harder than never having been on it at all. In the best case, you’re slammed by extreme exhaustion. The thin air can knock you out, just as it does to a fighter pilot with a failing oxygen mask. Cerebral or pulmonary edema can set in, filling the brain and lungs with fluid. In a worst case, the body revolts with acute vasospasm as arteries constrict, cutting blood supply to the organs. Within three minutes of acute vasospasm, cells wither in the heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, and brain. Within twenty minutes, the organs degrade to medical waste, and the climber does too.

Pasang could see headlamps fanning out below. Sucking a guilty breath from his regulator, he trudged forward and crouched beside Mr. Kim. Pasang’s boss was too tired to waste words. Kim tapped the side of his oxygen canister and pointed to the gauge, which registered empty. Pasang understood what was expected. He gestured for Mr. Kim to hold still. Kneeling down, he detached Kim’s empty cylinder and swapped it with his own.

His oxygen now gone, Pasang braced for the shock. It hit, but he remained functional, still able to climb and think. It may have helped that he was Bhote—a carrier of genotypic variants for NOS3, a gene that codes for an enzyme that helps modulate blood flow to the lungs—and was perhaps less susceptible to acute vasospasm. His clients, however, were at higher risk.

He and the rest of the Flying Jump had at least three hours to go before reaching the fixed lines on the Traverse, so Pasang decided to take a shortcut. He descended in a straight shot toward the Snow Dome, the massive lump that signaled the start of the Traverse and the fixed lines. The new route allowed the climbers to bypass the summit ridge, but the Snow Dome also had a sheer drop on one side. With no moonlight or stakes for direction, there was no discernible path. Climbers scattered in the darkness.

Pasang spotted a man veering left above the Snow Dome. It was Karim. He never turned around. Now heading away from the Traverse, he would end up on top of the seracs; instead of descending toward the Bottleneck, he’d climb high above it.

If the descent continued like this, Pasang knew delirium would pull his team apart. He herded the Flying Jump together and devised a plan to keep them from
stumbling and falling
. Pasang tied a Figure-8-on-a-bight, the first climbing knot he’d ever learned, and looped it over his axe. Plunging his axe into the snow, he handed the rest of the rope to Jumik, who uncoiled it while descending ahead of the group. When the line payed out, Jumik tied it to his axe, anchored in the snow. The rope, now strung between two axes, resembled a clothesline.

It led in the direction of the Traverse. The climbers gravitated toward this rope, clipping in and clutching on. Once they’d reached Jumik’s end of the clothesline, Pasang pulled out his axe, coiled the slack around his elbow, and raced ahead of the pack. Pasang and Jumik created and re-created this rope system about a dozen times, lower and lower toward the Snow Dome.

It served to guide the group, more or less. The rope caught the climbers when they slipped and kept them from making the disastrous left turn that had led Karim to the crown of the seracs. “It was saving lives,” said Chhiring, who used it. But the system was slow. After each step, men slumped over their ice axes or ski poles to rest and shivered for warmth. By sea-level standards, the night was frigid, about minus four degrees Fahrenheit; by K2 standards, it was moderate. On an ordinary evening, the jet stream would have tossed them to China, but August 1 was relatively windless, so the cold merely seared exposed flesh.

As Pasang anchored the last stretch of rope, he thought about his axe. More climbers, all clearly in need, had attached their Figure 8s to the line dangling from it. Pasang couldn’t recover his axe without dismantling a rope system that was serving as a lifeline.

Shivering, he waited, punching his fists out for warmth. More figures materialized in the darkness and attached to the line. Occasionally one climber stalled, forcing those behind him to wait. Pasang’s headlamp dimmed, and he was no closer to getting his axe back. “I had to make the decision: Take the axe or leave it.” He radioed his boss for approval to ditch the axe and descend.

Mr. Kim agreed that the axe wasn’t crucial: With fixed lines through the diagonal ridge, the Traverse, and the Bottleneck, Pasang could manage without one. Pasang started down and soon overtook Jumik, leaving him behind with several clients. Descending without an axe would be tough, Pasang thought, but not deadly.

Rolf was shivering uncontrollably when his wife reached him, but he smiled when he saw her. Debilitated by altitude, he had waited 300 vertical feet below the summit as Cecilie reached the top at 5:45 p.m. Now, about an hour later, the newlyweds were reunited. Lars, the third member of the Norwegian team, videotaped their exchange, one of their last:

“Are you freezing?” Cecilie asked.

“Not especially,” her husband replied.

Lars had removed the bunny ears he’d worn on the summit. He zoomed in on Rolf’s face. “Long day?” he asked.

They’d been climbing for seventeen hours, but Rolf’s tone sounded as though he were denouncing a desk job: “More than average.” With shaking fingers, he manipulated a chalky tablet of Dexamethasone, trying to bring the steroid to his lips. He dropped it, and the tablet hit the ice. “Oh, hell,” he said, “it broke.”

The newlyweds were the first to start down after Alberto. Behind them, Hugues seemed to be applying risk assessment: Out of oxygen, in pursuit of thicker air, he was moving down rapidly. Next in line was Cas van de Gevel, of the Dutch team, who, climbing even faster, caught up with Hugues along the Traverse. “It never occurred to me to ask Hugues, ‘Where’s your porter? Where’s Karim?’ ” Cas recalled. “When you see two people climbing together, then one is descending alone. . . . I would have known to ask if we’d been at sea level.” But the problem eluded him in the rarefied air.

