No Way Down, Life and Death On K2 (2010) (16 page)

On a small computer, he tapped out text messages to his family in Ireland and to Annie, who for a few weeks during this time was climbing Mount McKinley, North America's highest peak. He posted thoughts to his blog. Alone at night, he lay in his tent, listening to the cracks and groans of the Godwin-Austen glacier—shifting more than usual this year, he thought.

“Night now,” he wrote in one dispatch, “and one hears the glacier ache beneath and settle with sound of distant gun shots at times. Stars galore and silhouettes surround. Best of luck on Denali, Annie.”

Annie sent piles of letters to him in Base Camp, which were carried up from Islamabad by the company that had arranged their expedition, Jasmine Tours. He called hi mother every Sunday. She sent him holy water.

McDonnell was feeling hungry and thirsty and tired now. Under stress, at these altitudes the body did not function normally in a number of ways, and he hadn't been able to eat properly for days. When he had tried, he had not been able to keep anything down.

 

For Wilco van Rooijen, the joy of the summit had soon evaporated in the pain of the heavy summit snowfield. He was so tired he had fallen behind the other climbers and lost sight of their headlamps.

He laid his exhausted body down and fell asleep in the snow. When he woke up, he climbed lower for several long minutes, but he couldn't shake the vague sense that he had taken a wrong turn. The snows looked unfamiliar and he wasn't coming to the abrupt drop down to the fixed ropes. So he veered back to the right for several hundred yards across the top of the serac. It was then that he heard the sound of someone whistling shrilly.

About one hundred yards away he noticed a headlamp. When he got closer he saw in the light of his own headlamp Marco Confortola, who was standing up and shouting at the top of his voice. Beside him sat the hunched figure of Gerard McDonnell.

He realized they were trying to attract the attention of people down at Camp Four. He wondered where everyone else was and why Confortola and McDonnell were just sitting there. Why weren't they searching for the ropes down? But then Van Rooijen saw that they were in trouble. Confortola was massaging McDonnell's knees.

“Gerard is cold,” the Italian said in his halting English. “We can't find the way down.” Confortola had hoped Van Rooijen was someone who could show them the way down and he was disappointed that the Dutchman was lost, too. “Not safe out there,” he added.

Confortola said that he thought they were in the wrong area. He described the crashing sound he had heard. Looking back toward the part of the snowfield where Van Rooijen had come from, he asked whether they should try in that direction. Van Rooijen shook his head and said it wasn't the right way, either.

“I am lost,” he said above the wind, which was picking up. “We must be able to see something we recognize.”

The three men began to explore the snows again. The balcony of ice thrust out and down for a few hundred yards before dropping
away. Feeling their way out a little distance, Van Rooijen went to the right, Confortola to the left, both men zig-zagging down the snow. McDonnell stayed where he was in the center.

With the help of his headlamp, Van Rooijen looked over the edge of a steep drop. Seeing the thick black air above a chasm, he realized that Confortola was talking sense after all. There was no way down here. Where were the fixed lines?

Far below, headlamps bobbed lower toward Camp Four. They tempted him. He turned and started to climb down but he had gone only a few feet when he heard Confortola behind him calling out loudly that he thought the snow was unsafe. Van Rooijen stopped himself and climbed back up. Confortola was right; it wasn't worth it.

When he reached the other two climbers, his headlamp lighting up the reflectors on their suits, he said, “Let's stay.” But now it was Gerard McDonnell's turn to be seized by panic, warning that they couldn't stay there overnight. They had to try one last time to attract the attention of the people at Camp Four, he said. They would signal the way they had to go to get down. After a minute or two of yelling, however, they realized it was no use. There was no alternative but to bivouac for the night.

It was risky—some would say stupid—to stay on a mountain like K2 above 26,000 feet. Since they were proficient mountaineers, they should have been able to climb down the Traverse and the Bottleneck even without fixed ropes. They should never have been in this position in the first place. But having made up their minds, they settled back in the snow.

McDonnell sat in the middle; Confortola sat on his left-hand side; and Van Rooijen perched on the right. They turned their backs to the wind. It was not snowing. But as they hunched over, their coats were soon plastered with snow blown by the gusts.

Van Rooijen had bivouacked countless times before in the Alps, and often on the more perilous north face of high peaks, when the
interminably falling snow filled the space behind your back until you felt you were going to be pushed off the edge. In comparison, he felt, this was easy. He was also in good company. He looked at the other two men. The emergency mountain rescue expert. And McDonnell, whom he could trust with his life.

