No Way Down, Life and Death On K2 (2010) (10 page)

Skog's headlamp was still not working. After she had changed the batteries, she had not fitted it together again properly and the batteries had fallen out when the avalanche hit. Letting himself down on the rope, Nessa watched as Skog was swallowed by the darkness.

He rappelled down diagonally to the right over broken rocks, bracing his legs to avoid swinging back vertically like a pendulum, and watching carefully for the end of the rope. In the darkness, he was unsure where he was heading but after about forty yards he recognized the rocks around him and realized he had reached the Bottleneck.

He yelled back up to Skog and soon he felt her weight moving down the line. He held the end of the rope tightly. Five minutes later, Skog's legs appeared out of the darkness and within a moment she stood beside him, only slightly out of breath.

The first thing she said to Nessa was “Have you found him?”

He shook his head.

“When will we find him?” she said.

“Cecilie, he is gone.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Look, we can search tomorrow when it's light. You won't see anything now anyway.”

Nessa remembered Bae's three iron rules. He knew he had to get Skog and himself home. They could not take the risk of looking for Bae. Now they saw that in addition to cutting the rope in the Traverse, the avalanche had also swept away or buried the lines fixed in the Bottleneck. The gully was littered with large chunks of ice. There was nothing to do but to turn their faces to the slope and descend without rope.

“We must go,” Nessa said.

Skog nodded.

Nessa went first, punching grips with his ice axe and the teeth of his crampons. Every few feet he stopped and pointed his headlamp upward, trying to give Skog as much light as he could. He waited
until she made it down to him, and then he climbed another few feet lower.

It was a slow, laborious way of descending the mountain; they were tired and their nerves were raw from Bae's death. Nessa called out encouragement to Skog and tried to guide her and she tried to concentrate and be patient, though the broken chunks of ice around them made the way perilous.

Skog doubted whether she could make it to the bottom. She climbed automatically, moving one axe down and then her boot. Axe and boot.

Half an hour later, the ice gully flattened out a little, and Skog and Nessa were able to turn and stand up straighter and walk down slowly in single file. They bent forward tentatively because the ice was still slippery, and held the blades of their ice axes in their hands and thrust the handles before them into the crust of the snow.

They were still walking amid the blocks of ice that had crumbled from the serac when Skog's boot caught on a brick of ice and she fell.

The surface was hard and slick and Skog slid fast, tumbling and rolling over and crying out for Nessa to help her. She was on a slope and she couldn't see where she was going. After sixty feet, she flung out her axe and slammed the point into the ice, which brought her to a jolting stop.

She gasped for breath. Her ski pants were ripped down her leg. But she was alive.

Nessa scrambled down to her.

“I thought I was gone,” she said, still breathing heavily, as he helped her up.

“So did I,” he said.

She was bruised and shaken and feeling more weak and exhausted than ever, but they continued making their way down. The wind was picking up.

After another hour, the line of fixed rope appeared suddenly and
they clipped on to it. Ahead, a small, strong light was flashing on and off from the direction of Camp Four. Someone had put out a beacon. They fixed their compass to it.

As they approached the camp, Skog grew convinced that Bae would be in the tent waiting for her. Of course he was in Camp Four, she thought. Her husband was the one who constantly worried about safety. He never took risks.
Safe and sure. Get back home
. Nothing could have happened to him. She was late and he would be worried about her by now, she thought.
Cecilie
,
where have you been?
Skog told herself she must hurry. She had to get back.

At Camp Four, Skog and Nessa went straight to the tent of Oystein Stangeland, the fourth member of the Norwegian team. Stangeland had turned back after the Traverse. As Skog opened the tent flap, she looked immediately to see if anyone was sitting with him, but he was alone.

Inside, Stangeland asked where Bae was and Nessa shook his head.

“Rolf got lost,” Nessa said.

That was all he had to say. It was short and brutal and all three climbers knew what it meant.

The night before, Skog and Bae had slept together in one of the tents at Camp Four, while Nessa and Stangeland had shared the second tent. Now Skog walked to her tent and went inside. Bae was not there either.

Nessa brought in a bottle of water that Oystein had melted for them. Skog felt thirsty but she was not hungry. She was cold and tired and sad. Nessa helped her remove her crampons. She left her boots, her thick climbing suit, and everything else on.

The two climbers lay down on the mat under the sleeping bag and Nessa held her.

T
he violent, shape-shifting nature of K2 was dramatically revealed during an expedition to the mountain in 1953.

