Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day (20 page)

On the crown of the seracs, another man was crouched in the snow, trying to survive. It’s hard to know how cold Karim Meherban became after taking a wrong turn, but he certainly suffered.

Hypothermia was unavoidable. As he shivered, Karim’s blood would have shunted away from his fingers, toes, and skin, gathering around his vital organs. If his body temperature fell to 96 degrees Fahrenheit, amnesia and disorientation would have dulled his pain and fear. At 86 degrees, he would have passed out. At 79 degrees, Karim’s heart and lungs would have stopped, but this is a reversible death. If rewarmed slowly at a hospital, a hypothermia victim can be resurrected hours after breathing stops, because the heart and brain require less oxygen when chilled. They don’t usually degrade much, despite the loss of circulation, and they can start up again once body temperature rises.

Along with hypothermia, Karim surely suffered from frostbite, which tends to strike the fingers, toes, ears, nose, and other extremities farthest from the heart. Ice crystals crowd around the cells, causing them to burst from the pressure. This makes the extremities itch. The itch progressively evolves into a deep, dull pain, similar to that of pressure on a bruise. As his nerves, muscles, blood vessels, and tendons froze, the pain would have subsided as Karim’s skin blanched to a waxy-white and then darkened to blue-gray.

But the cold didn’t kill him. With the heat at sunrise, his veins would have dilated slightly, sending blood coursing through some of his thawing tissues and causing a throbbing pain far worse than what he would have felt before. His digits probably stayed frozen and wooden, making it difficult to clench an ice axe tightly. Nevertheless, a photo taken at 9:58 a.m. on August 2 shows a climber—almost certainly Karim—standing on top of the seracs, to the east of the summit.

A photo of the same spot taken nine hours later shows a
skid mark
. Karim, perhaps unable to warm his muscles properly before he stood, must have slipped, his body carving through soft snow or powder. Just before the lip of the overhanging glacier, the track stops. Next to it is a horizontal trail of boot tracks. The bootprints lead toward the junction above the Snow Dome.

Battered and weary, Chhiring had thought of nothing but sleep as he trailed Pasang into Camp 4. When he found his tent, the flap opened and the arms of his friend yanked him inside. Eric Meyer locked him in a bear hug.

“
Is it bad?
” Chhiring asked.

Eric nodded. Eight sleeping bags were empty. He held out a Nalgene bottle of scalding Powerade, and Chhiring, his throat too tight to gulp, took small sips. He crawled into a sleeping bag but felt little warmth. Drifting in and out of sleep, he listened to the commotion outside the tent.

Sometime after daybreak, Chhiring overheard two raised voices. Eric, now outside the tent, and Pemba Gyalje, the Sherpa on the Dutch team, were debating what to do.

“The visibility is terrible right now,” Eric said. The American team must descend, he continued, and so should you.

Pemba was crying, barely able to respond. “He was determined to recover what was left of his team,” Eric recalled. Pemba’s teammates, Wilco and Ger, were still lost somewhere on the mountain. “So I gave Pemba something that might help.”

Chhiring rolled over in his sleeping bag and listened to the pills being administered. Pemba swallowed 30 milligrams of dextroamphetamine, a psychostimulant to keep him awake; 10 milligrams of Modafinil, another drug for workers on a graveyard shift; and 10 milligrams of Dexamethasone, to stall the onset of cerebral edema. No stigma attaches to mountaineers who take drugs in exigent circumstances, and Eric gave Pemba the medicine bottles in case he needed more.

When Eric ducked into the tent, Chhiring immediately pulled on his boots. Eric shot him a look that said, You want to die, too?

12

Survival

A
s night fell on summit day, Pasang’s cousins,
Tsering
and Big Pasang Bhote, were deciphering fragments of radio chatter. Conflicting reports in a babel of languages told of confusion and death. Ten o’clock passed. “Our team should have been back by then,” Tsering recalled. Another hour passed. And another. None of the seven summiters from the Flying Jump had returned.

Tsering and Big Pasang had moved up to Camp 4 to guide a second wave of Korean clients to the summit. “But no one was thinking of summits anymore,” Tsering recalled. Worried, he and Big Pasang filled their bottles with juice and left to find their missing teammates.

Along the Shoulder, they spotted Mr. Kim. Skin chapped from exposure, eyes bleary with exhaustion, he looked tired but defiant, strong enough to make it back to camp on his own. He spoke to the Bhote cousins in a stammer, explaining that his climbing partner Ms. Go had lagged behind. “Serve her tea and help her down.” Tsering pressed his boss to drink some juice himself. After reassuring Kim that he’d find Ms. Go and bring her back safely, he and Big Pasang continued up the Shoulder.

As they climbed, mist coalesced around them, obscuring the slope. Without fixed lines to guide them, the Bhote cousins often squatted and scrutinized the contours of the snow, searching for boot tracks. They took turns calling for Ms. Go, shouting the honorific “Didi” (Elder Sister), and listening for a response. After about two hours, their voices were spent and they still hadn’t found her.

