Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day (22 page)

Many people imagine an avalanche as being a lot of loose snow and ice tumbling down the mountain like a bunch of BBs rolling down a slide. When an avalanche starts, it’s more like a plate sliding off a table. At first, a slab of snow breaks free from the mountain and moves down the slope. As it picks up speed, the slab shatters, breaking into increasingly smaller pieces that eventually become so tiny they flow like water. The material at the bottom of an avalanche is as fine as powdered sugar. Most avalanches flow at around 70 miles per hour; the big ones can reach 200 miles per hour and flow on for miles, washing up and down hills and valleys and striking with enough power to take out trees, houses, and entire towns.

The last, deadly avalanche of the day began all at once, with an enormous, thundering crack. Karim would have known what the sound meant. The men had about a second and a half to get off the snow slab. That wasn’t enough time.

A moment after the crack, the slab slid out from under them. Within a second, the snow would have been moving at about 10 miles per hour, breaking into giant pieces. Two seconds later, the avalanche would have been sliding between 10 and 30 miles per hour, with chunks further fragmenting. Faster-moving snow at the surface of an avalanche carries more force than the slower-moving snow below it, causing a tumbling motion. For the next five seconds, the slide accelerated, the snow churning like the surf after a wave breaks. At this point, the men would no longer have known which way was up. When this happens in water, surfers sometimes call the condition “being washing-machined.”

The snow, mixing with air, packed into the climbers’ lungs and plugged their mouths, ears, and noses. Their goggles, hats, and mittens were ripped off. Big Pasang and Jumik were short-roped together. They spooled and threaded around each other, becoming tangled ever more tightly. This apparently broke their necks. Around 3 p.m., Pemba saw Big Pasang and Jumik tumble past him. They were dead at 3:10 p.m. when he photographed their bodies, tightly wound together in ropes. The snow around them was streaked with blood and tissue.

The flow would have reached its maximum speed, somewhere between 40 and 80 miles per hour, after roughly eight seconds. And then it would have begun to slow. Once it did, it probably took less than a few seconds to stop. The other two climbers were never found, suggesting that the avalanche sucked them down and buried them. The snow probably would have cushioned them so that they remained conscious.

A trained climber would have tried to clear a space around his face, creating an air pocket before the slide halted completely. Then he’d have flailed out his arms and legs so his body would be easier to find.

Once the flow stopped, the snow would have compacted so tightly around him that he couldn’t move even his fingers. Spitting to see which direction was up wouldn’t have helped. The snow feels like concrete, too hard to dig without a shovel. In that situation, all a climber can do is wait, hope, and cough out the snow in the lungs, trying to relax and consume less oxygen.

More than enough air can diffuse through densely packed snow to keep a human alive, but warm breath causes the snow around the face to melt. Inevitably, that melting snow refreezes. This forms a capsule of ice around the climber’s head, preventing fresh air from cycling through. As a result, he is forced to inhale and exhale the same air, with increasingly lower concentrations of oxygen. The climber, buried alive, slowly asphyxiates.

During asphyxiation, the heart initially beats faster. Breathing speeds up. People revived from this state commonly recall seeing a ray or tunnel of light. Many consider it a religious experience. Scientists have an explanation as well, but it hasn’t been tested in a laboratory: Oxygen deprivation causes peripheral vision to decline, narrowing the field of view and giving the illusion of an ever-contracting tunnel of light. Survivors have described it as heavenly.

After about four minutes of asphyxiation, the brain goes into a manic version of REM sleep. Some researchers believe that this brain-wave pattern delays damage to neurons. Victims revived from these moments often remember seeing their entire lives flash before their eyes. They report feeling relaxed, falling into a Zen-like trance that has been known to turn atheists into believers.

After that, the heart, starved of oxygen, slows; the pulse drops to roughly thirty beats a minute. Then the heart beats erratically and soon stops completely, quivering in place, jellylike. Breathing slows, then ceases. The body cools. Electrical activity in the brain diminishes and the central nervous system gradually shuts down.

If the climbers buried by the avalanche didn’t form an air pocket in front of their mouths, they died within thirty-five minutes. With an air pocket,
death
could have taken about ninety-five minutes. If their bodies cooled quickly, they might have survived for hours in a state of suspension between life and death; hearts stopped, brains partially on, they could be summoned back. Doctors at a state-of-the-art hospital might have been able to revive them.

But the men buried by the avalanche on August 2 were never found. Their bodies stayed interred, cooling beneath the snow.