A year before Desio, Lacedelli, Bonatti, and Compagnoni made their pilgrimage from Italy, a team of seven Americans and one Briton arrived on the slopes. They were led by a thirty-nine-year-old doctor from New York named Charles Houston, a Harvard graduate and a legendary figure of American mountaineering, although this would be his last climb. His team included a twenty-seven-year-old climber, Art Gilkey, who was a graduate student in geology at Columbia University in New York, and twenty-six-year-old Pete Schoening from Seattle.

For six weeks the team climbed steadily, defeating the most difficult landmarks of K2, including House's Chimney and the Black Pyramid, and discovering the empty tents of Wiessner's expedition. K2's notorious weather had already begun to blow in: In a violent storm, Houston's team was trapped in the tents at the expedition's Camp Eight at 25,500 feet, three thousand feet from the summit. They could not light the stoves easily, so the climbers struggled to melt water to drink, and to cook. They passed the time reading aloud to each other, painting, or writing diaries. Four days later, after one of their three tents had been pummeled by the storm, the wind dropped slightly and they staggered outside. Art Gilkey, however, had developed swelling in his left leg. He collapsed and passed out.

When Gilkey came around, he insisted he was only suffering from
a cramp. “I'm all right, fellows; it's just my leg, that's all,” he said. “I've had this Charley horse for a couple of days.”

But he had developed thrombophlebitis, or blood clots, in the veins of his left calf. He could certainly climb no higher and was unable to descend alone.

Another storm swept in, confining the team once again to their tents, and the clots spread to Gilkey's right leg and eventually his lungs. Gilkey apologized for being a burden but his six teammates gave him a shot of morphine and then quickly composed a makeshift stretcher from his sleeping bag, a tent, a rucksack, and a cradle of rope.

The route they had followed on the ascent had become a major avalanche risk, so in the howling wind they tacked to the west, down a steep rock rib, dragging a now blue-faced Gilkey through deep snow. When the slope steepened, they lowered him down it with a rope tied to the stretcher and anchored from above by Pete Schoening. This involved Schoening's securing his ice axe in the snow behind a boulder, using the rock to support the axe, and looping the end of the rope once around the axe handle and around his waist.

Delicately, they lowered Gilkey until they reached a place where they began to cross the rocks to Camp Seven. But at this point, one of them lost his footing and slipped. He was roped to a teammate who in the force of the fall was also wrenched off his feet. The pair then crashed into the rope between Houston and another climber. Within a moment all four were hurtling down the slope toward the precipice. They snagged a fifth climber, who was attached by a rope to Gilkey's stretcher, and he too began to slide. Entangled, they were going to fall thousands of feet, it seemed, and they were going to die.

But Schoening was still supporting Gilkey from above and the incredible happened. Even as the weight of six mountaineers jolted onto his rope, Schoening's strength held the falls.

As he strained, the train of falling men stopped, hanging above the
drop. Slowly, one by one, the mountaineers righted themselves. One had lost his gloves and his hands were frozen; another had a cracked rib and a large gash in his leg; a third had a nosebleed. Houston was unconscious and had to be revived by the reminder that if he didn't climb up now he would never see his wife and daughter again.

The climbers anchored Gilkey on the slope with two ice axes and explained that they would return to fetch him soon.

“Yes, I'll be fine,” Gilkey said. “I'm okay.”

The mountaineers crawled across to the small ledge where one member of the group was already erecting two tents. As they did so, they heard Gilkey calling out to them from his stretcher 150 feet away. Ten minutes later they returned to collect him, but he was gone.

At first they assumed an avalanche had taken him, but in the following years some wondered whether Gilkey had cut himself free so that his teammates would not have to carry him down. Had he sacrificed himself so that they could live? As they continued the descent over the next few days, they found no sign of Gilkey except for a tangle of ropes, a torn sleeping bag, the shaft of an ice axe, and blood-streaked rocks. They all studied the remains but none admitted until later that they had seen them.

K2 had its close Italian connection, thanks to the Duke of Abruzzi and the triumph of Compagnoni and Lacedelli. But down the years, after an American expedition in 1938, Wiessner's ill-fated attempt in 1939, and Houston and his colleagues' expedition in 1953, it also became known as “America's Mountain.”

In 1953, the day after the Americans' safe return to Base Camp, their Hunza porters erected a ten-foot-high memorial cairn to Art Gilkey, a pile of boulders thrown aloft on a spur of rock at the confluence of the Savoia and Godwin-Austen glaciers looking across the southern face of K2 and down the glacier to Concordia.