Van Rooijen didn't even bother to take his satellite phone out of his jacket to call anyone. When the sun rose, they would act fast, descend quickly. In a few hours he would be down in Camp Four. Then they could tell everyone about their adventure in person.

 

Marco Confortola watched as the sky started to brighten at about 4 or 5 a.m.

“Let's go,” he said, shaking himself.

Wilco van Rooijen was already on his feet, wading through the snow to the left-hand side of the ridge. McDonnell crossed to the right-hand edge while Confortola walked ahead to look directly over the head of the serac.

They were impatient. They wanted to lose altitude and relieve their bodies, which had existed above 26,000 feet for thirty-six hours. They wanted to get warm again.

They spent about half an hour looking for the ropes or a way down over the tip of the serac, until one by one they gave up and returned to the middle.

When he came back to the other two men, Van Rooijen muttered something but Confortola and McDonnell couldn't understand what he was saying.

Then to their surprise Van Rooijen turned away, strode forward, and began to back over the edge of the ridge.

6 a.m.

W
ilco van Rooijen took a direct line down from the top of the glacier, backing slowly lower, securing his ice axe and feeling for each step with the points of his crampons.

While he had been searching for the fixed ropes to the left of the bivouac, Van Rooijen had realized something was wrong with his eyes. The eye is especially vulnerable at high altitude, where ultraviolet light is more intense than at sea level. Without protection, the ultraviolet radiation inflames the outer covering of the eyeball, resulting in excruciatingly painful snow blindness.

Van Rooijen recognized the symptoms because he had suffered the same problem at the North and South Poles. Dehydration, he was convinced, made it worse, and he was desperately thirsty. It had been a hot summit day and, foolishly, he had dropped his flask in the Traverse on the way up, so he hadn't had a drink since then.

Now he knew he had to get down immediately. If he didn't, and his eyes got slowly worse, he would be trapped.

Van Rooijen struggled to keep himself from panicking. On K2, the altitude was going to kill anyone in the end. And it was finally killing him.
Shit.
It only took a small mistake to slip and fall. He couldn't expect Confortola and McDonnell to carry him down, and no helicopter could get up to this height to rescue him. It was imperative that he descend quickly. He wasn't going to wait for Confortola
and McDonnell. They hadn't reacted when he told them. They were too tired and too absorbed in searching for the ropes. He had to save himself.

Now he climbed down, not knowing where he was or where he was going. The slope was so steep that the other two climbers disappeared from view within a few yards.

Van Rooijen knew that somewhere behind him were K2's vast lower gullies and the distant glaciers at the valley floor, all opening out beneath the dark morning sky. He had a suspicion that by getting lost on the snowfield he, Confortola, and McDonnell had wandered onto a completely different side of K2. He didn't think he was near the Traverse and the lines that the teams had fixed on the way up.

However, three hundred feet into the climb down, he saw a rope a few yards away. He didn't recognize it; some other expedition must have fixed it on an alternative route, he thought. Nevertheless, he clipped on to it and it gave him some encouragement.

Then, facing the mountain, he glanced to his right and saw, only two yards away across the ice face, a dreadful scene.

Three climbers were hanging from ropes against the smooth ice wall leading down from the glacier. They were tangled in two ropes, one of which was still attached to their harnesses. It was keeping them from falling to their deaths.

At first Van Rooijen thought he must have simply lost his mind. It took him a few moments to accept they were real.
Who were they? How did they get here?
He didn't know which part of the upper mountain he was on, so as far as he knew, these strangers belonged to a completely different expedition than the ones he had climbed up with the day before. They could have climbed onto K2 from the Chinese side.

He focused on the trapped climbers. They were beaten up and bloody and unrecognizable.

The first one was dangling upside down, his harness wrapped around his feet. He was moaning from the pain and cold. His face
was so badly smashed that Van Rooijen couldn't tell who he was. A large camera swung from his chest.

About thirty feet below him, the second climber was also hanging upside down but at a less steep angle. He seemed to be supporting himself with one hand on a ledge, and was almost lying down, but he was staring ahead listlessly, as if he had given up. Just a few feet below him, the third climber sat upright, awake and looking terrified.