When Tsering Bhote, climbing 900 feet below Big Pasang, saw the avalanche sliding toward him, he darted to the nearest rock, wrapped his arms around it, closed his eyes, ducked his head, and prayed. The snow hit the rock and parted, roaring past him on both sides, shooting over him. The noise resembled a jet engine at takeoff. Grains of ice sprayed him, blasting him with powder. He screamed but couldn’t hear his own voice. Snow particles gusted into his mouth and nose.

As the roar continued downslope, gradually subsiding, Tsering opened his eyes and wiped them with his glove. All he saw was snow emulsified in air. Again he yelled, but the whiteness swallowed the sound, creating a hollow silence. He sucked in to breathe and felt the suspended ice crystals cake his throat. He coughed and snorted, panting. Still hugging the rock, he braced for more.

The powder around him drifted down and the sun tunneled through the dense white. As his ears stopped ringing, Tsering shook his head to dislodge the ice coating his hair. He relaxed his grip on the boulder and looked around, seeing only raked snow, bleak and featureless. Far below, a field of debris fanned into an embankment. Tsering recognized the contours of a mass grave. He hunted for a red splotch, something to signify a downsuit. He saw only chunks of ice and snow, no hint of where the men were buried. He yelled out for the other climbers, calling Jumik and Big Pasang by name, but “the goddess had hidden them well.” So he moved downward, mindlessly placing one boot in front of the other, not caring what came next. He barely noticed Pasang Lama climbing toward him. When the two men met, Pasang was breathless. He explained that he and Pemba had ascended from Camp 4 as swiftly as they could to help the survivors. “What survivors?” Tsering replied. Unwilling to describe what he’d seen, Tsering turned away and traversed the slope to a rock outcropping and slumped down, shaking.

Pasang followed, crouched next to him, and held out a water bottle. Tsering refused the liquid and stared into the reef of clouds, contemplating the sky above and the sky below. “I didn’t think I would
lose my family
,” he said. “Somewhere in my heart I felt I would meet them below.”

14

The Fearless Five

S
oon after giving the Bhote cousins chocolate, Marco collapsed. Exhaustion had beaten him, and now, splayed out below the Bottleneck, he rested his head in the snow. An avalanche could have barreled down the slope at any moment and swallowed him alive, but he slept on, wavering in and out of consciousness.

Around 3 p.m., a hiss jolted him awake. Something dark glommed onto his nose and mouth like a slug. He knew instinctively to yank it off. Coughing, he tossed and turned his head and tore at the slug’s rubbery hide. Unable to pull it from his face, he pried his fingers beneath its lip. The thing came loose, finally, releasing the suction around his cheeks, but then an oblong shape—a wrist—pressed it back into place. Marco tried slapping and pinching, but now the thing wouldn’t budge. The hiss amplified to a wheeze, and dry air blew into Marco’s throat and down his windpipe, inflating his lungs.

He reluctantly inhaled lungful after lungful of the gas. As he breathed, his vision sharpened and his mind rebelled. He realized that an oxygen mask was on his face. The wrist pressing it on him belonged to the Sherpa on the Dutch team, Pemba Gyalje. The hiss came from the regulator attached to the bottle. “Marco,” said Pemba’s soothing voice. “Marco. Marco. Marco. I’m trying to help you.”

But Marco didn’t want this kind of help. He had suffered plenty to avoid the bottle. Now, with each breath, he was ruining his record of climbing without supplemental oxygen. Why now, so close to high camp, should he surrender? To satisfy the recordkeepers, he’d have to climb the Savage Mountain all over again. Meanwhile, the Italian media
might dig up
an old taunt from 2004 when he had climbed Everest on the bottle: They’d call him
il bombolaro
, the bottle guy. Marco tore off the gas mask. Using it was exactly what he hadn’t wanted. Pemba extended an arm and Marco, infuriated, grabbed it, pulling himself to his feet.

They had barely begun descending when something—Marco thought it was an oxygen cylinder, Pemba thought it was a rock—bounced down the incline and bludgeoned Marco in the nape, knocking him to his knees. Blood trickled from the puncture on his neck, and a dying avalanche, which had propelled the missile, flowed hard against him, threatening to whisk him away. Within seconds, Marco felt as though he were levitating.

Pemba grabbed him by the scruff, “
like a lioness
protecting her cub,” and towed him to the side, out of the slow-moving flow. The avalanche slid past, blasting powder into the air and carrying the entangled bodies of Big Pasang and Jumik. Sickened, Marco shut his eyes, and Pemba, with the equanimity of a coroner, snapped photos.

To their far left, the man who had eaten Marco’s chocolate bar came to rest. Ropes bound Big Pasang’s corpse to Jumik; the Bhote cousins were aligned head-to-toe. Marco sucked in and looked away, contemplating something far worse than his tarnished record as Pemba photographed the streaks of gore in the snow.