In the distance, Tsering saw something that made him think that Ms. Go was gone. High on a ridge, a dot of light plunged downward. A moment later, a second light mimicked the first. Although it was too dark to tell, Tsering feared that one of those climbers was Ms. Go. “It was a terrible thing to see,” he recalled. He and Big Pasang climbed in the direction of the falling light. They kept calling, but their voices had lowered to croaks.

Finally, on a slope east of the Shoulder, the cousins heard a wail. The men hollered again. A woman’s voice responded. Ms. Go hadn’t fallen after all. As in a game of Marco Polo, the Bhote cousins exchanged shouts with her, blindly guessing where she stood in the mist. Sometimes it seemed as though she were only a few steps away; at other times, she sounded much farther off. Climbing toward the sound, Big Pasang spotted a flash. Ms. Go was clinging to an exposed band of granite on the unstable slope, blinking her LED headlamp off and on, off and on. One of her boots was jammed in a crack in the rocks, trapping her, but she smiled through gritted teeth.

Big Pasang climbed down and jimmied out her leg. Leashing her to his harness, he helped her plod toward Tsering. “We didn’t talk with Ms. Go,” Tsering recalled. “She was not in a state where she was able to communicate.” Sandwiching Ms. Go between them and carrying her pack, they marched her back to Camp 4, arriving around 4:30 a.m.

Sobbing men mobbed Ms. Go as she arrived, smothering her in hugs. An American with swollen eyes brought her a steaming mug of Powerade and announced into a radio: “She’s alive and kicking.” Tsering escorted her to her tent and filled up a water bottle, tucking it in her sleeping bag so it wouldn’t freeze. He unstrapped her crampons, pulled off her boots. She was as comfortable as one can be at 25,800 feet. As Ms. Go shivered in her sleeping bag, Tsering crouched nearby, melting snow on the burner and worrying about Jumik.

About ten minutes later, Kim opened the tent flap and waved, signaling for Tsering to speak with him out of earshot of Go. “We were all so relieved to have found Ms. Go, and I thought Mr. Kim wanted to tell me how much he appreciated the rescue,” Tsering recalled. “I was hoping he had good news about the others.”

But Mr. Kim wasn’t ready to give thanks yet. He gave his high-altitude porter the update. Pasang Lama, he said, was passed out in his tent. Jumik and three other members of the Flying Jump—Hwang Dong-jin, Kim Hyo-gyeong, and Park Kyeong-hyo—were still missing, probably somewhere above the Bottleneck. The radios weren’t getting through to them. The weather, Mr. Kim feared, was deteriorating. You and Big Pasang, he told Tsering, need to head up immediately and bring the four missing climbers down to camp.

Tsering nodded but decided to consult with Pemba Gyalje of the Dutch team. Pemba had overheard the discussion. “It’s too dangerous,” he said. Pemba, like Chhiring and Eric, had assessed the lack of visibility, the potential avalanche conditions, and his own level of exhaustion. He’d determined that a rescue attempt at this time would cause more deaths, not fewer. Pemba was waiting to launch a search-and-rescue after the sun rose and visibility improved. “Don’t go yet,” he advised.

Tsering doubted he had a choice. Mr. Kim had hired him to help the Flying Jump immediately, not to wait. He found Mr. Kim again. As they were talking, Big Pasang joined them and listened, his face hardening. “Maybe he was thinking of Jumik’s baby,” Tsering recalled. “Jumik was my brother and his cousin, after all.” Whatever the reason, Big Pasang was ready to go. He had already grabbed two oxygen cylinders, snapped fresh batteries into the radio, and filled several bottles with boiling water. Neither Big Pasang nor Tsering challenged Mr. Kim. “He had paid us some money,” Tsering recalled, “so we acted as though he owned our lives.”

At 5 o’clock the morning after summit day, Wilco took an inventory. Frostbite had consumed his toes, but his friends were still there: Marco and Ger were dozing on a perch, three yards above him. The Dutchman approached their predicament as a mathematical equation, considering the variables: “I kept telling myself there has got to be a solution.” He remembered the night well enough. He’d made it to the summit. The fixed lines had vanished. He had searched for two hours. Then the night had never seemed to pass. From 1:30 to 5 a.m., Wilco had sat apart from his friends. “I don’t know why I didn’t go over and sit next to them,” he recalled. Too numb to feel lonely, “I just sat there by myself and waited for the sun to rise.”

Now, with the sun blazing in front of him, he roused Ger and Marco with a loud croak. Marco barely looked up. He began rubbing Ger’s thighs and forearms. Wilco, meanwhile, fantasized about water. It had been twenty-two hours since he’d drained his bottle below the summit, and the snow around him looked tantalizing. He wanted to scoop up a handful and melt it in his mouth. But he fought the urge. The slush would lower his body temperature and sap more energy than the hydration was worth. Trying to distract himself from the thirst, Wilco scanned the slope and wondered where the fixed lines were hidden. When he stood up, the crust beneath his boots squeaked, splintering under his weight. “It’s unbelievable there wasn’t an avalanche right then,” he recalled. “The snow was so tense.”