It was a monument to teamwork and brotherhood. It was also a monument to mortality, and to the deadliness of the mountain. Over
the years, names were added to the memorial, names punched into simple tin mess plates, or lives paid tribute to in pictures, elaborate stone carvings, or metalwork. If the remains of fallen climbers were discovered on the glacier, they were often carried up and interred in the crevices between the rocks.

Over the decades, it became a matter of duty for mountaineers coming to K2 to scale the cliff outside Base Camp and visit Gilkey's memorial. The glacier receded and each year the promontory reached higher into the sky.

There were plaques placed there to commemorate later disasters. The 1995 accidents that claimed seven lives, including Alison Hargreaves, a British mother of two young children who was blown off the mountain just below the summit by sudden, hurricane-force winds. And the 1986 deaths, when thirteen climbers perished over the course of the climbing season. One of them, an Italian, Renato Casarotto, climbed on the Magic Line, an especially difficult and renowned route also known as the Southwest Pillar, although he turned back before the summit. Near Base Camp, he fell into a crevasse. He telephoned his wife, who was waiting for him in a tent at Base Camp, to tell her that he was dying and needed urgent help. When rescuers reached him that night, they managed to lift him out, but he died soon afterward and at dawn Casarotto was lowered back into the crevasse.

During the summer, Gerard McDonnell and the Dutch team had climbed up to pay their respects. Marco Confortola visited and so did Alberto Zerain. Eric Meyer and three others from the American team made the pilgrimage, and in the silence linked arms and bowed their heads in prayer, ignoring the stench of rotting flesh on the breeze. Hugues d'Aubarède climbed up and studied the nameplates carefully.

They all brooded on heroism and eternity, accepting that death was a possibility, a risk—yet not fully believing that the Gilkey Memorial and what it stood for could lie in their own futures.

11 p.m.

I
n their tent on the Shoulder, where they lay in sleeping bags, waiting for people to climb down from the summit, Eric Meyer and Fredrik Strang didn't hear Cecilie Skog and Lars Flato Nessa return to Camp Four.

They monitored the radio for any transmissions, drank as much water as they could, and tried to stay warm and alert in case their help was needed. They had boiled noodles but it was hard to force any food down.

Earlier, as people had summited, the voices on the radio had been ecstatic. Chhiring Dorje was the only member of their own expedition who had continued to the top.

“Big Namaste,” he had said when he called in. “Very happy to be on the summit, brother!” He and Meyer called each other brother.

“Congratulations,” said Meyer.

Meyer was a Christian, Dorje a Buddhist. Spiritually, they found they had a lot in common. Dorje and his wife had visited Meyer in Colorado and Meyer had taught him to ski. On K2, Dorje had built a seven-foot rock chorten a few yards from the tents in Base Camp and encouraged the American team members to toss offerings of rice to the mountain; every evening he chanted his prayers.

Meyer and Strang were proud that one of their team had made it to the top. It was also a relief to hear good news in the wake of the
deaths of Dren Mandic and Jahan Baig. They punched the air and gave each other high-fives.
Way to go!

But then the radio had fallen quiet.

Toward 10 p.m., Meyer had noticed headlamps coming down from the summit. He walked outside to study them, the sight making him feel queasy. The climbers were already having to use lights even though they had far to go to reach Camp Four.

“Fuck, they are late!” Strang said, when Meyer returned to the tent. “Where is Chhiring?”

Camp Four was quiet. The Serbs had already gone down to one of the lower camps. About ten yards from the tents, the American team had planted a strobe light in the snow, taping it to the top of three bamboo wands. One of the other members of the American team, Chris Klinke, a climber from Michigan, had bought it at an outdoor adventure show in Salt Lake City. It was round and only about four inches long but it sent out a powerful flashing white beam that split the night and would help guide people down safely; Camp Four was surrounded by couloirs, or gullies, and you could easily stray into them if you didn't know the way back to camp.

Meyer and Strang waited for news on the radio. The American team had Icom five-watt radios. Some of the sets, which were about six inches high, had remote handheld microphones so the team members could keep the radio inside a coat pocket and the batteries would stay warm. Good communication was essential, the teams had agreed, and so they had established a common frequency for all of the radios that were being used by the expeditions on the climb, which the Americans had nicknamed the United Nations frequency. But the Dutch group's radios didn't always work on that part of the dial for some reason, and the South Koreans had gradually taken it over anyway, and no one in the other teams could understand what they were saying. As a result, the Americans tended to use their own frequency and so did the Italians. Meyer now checked the U.N. channel, but he
also continued to turn the knob listening for anyone else who might be trying to call in.