Clouds moved in, “as if trying to hide the disaster,” Marco recalled. He got moving, climbing side by side with Pemba, heading down the 50-degree slope toward the Shoulder. The nightmare was too real to talk about, so they made their way back to Camp 4 in silence.

Locating Wilco the next day became a collaboration that stretched around the globe and into space.

As he wandered down the mountain, lost, GPS satellites installed by the U.S. military were orbiting 12,000 miles overhead, spitting signals to Earth. Wilco’s phone grabbed several GPS signals. Using an algorithm based on the time the signals were sent and the satellites’ positions, his phone calculated its latitude and longitude.

Every time Wilco called his wife, his 7.5-ounce phone quietly tossed its GPS coordinates to a Thuraya communications satellite floating 22,000 miles above equatorial Africa. This satellite then volleyed the data to Thuraya’s computer server in Dubai.

The data sat there for a day, idling on the server. Thuraya’s United Arab Emirates office refused to release any information about Wilco’s location. Company policy promises its customers uncompromising confidentiality. The U.S. military uses Thuraya phones; so do spies, pimps, and politicians. Thuraya’s policy protects its clientele from assassins who could use GPS coordinates to hone in on targets. Disclosing Wilco’s location, the company feared, could put him in danger. Thuraya needed permission from the man himself.

Unfortunately, the subscriber was rather hard to reach. Tom Sjogren, Wilco’s expedition tech provider, tried to reason with Thuraya and assure the company that he was telling the truth. “We had to convince them that a customer lost at 26,000 feet on K2 had other concerns than being ransomed by terrorists.” It took several hours of verification, but Sjogren eventually prevailed. On the
afternoon of August 2
, he secured the data from Thuraya and plotted Wilco’s rough location on a three-dimensional map of K2, e-mailing the information to
Maarten
van Eck, Wilco’s expedition manager.

Aboard the
Archimedes
canal boat in Utrecht, Maarten further manipulated the data, factoring in his knowledge of Wilco’s last-known location, photos of the mountain, and details about the routes. What he found surprised him. Everyone had thought Wilco would be somewhere above Camp 4, and climbers had spent hours scanning those slopes with binoculars. Maarten discovered that they were looking in the wrong place. Wilco was below Camp 4, at about 24,000 feet, south of the Cesen route. Maarten relayed this information to K2 Base Camp.

In Base Camp, a crowd of mourners lifted their binoculars and scoured the area Maarten had described. Even Hoselito Bite, the Serb whom Wilco had evicted during a windstorm, pitched in to help. “I’d have even climbed up to help that asshole,” Hoselito recalled. “This was no time to nurse resentment.” But no one spotted Wilco, even with clues to his location. Fog obscured Camps 3 and 4, and the prevailing opinion was that Wilco was tough but K2 was tougher.

Nadir, the cook for the Serbs, disagreed. “Wilco wasn’t the type of man to give up,” he said. After rescuing Shaheen from Camp 2, Nadir was back in the kitchen, wishing he could do more than prepare lunch. He didn’t really expect to find Wilco, but he figured that if nobody had spotted him yet, he should leave the grill. “Everyone had lost their appetite anyway,” he recalled. Long after others had quit, Nadir continued to scan the slope in a grid pattern, even when all he could see were clouds.

Around 3 p.m., the fog lifted, and Nadir spotted a dot south of the Cesen, above Camp 3, just where the GPS geometry had predicted. At first, the dot appeared to be a rock, but, after studying it, Nadir decided that the object was unquestionably orange—and moving. “This had to be Wilco,” who had been wearing a mango-colored North Face downsuit. But a moment later, fog rolled in and others couldn’t see the spot.

Three and a half hours later, the fog burned off, and Chris Klinke, an American, sighted
the orange dot
. It was definitely a survivor. Chris became ecstatic and alerted others. Base Camp radioed Wilco’s teammate, Cas van de Gevel, near Camp 4.

Guided by bearings radioed from Base Camp, Cas descended toward the dot. As the sky darkened, he switched on his headlamp, but soon it went out. Cas crouched, trying to swap dead batteries with live ones. His fingers were stiff with cold, and all the batteries dropped from his grasp and slid down the slope. Forced to stop, Cas pulled a sleeping bag from his pack, wrapped it over his head like a shroud, and waited. He spent the night less than 700 yards from Wilco. At first light on August 3, he intercepted the last survivor
near Camp 3
.