Once they had warmed their muscles, Ger and Marco rose, too, and the men fanned out, hunting for the fixed lines.

As Wilco searched, he removed his glacier glasses and rubbed his eyes. A breeze wafted across his face, and, gradually, his
corneas began to freeze
. It took him some time to notice it. At first, the faces of his friends became milky, and, blinking hard, Wilco strained to focus. An hour later, he was peering through a fogged-up windshield. “And I was thinking, ‘I am so fucking fucked I don’t know how to unfuck myself.’ I couldn’t see anymore and had to take action.”

He turned to the others and told them he was going blind. “I said to Ger, ‘Listen, I’m not going to discuss this. I’m going down. Directly down. It doesn’t matter if I’m going in the right direction or not.”

Wilco gripped his axe, plunged the heel of his boot into the snow, and headed straight down, dropping into a soup of white. “It was pure focus,” Wilco recalled. Although he suspected that the path he was on led toward China, not Pakistan, Wilco was actually descending below the Snow Dome.

After about 200 feet
, he heard a whimper. Confounded by the noise, he moved toward it and, a moment later, nearly bumped into something that made him gasp. As his mind processed the sounds and shapes, Wilco realized he was staring at a writhing knot of climbers. They were suspended upside down, hanging from the missing fixed lines, bound together in a snarl of secondary rope. The climbers were members of the Flying Jump—Pasang’s cousin Jumik and two of his Korean clients.

The man at the top was hanging headfirst, his harness at his shins. About 10 yards below him, another Korean was curled on the ice, his face swollen, slashed, and bruised. He didn’t respond to Wilco’s voice. Below him hung Jumik. His eyes were glazed and his cheeks were covered in a gray crust, but he was alert enough to ask for gloves.

Wilco pulled out his spare pair, tugged them over Jumik’s bare hands, and tried to understand why the men were tangled in so much rope. When the serac fall had cut the fixed line, the men had been attached to it by a safety leash and roped up to each other with a separate line. Falling, they must have somersaulted over each other. The two lines would have wound around them,
twisting and cinching
.

Wilco didn’t want to imagine the horror of hanging upside down all night in the freezing cold. He moved Jumik into a more upright position and offered help, although he had no idea what he could do.

Jumik told him that
help was on the way
, and, after ten minutes, Wilco decided to leave. He descended toward a band of rocks. He tried to put the hanging men out of his mind. “They were trying to survive,” he recalled, “but
I had to survive, too
.”

Beyond the band of rocks was a sheer drop. Wilco turned back, “hanging over my ice axe, almost dead,” he recalled, “and progressing centimeter by centimeter.” He saw that Ger and Marco were far above him, kneeling beside Jumik.

“Where do I go?” Wilco shouted. He got no response. Too exhausted to climb up, he trudged forward, beneath the overhanging serac and saw a fragment of rope, his team’s own five-millimeter Endura. It lay in the snow like a gift.

By noon,
Wilco was lost
, wandering south of the Cesen route. He had made it through the Bottleneck with help from the rope but veered right, dropping off the Shoulder. “I really had no clue where I was,” the Dutchman recalled. He hadn’t recovered his sight, but even with perfect corneas, he wouldn’t have seen much. A cloud bank obscured the slopes. Wilco went in the one direction he was certain of: down.

Pursing his lips to preserve moisture, he counted his steps. “I was busy with only one thing,” he recalled. “Survival.” Aiming to keep
three limbs
touching the mountain at all times, he backtracked when crevasses blocked his way. At one point, he saw more survivors, waved, and climbed toward them. The survivors ignored him, and, when Wilco finally reached them, they all turned out to be rocks. Defeated, he squatted in the snow. “I couldn’t move any farther,” he recalled. “I couldn’t go to the left, I couldn’t go to the right. I couldn’t go down, I couldn’t go up. I had no more strength. I was really trapped. That’s when I was thinking I should make a phone call.”

He pulled out his Thuraya sat phone. The keypad looked like pudding, and his mind was washed of all numbers except one. He felt out a
familiar combination
, and, at 9:30 a.m. Pakistan time, he heard the phone ring as it tried to connect to Utrecht.

A soft hello—the voice of his wife, Heleen—jolted Wilco. “
I’m alive
,” he told her. Wilco tried to sound confident and paused, squinting. “I think I see people ahead.”

Heleen sounded simultaneously shaken and relieved. “Are they moving?”

Wilco thought so. Switching off the Thuraya, he sculled forward, anxious to greet his rescuers. Again disappointed, he encountered more freestanding rocks.

The hours compounded. “I didn’t have the guts to look at my watch,” Wilco recalled. “I got frustrated at how slowly time was passing.” He couldn’t remember whether he slept. Sometimes his legs wobbled and tried to collapse. His eyes stung. He willed himself to keep going and to think of home. He began to regret the brusque call to Heleen. “Did I tell her I loved her?” Wilco couldn’t remember. Squatting in the snow, he once again fished for the Thuraya in his pack and dialed.