Not everyone had taken a radio up anyway. Some had left them behind because they didn't want the weight. Others had simply forgotten them in their tents, and other teams had divided up, one person carrying the team's radio and another taking the satellite phone for the obligatory call to the family and friends from the summit. It all made perfect sense in the bright light of day but it seemed to Meyer and Strang a little stupid now that everyone was late and it was getting toward midnight. Why wasn't anyone talking?

The two climbers lay back on their sleeping bags and waited. At 10:30 p.m. the radio finally crackled. It was Chhiring Dorje. He said he had reached the Traverse but he had bad news.

“No ropes!” he said. His voice was anxious and excited. “No rope left on the Bottleneck. Big problem. Many danger.”

Meyer held the radio and let the news sink in.

“That is a very difficult spot to be in, Chhiring,” he said. He knew he didn't have to tell Dorje what he should do but he said it anyway. “I think you have to keep moving. Keep descending, no matter the danger. But be careful.”

Dorje said he was alone, although he had been following two other Sherpas, who were somewhere ahead of him. He made Meyer understand that everyone else was still behind him and so they were also before the break in the ropes. Their umbilical cord down had been cut. Were they good enough to get down without it in the dark—or had they left their descent too late? Meyer and Strang began to realize they could have a full-blown catastrophe on their hands.

 

Chhiring Dorje was a stocky, wide-shouldered man with red cheeks and jet-black hair cut in a bowl shape. His friend Eric Meyer said he looked like Oddjob, the James Bond villain.

Dorje had descended from the summit with a large group of climbers. All knew they had left their descent late and were running out of time. They were also worried about falling on these slopes in the poor light, so the South Korean team fixed a rope down a steep section of the snowfields, beginning about one hundred yards below the top. This slowed the teams once again.

Dorje had helped the Koreans' chief Sherpa, Jumik Bhote, carry the rope lower and fix it. The time was past 9 p.m. and in the dusk the mountaineers clipped onto the line and backed down carefully and slowly in single file, the snow in places reaching up to their thighs.

The rope helped. Descending would have been faster if the climbers had divided into two lines. Then the speedier mountaineers could have forged ahead. But there was only one rope, and anyway creating two tracks would have doubled the avalanche risk.

Dorje believed this was the correct course of action. Everyone was staying together as a group. But after about four rope lengths, the climbers suddenly began unclipping and they wandered off independently into the darkness.

Dorje was a strong climber and he went on first with the two Sherpas, Pemba Gyalje and Little Pasang Lama. Up behind him, the slow procession of mountaineers backed down the slopes, seeming hardly to be moving. He could see the vague figures of the Koreans—Kim Jae-soo and Go Mi-sun—and Wilco van Rooijen and Hugues d'Aubarède. They were struggling, and Dorje felt that if he did not wait to help them they might lose their way. Securing his ice axe, he sat in the snow.

When Dorje turned around, Gyalje and Lama had disappeared from sight. There was no trace of their headlamps and he was seized by a fear that they had been taken by an avalanche. The snowfields were a terrifying blank. Suddenly, the Sherpa was worried about whether any of the expeditions were going to survive. He was concerned about himself, too; he was cold, and he wondered whether this time he was really going to be able to return home to Nepal.

“Oy!” he shouted up to the people behind him. There were a few shouts in response. “Come on quickly!” he called.

Dorje set off alone, but he had climbed only a few yards when he slipped and fell fast, bumping and sliding. Shoving his axe handle in behind him, he came to a stop after about seventy feet. He stood up, thinking how lucky he was, and still wondering where the two Sherpas were and whether they really were dead. Then he climbed down alone onto the Traverse, eventually arriving at the section where the rope dangled limply from the ice screw. This was different from the way up.

Testing the rope, he found it tight, probably from the weight of climbers below. His hope rose. Was it the two Sherpas? He climbed down backward, and staring over his shoulder into the darkness, he realized there was a point of light below him. It was a headlamp.

“Pemba, wait for me!” he called out. Someone called up to him and he recognized Pemba Gyalje's voice.

“Here is an avalanche!” Gyalje shouted. “Here is no rope!”

“Still, wait for me,” Dorje called back in Nepalese, his high-pitched voice ringing across the slope. He said he was climbing down. “Ma tala jhardai chu!” he added. “I am coming!”

He clutched the rope and rappelled down over the rocks, making for the light, which was about 150 feet below him. He looked up at the looming shadow of the serac, which he thought looked like a god's brow. Dorje considered the mountain to be divine, one of the holiest of mountains; too many western climbers in Base Camp had showed disrespect. As Dorje got closer to the light, Gyalje shouted out that he was not alone. “Little Pasang is also here,” he said.