It was a horrific sight. The three men had suffered a brutal fall and then must have been hanging there for hours in the subzero temperatures. They had been slowly freezing to death. Van Rooijen especially pitied the man at the top, the blood running to his head, barely able to breathe.

But even though they looked desperate, Van Rooijen, who himself was clinging to the side of the mountain, wondered what he could do. If he tried to untangle the ropes or cut them, the climbers would fall. Even if he were successful in freeing them from the ropes, the climbers could not walk for themselves, he thought. He had no strength left to lift them. And every extra minute he stayed with them, his eyesight was getting worse and he was becoming ever more befuddled by the altitude.

When the Dutchman climbed down to the third climber, the man asked him for help. He had lost his gloves. Van Rooijen handed him a spare pair.

“I have to go,” Van Rooijen said. “Okay? I am going snow blind.”

“I radio already,” the climber said. Van Rooijen didn't recognize the accent. The climber added that people were coming up to rescue him.

His words made Van Rooijen feel better about going on. Still, he hesitated. It was against every instinct in his body to leave the climbers. If he left them, and the rescuers didn't come, he would be abandoning them to die. But Van Rooijen had to save himself. He had his own struggle for survival ahead of him. He couldn't help these men.

Still he hesitated. He stayed with the climbers for just a few minutes. Then he left them and continued to drop down the side of the mountain.

 

Van Rooijen's thirst was so desperate and he was so concerned about his eyesight that he had no time to worry about whether following an untested route down the side of K2 was a wise idea and whether it would lead him to safer ground or to a dead end.

The ice and rocks were steep and he held on with his wet gloves. He felt for each next step with the teeth of his right crampon.

On a stretch of icy rocks, he couldn't find a place to put his boot. Switching the way he was standing, he reached down with his left boot, but he fumbled, his boot slipping out from under him, scratching against the rock, and he managed to save himself only by gripping on to the mountain face with his fingers.

A few hundred feet later, the rope ended, and he climbed down without its support. The climbing became steeper, until finally, a few more yards on, he stood at the top of a stretch of sheer brown rocks and realized there was no way past them. He tried desperately to keep his balance as the world swirled thousands of feet below him. He laid his forehead against the rock. Every instinct told him to get lower in order to breathe oxygen and, when he reached camp, to drink water. The idea of climbing back up again was hateful but there was no other choice. He realized he had to do it.

Ascending through the ice and snow was far tougher than climbing down because he was so exhausted, and for every three painful steps up, Van Rooijen slid two back. He counted the steps and then stopped to refill his lungs.

The sun was higher now and he was hot. He forced himself to breathe through his nose, not his mouth, to keep the moisture in.

Once when he stopped, he slumped forward on his ice axe and, without meaning to, fell asleep. When he woke up, he blinked into the sun.

He saw he was getting closer to the place where the three trapped climbers had been hanging. Squinting, he thought he could make
out two other figures with them now. Marco Confortola and Gerard McDonnell must have descended and were trying to help them, he thought. They were still a few hundred yards away from him.

Above him to the left were huge fists of black rocks, and to the right was a possible route beneath a serac. The serac looked as frightening and dangerous as the one he had passed under on the way up to the summit. He wasn't going to be able to make it all the way back to where he had started, so he could either follow the rocks around the western edge of the mountain, though he had no idea where that path would take him, or he could go under the serac.

He called out to McDonnell and Confortola, hoping they could see which direction he should take.

“Marco! Gerard!” His voice was hoarse. “Which way? Can you see? Left or right?”

He gripped the rocks and repeated the question but his voice was weak and they couldn't hear him. Then he went right, moving out under the serac.

Below him was a drop of thousands of feet and he still didn't know where he was heading. Yet, after about a hundred feet, he saw another rope fixed to a screw. That was good news. Traversing toward it, he clipped on to the rope and followed it.

It was taking him on some sort of route, although it looked unfamiliar. When he saw four oxygen bottles hanging from the next screw, he began to recognize where he was. He thought it had to be the Traverse. This was the same route he had followed on the way up. But it looked completely different. The snow was blasted away in sections on the slopes and there had been icefalls.

He reached a place where the rope hung diagonally over a huge rump of rocks. He rappelled down and after a few minutes he recognized Gerard McDonnell's 5mm Spectra line. Then Van Rooijen saw the Bottleneck and was elated.