Wilco could march, but his gait was robotic. His face resembled a barbecued bell pepper, and his lower lip was swollen, ready to pop. His eyes were poached. Cas had known him for twenty-five years, and when he grabbed his friend in a bear hug, both men began to cry. “I thought I’d never see you again,” Cas said. Unable to speak at first, Wilco accepted a liter of water and downed it. His throat now wet, Wilco rasped something to his friend, but it took a few tries before he could be understood. Cas was anxious to hear what he had to say.

“I’m fine,” said Wilco. “I’m feeling good.”

At Base Camp, the vacant tents unsettled everyone, but the dome of the first victim was the strangest. As the glacier melted around its perimeter, Dren Mandic’s red-and-blue tent appeared to rise. On a four-foot pedestal, too prominent to avoid, it resembled a
stupa
. “I tried not to look at it,” Pasang recalled.

Entering his own tent was intolerable enough. Inside, his cousins’ sleeping bags were rolled in the corner. Jumik’s socks were paired on top of each other. Big Pasang’s wallet was wedged inside a shoe. The neatness of the space repulsed Pasang and made him imagine his cousins, entombed in the glacier, being ground into scrap.

He was unsure what to do with their gear. The various equipment—down gloves, glacier glasses, parkas, sleeping bags—were valuable. The Flying Jump had provided it all, but Pasang doubted that his family would accept anything with Kolon Sport’s twin-tree logo. He left the tent and asked another cousin, the team cook, what to do.

Take whatever you want, Ngawang Bhote replied. “You’re
a stranger to them
. A few weeks from now, Mr. Kim won’t remember your name.”

Pasang didn’t care. He didn’t want to remember his name either.

Pasang heaved, crying, and Ngawang gripped him by the shoulders. “I have good news,” he said. On the day before the summit bid, Ngawang had received a call from Kathmandu. Jumik’s wife, Dawa Sangmu, had given birth to a son on July 29. Ngawang had tried to radio high camp to surprise the new father, but terrain blocked reception. And then Jumik had died. Ever since, Ngawang had been burdened with good news. Now, he told Pasang everything he knew about the baby, a healthy boy named Jen Jen.

The birth of a baby buoyed some survivors, and Ms. Go went around to the occupied tents to announce it. In the Serbian tent, Nadir, the team’s cook, listened to her and wondered what would happen to the fatherless child. He tapped a stubby metal pick with a mallet, incising letters on an aluminum dinner plate; then he took out a semipermanent Magic Marker. On the surface of the plate, he glossed over the name Karim Meherban and added
HAP PAK
to identify him as a high-altitude porter from Pakistan.

Carrying several of these memorial plates, Nadir and a kitchen hand named Nisar Ali hiked to the Gilkey Memorial, the putrid burial cairn beyond Base Camp. With fishing line, Nadir strung the shiny plates around the rocks, and Nisar Ali found and buffed an old, oxidized platter engraved with the name of his father, Lashkar Khan, a high-altitude porter who died on a 1979 French expedition. In all, eleven new names were added to the memorial in 2008.

Miraculously, neither a twelfth nor a thirteenth plate was added. Wilco and Marco limped into Base Camp, skeletal but alive. Eric Meyer turned the Dutch mess tent into a field hospital, propping the two men against the soap-suds pattern of Cecilie’s inflatable IKEA sofa. Most of the survivors he had treated needed food, water, and sleep, or blisters disinfected and dressed. Wilco and Marco, however, were living cadavers. After enduring three days in the Death Zone, Wilco had lost twenty-two pounds. Frostbite had tinted his feet violet, and much of his skin had the consistency of cheese. Marco had similarly severe frostbite, plus a concussion.

It was hard to tell how deep the frostbite had penetrated. To treat the patients, Eric soaked their feet in warm water. He injected Wilco with the clot-busting drug alteplase and the anticoagulant heparin. As the pain intensified, he offered morphine and Valium. Chhiring worked as the physician’s assistant. He fetched supplies for Eric, monitored the IVs, maintained the temperature of the tubs, and served tea, bread, and Powerade. On breaks, he walked over to his
chorten
in the center of camp and prayed, thanking the goddess for his deliverance.

Across camp, the Flying Jump survivors were arranging a deliverance of their own. Askari Aviation had quoted a price of
$60,000
to dispatch the Fearless Five pilots. It was an expensive and unnecessary chopper ride, but Pasang and the Koreans were going to fly back to town. When Eric learned of this, he thought of the dead sherpas’ children in Kathmandu and Shimshal. “If the Flying Jump saved the 60 grand and trekked out like the rest of us,” he told Chhiring, “they could have set up those kids for life.”