The two men, Gyalje and Little Pasang, were clinging to a shelf of rock and ice. Little Pasang looked awkward. Both stared at Dorje questioningly. What were they waiting for? Dorje scowled. “We must go,” he said. “We climb down. There is no other choice.”

Gyalje gestured to Little Pasang to explain why they had not gone down. “Little Pasang has lost his ice axe,” he said.

Dorje looked more closely at the young Sherpa. He could see he was afraid. His eyes were red from crying.

Dorje stared down with the help of his headlamp at the hard slope, littered now with blocks of ice. You might
just
be able to descend without an ice axe. But it was dark and they had been climbing nonstop for twenty hours and were tired. At least he and Pemba had their axes. The odds on falling without one were pretty high.

Gyalje said he was climbing down to look for the rope, but after he had gone about a hundred yards Dorje could see his headlamp was still dropping lower.

“What are you doing?” Dorje called. “Have you found the rope?”

“No! But I am going down.”

“Pasang has no ice axe,” Dorje shouted back.

Gyalje said the Koreans were following. They would help Pasang.

Dorje felt sorry for Little Pasang. He didn't know him well. They had called out greetings to each other occasionally when they passed on the route and from time to time they shared tea in Base Camp at the end of a working day, when he, Pemba, Pasang, and Jumik Bhote played cards and gambled for small change. He had met him first in the South Koreans' camp when Dorje walked over to sweet-talk the Koreans' Nepalese cook into giving him a jar of spicy kimchi, or Korean pickled cabbage, for Eric Meyer.

Dorje thought that if Pasang waited where he was he would freeze to death within an hour.

“Okay, Little Pasang,” he said. “You clip on to my harness. I have an ice axe. We will go together.”

Little Pasang looked shocked. “No!” he said. “Dangerous. Maybe we will die.”

Could he hold the two of them? Dorje wondered to himself. If he slipped, they would both plunge to their deaths. If Little Pasang caught a boot or mistimed his step, he would drag Dorje down with him. The Sherpa pictured himself toppling from the Bottleneck.

His wife, Dawa Futi, had told him over and over back in Kathmandu not to go to K2 because it was too dangerous. She had cried, and she had never cried when he had left on expeditions before. He thought of his two daughters, Tshering Namdu and Tenzing Futi. They attended the expensive English-language school just outside Kathmandu, Little Angels' School. What would they do without him? And his brother, Ngawang, and his sister who had moved in to live with his family and depended on Dorje? How would they survive?

Dorje also had his own dreams. Not that long ago, it seemed, although it was ten or more years now, when he was about Little Pasang's age, he had started in the business as a mere porter, fresh from the Rolwaling valley. Gradually he had built a reputation and started his own company; he had climbed Everest ten times; his life had changed. He didn't want to throw everything away. One day, maybe, he and his family might move, to be near Meyer in the United States. His girls might go to an American school.

Now on the Traverse, Dorje felt his voice shake as he spoke to the young Sherpa who was looking at him so expectantly.

“We will go together,” Dorje said again to Pasang. “We have two choices. Maybe we arrive together, or we die together. Don't worry. I will not leave you.”

Each had a six-foot-long rope connected to his harness and they clipped the two ropes together. Dorje turned to face the slope, and Little Pasang climbed down a few feet below him, balancing with his hands and kicking into the ice with the crampons on his boots. Dorje felt the extra weight and then followed the other man down. He attempted to keep a short space between them and coordinated the placement of his ice axe and his crampons with Pasang's own steps just below. He concentrated hard, snapping out short commands and listening for Little Pasang's answer. He could hear Pasang's heavy breathing.

“Comfortable?”

“Fine! You?” said Pasang.

“You keep balanced, otherwise if you slip, we go!”

“You just hold on to that axe!”

There were further loud icefalls as they descended, and small pieces of ice from the serac pattered around them. Each time, the two men froze and gazed up nervously to see which way they should go to avoid the ice, until the air was quiet before going on.

“I am all right,” Little Pasang said.

After one icefall, Little Pasang slipped and pulled Dorje down.

Dorje held the tip of his axe in the ice with both hands, trying desperately to control their fall.

“We are going!” he cried through gritted teeth. “Now we are finished!”

Pasang screamed. They slipped for ninety feet. But the axe blade struck a crack and held them.

“Little Pasang, I thought that was it!” Dorje said.

When the slope eased, they found Pemba Gyalje waiting for them. The relief of surviving made Dorje feel lightheaded. For the past hour he had forced himself to block out thoughts of his family, and only now did he allow himself to think of them again. He felt hot from the climb, and happy and lucky that the mountain had allowed him to survive.