Hugues stepped aside. “You are quicker,” he said. “
You go first
.”

Cas nodded, slid around Hugues, and resumed his descent.

When Cas arrived at the mouth of the Bottleneck, he was 30 feet in front of the Frenchman. That’s when he heard a noise—a scratching, like a rat in a wall. Cas looked back. Hugues, who had probably snagged a crampon, shot toward him. “I couldn’t see his face at such high speed,” Cas recalled. He only recognized the yellow-orange blur of Hugues’s downsuit whizzing past within an arm’s length. The insurance salesman with dazzling teeth was gone.

Just as a sealed glass jar full of water shatters when left in a freezer, refreezing meltwater in the seracs’ fissures was expanding, wedging apart the glacier’s interior cracks
.
As the pressure built, the seracs let off slow, elastic, electrified
zoings
. A percussion of pops, snaps, creaks, and booms accompanied the breaking ice. These sounds—high and low, short and long, soft and loud—overlapped in rhythm.

Pasang’s cousin Jumik was tied to two exhausted clients, wading through snowdrifts. As he approached the Traverse, the seracs hulked above him. As the
zoings
amplified, Jumik would have moved as fast as possible, frantically dragging his clients along, urging them to rush. But the
two Koreans with Jumik
could barely walk. Speed wouldn’t have mattered much, anyway. To avoid the falling ice, the three men needed a miracle.

The mountain announced its intentions with a drum roll:
Crrrrrk-crrrrk-crrrk-crrk-crk-ck
. The men would have looked up as the seracs crumbled, dropping chunks large enough to transform the terrain. One of these chunks sped toward Jumik, gouging out fixed lines. The three men, still attached to these fixed lines, were yanked downward.

Jumik’s boot tore off. His gloves flew away. One Korean’s German Rollei camera split open and his skull crunched. Down jackets ripped open, snowing feathers. Jumik may have thought he was going to die and been surprised when he didn’t. One of the anchors above him held. The rope cinched tight. The three men jerked to a standstill, coming to rest on a precipitous snow slope.

Dangling from the line’s end, Jumik hung upside down, blood pooling in his lungs and head. The rope had wound around Jumik’s trunk, binding him, and he was too tangled to adjust his clothing or cover his bare hands. Squirming free would have been impossible, and he would have only been able to see the ice two inches in front of his face.

At 9 p.m., about 50 yards from the Bottleneck, Rolf was hit by a serac fall. As chunks of hard ice sailed over the Traverse, one came so fast he had no chance to shout. It must have hit him head-on, severing the rope and burying him under tons of ice.

Twenty yards behind him, the tremor knocked his wife flat. Cecilie slid several feet, but the fixed line caught her. As she scrambled to stand again, the batteries shot out of her headlamp. Cecilie clutched the rope with a gloved hand, felt the limp end, and realized it no longer linked her to her husband. She scanned the slope for the glow of his headlamp. It had disappeared.

Cecilie was stunned, too horrified to move. This was supposed to be her honeymoon. From behind, Lars touched her shoulder. Cecilie stayed frozen. Lars said something as he stepped around her, but Cecilie heard him as though she were underwater. Dazed, she watched him shuffle in front. Lars examined the cord cut by the ice fall, pulled a 50-meter coil of thin rope from his pack, and secured it to one of the surviving ice screws. Then he rappelled down until his headlamp dimmed to a pinpoint.

Cecilie remained fixed in place. Without Lars’s light, darkness enveloped her. The ice creaked and the breeze whistled. She wondered why she was there. “I hadn’t seriously prepared myself for coming home alone without Rolf,” she recalled. “It was not something I could have prepared for. It’s a pain you can’t simulate.” She couldn’t climb—she didn’t want to. The desolation was complete and unbearable.

Lars’s voice jolted her out of contemplation. “Come here!” his cheerful tenor exclaimed from below. Had he found Rolf? Cecilie knew that climbers had survived worse falls. Maybe her husband had landed relatively unharmed.

“Rolf?” she yelled. “Rol
f
!” Her hope revived, she rappelled down the Bottleneck, repeating her husband’s name and shouting at Lars to tell her more. When the rope ended, Cecilie focused on climbing so she could reach her husband sooner. Axe, front point, front point. Axe, front point, front point.
Chuck, shink, shink. Chuck, shink, shink.

She couldn’t see her boots without the headlamp. Slipping once, she heaved her weight onto the axe and stopped herself. As she got closer to Lars, he shined his headlamp to guide her down. Finally, she could see Lars’s face. He looked crushed.

“
Where’s Rolf?
” she asked him, out of breath.

Lars wouldn’t lie to her now. “Rolf is gone.”

Despite the pain, Cecilie appreciated what her friend had done: “He had tricked me into descending.” Still, she held out hope that Lars was mistaken. Maybe Rolf was alive, somewhere below the Bottleneck. She kept calling for him and hoping, praying that he might be limping to camp on his own.