He let go of the end of the rope and descended carefully until the ground started to level out. By now, however, clouds had started to blow around him.

At the lower altitude, Van Rooijen's eyesight was improving, at least temporarily. His next goal was to reach Camp Four. He was soon disappointed. The clouds had grown thicker around him and he couldn't make out the way along the Shoulder.

He climbed down several yards farther but the whiteout forced him to stop. He could see nothing. Below him somewhere was the Shoulder and the safety of Camp Four, but there also lurked crevasses and the steep drops on both sides of the long ridge. It was too much of a risk. He couldn't go on.

Faced by a cold wall of fog, Van Rooijen sat down. He fumed with frustration and with disappointment in himself. He had studied the history of K2. He knew how tough it was to find the high camp on the descent; that's why he had brought a lightweight GPS and a strobe light to the mountain. But when he had set out the day before, the weather had seemed so perfect, and the other teams had promised to put up flags and bamboo sticks and fish lines to guide climbers on the Shoulder. That was all part of the cooperation agreement. So he had left his GPS and the light behind in the tent. He thought now how reassuring it would be to hold the GPS or to have the fish line leading him down.

What a mess!
Despite Van Rooijen's pains to assemble a team worthy of taking on K2, he thought, the Dutch expedition had become entangled with lesser climbers. They had forgotten equipment they had promised; they had underestimated the sheer difficulties of this climb. He was not saying the other climbers were incompetent. Most of them were good enough. But there was the beginning of the trend on K2 that had afflicted Everest decades ago. Unqualified climbers paying big money to come to a mountain they had no business attempting. With just a click on the Internet you got a place on a trip.

Van Rooijen remembered his satellite telephone tucked away in
side his coat, and a new hope began to form in his mind. He pulled the phone out, nearly dropping it, then cradled it carefully. But when he held the Thuraya's glowing screen a few inches from his face to read the numbers stored in the electronic address book, he could not see them.

His thumb flicked desperately through the list. He wanted to call the Dutch team's main point man in the Netherlands, Maarten van Eck. Van Eck, he thought, would know what to do.

Van Rooijen tried to type in his friend's number but he couldn't remember it and the call failed to connect. Eventually he realized that the only number he knew by heart was his own in Utrecht, where his wife would be waiting. Though she might be out at the day-care center where she worked.

Van Rooijen dialed the number, and Heleen picked up. She was sitting on the sofa with their son, Teun. Heleen had not heard anything from her husband in three days and she had begun to give up hope that he was alive.

“Where are you?” she asked.

Relieved to hear her voice, Van Rooijen spoke quickly, telling Heleen about the bivouac and about leaving Confortola and McDonnell.

“I am alive,” he told her. “But I can't see and I am lost. I don't know where I am.”

Van Rooijen described his thirst but he tried to reassure her and said he thought he could see Base Camp so he knew he would get a drink soon. Even as he spoke, though, he realized in another part of his mind that he was babbling and making no sense. Base Camp was in reality still nearly 10,000 feet below him.

Then, as he was talking to Heleen, he saw shadows moving in the distance, which he thought were climbers in the fog. He told Heleen, and she shouted into the phone that he had to go toward them. But within a moment the shadows were gone. Van Rooijen realized he couldn't trust his own senses.

“Listen, write this down,” he said, trying to stay as matter-of-fact as he could. He estimated his altitude as being about 600 feet above Camp Four. “I am at seventy-eight hundred meters on the south side. Below the Bottleneck. Call Maarten and ask him to call Base Camp.”

He told Heleen he would call her back within the next twenty-four hours. “Don't worry,” he assured her. “I am safe.”

After she had hung up, Van Rooijen realized how alone he was. She had seemed so close, and now she was gone.

 

Maarten van Eck, a fifty-one-year-old businessman with silver-tinged black hair and square platinum-colored glasses, was sitting in the kitchen of his two-story houseboat, the
Archimedes
, on the Merwede Canal in Utrecht when Heleen called to tell him about Van Rooijen.

It was here on the boat that Van Eck had set up what he liked to call K2 Base Camp Netherlands—essentially a kitchen table with three computers and a bank of phones. He had spent the previous few nights sleeping on his couch to be ready to take calls and updates from Wilco and the gang on K2. They had an agreement that on the descent Van Rooijen would call in at specified points—the start of the fixed lines, the Bottleneck, Camp Four—but he had heard nothing from him since the summit.