No Way Down, Life and Death On K2 (2010) (18 page)

8 a.m.

E
ric Meyer and Fred Strang were surprised by Pemba Gyalje's appearance when he came to the door of their tent. The usually stoic man was nearly hysterical.

They unzipped the nylon tent door and helped him inside and onto the mats.

“Come on in,” Meyer said in a soft voice, seeing that the Sherpa needed comforting. “What's wrong? Sit down.”

The two men were resting on their sleeping bags. They helped Gyalje sit against some gear, made him tea, and told him he had to calm down. The tea would help him rehydrate.

Gyalje looked exhausted and was barely able to lift his head.

He had been up for most of the night since he had come down from the Bottleneck. He was zipped up in his dark blue Feathered Friends climbing suit. His breath billowed out in the cold air.

He started to cry as he told Meyer his account of how he had found the ropes cut in the Traverse and how he had made it down. Gyalje was a survivor, Meyer could see, but he had had to draw on deep reserves to descend and it had cost him.

It seemed to Meyer and Strang that Gyalje was also feeling guilty because though he was safe, his friends Wilco van Rooijen and Gerard McDonnell had still not made it down. Yet he was terrified about returning to the Bottleneck.

“What can I do?” he said, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I am feeling bad.”

Earlier, before dawn, he had confronted Big Pasang Bhote and Chhiring Bhote before they left Camp Four, urging them not to go back up into the Bottleneck to search for survivors. It was too dangerous. He suspected that Kim, the South Korean leader, was pushing them to go up there because the three Koreans were missing—Park Kyeong-hyo, Kim Hyo-gyeong, and Hwang Dong-jin. But the two Sherpas had told him they were going of their own free will. They wanted to go because Jumik Bhote had still failed to return.

Talking now to Meyer and Strang, Gyalje was adamant that they all should descend from Camp Four soon. None of them should stay at that altitude for many more hours, he said.

“We must go down,” Gyalje said. “Before we lose more energy. The weather is also getting worse.”

Meyer realized Gyalje could use some of his doctor's help. He shook some pills into Gyalje's hand, dexamethasone, dextroamphetamine, and 200 milligrams of Provigil. The capsules seemed to help; Gyalje soon seemed more alert. He said he was going back to his tent to rest.

The sun rose and Meyer and Strang went outside. At this altitude, the dawn was quick and already the sun's rays shone on the Bottleneck and the hanging glacier. The air temperature, which had dropped sharply during the night, had risen again and was a few degrees above freezing. They could see the slopes. A dozen or so climbers were standing around the tents—including Go and Kim and the six or seven members of the Korean B team, and the group of the other mountaineers who had been expecting to make a summit attempt today but had now called it off.

Everyone was staring up at the mountain. Meyer could see the day was going to be stunning again; the air was so clear. The sky arched over the summit. Crystals of snow seemed to jump across the waves
of the Shoulder, where the wands and red flags Marco Confortola had set the day before fluttered in the breeze.

At about 7 a.m., Cecilie Skog and Lars Nessa walked over to the Americans' tent. Skog borrowed Strang's satellite phone to call their manager in Norway who was going to let Rolf Bae's parents know about his death.

She spoke of walking out a short way onto the Shoulder for a small ceremony to say good-bye to her husband properly. But at around 8 a.m., she, Nessa, and Stangeland set out for Base Camp, leaving their two tents standing.

Those who remained behind looked to see whether they could locate anyone beyond the Shoulder. The Bottleneck and the serac were a beautiful blue-gray. Up to the left of the serac, on its western edge, where the climbers had seen headlamps the previous night, the onlookers at Camp Four could now see black specks in the snow. They pointed, able to make out the specks with the naked eye but also staring through binoculars. The specks, they realized, could be bodies but they were not moving, except one. A single figure was standing alone in the snowfields above the serac. As they watched, the figure moved slowly through the snows to the right, zig-zagging higher and then descending again toward the lip of the serac. His mind must have gone, or he was panicking, for he was heading in the wrong direction if he was going to descend to the Traverse and come down the Bottleneck. After a short while, when clouds started to drift in, the mountaineers at Camp Four lost sight of the figure.

A few of the climbers took photographs. Strang shot some film. It had been so dark and cold during the night that forming a clear picture of what happened had been impossible. But now they counted who was missing: Van Rooijen, McDonnell, Confortola, Jumik Bhote, Hwang, Kim, Park. There was still some uncertainty about Hugues d'Aubarède. His HAP, Karim Meherban, was also not accounted for.

Standing outside his tent, Meyer took out one of the Americans' radios and tried to make contact with anyone who was still up on the mountain and alive. He went up and down the frequencies, turning the knob on top of the radio, even though he still did not know for sure who among those missing possessed a radio and who didn't. They believed that Gerard McDonnell wasn't carrying a radio or a satellite phone because they thought he had given his satphone to Pemba Gyalje at the summit. Wilco van Rooijen had only his Thuraya.

“This is Camp Four,” Meyer said. “Do you hear us?”

He spun the dial around and listened to the static. Some of the others still had binoculars trained on the specks.

What if someone was alive but couldn't talk? What if they were frozen or in such a state of hypoxia that they couldn't speak?

“Press the talk button if you hear us,” Meyer said, hoping.

Still, nothing.

Strang had lit three burners and was melting snow just outside the tent to prepare water for anyone who came in. Survivors would need liquids quickly.

They were ready to go up to rescue people if there were signs of life, but so far they had none. They could not bring down a person unable to move on his own.

Among the climbers gathered around the tents, the sense grew that they were in the middle of something serious, an escalating tragedy beyond their power to cope. Cas van de Gevel stalked out of his tent. He looked exhausted. His eyes were bloodshot. He said he was going to search for Wilco van Rooijen and Gerard McDonnell, but Strang pointed out that he couldn't just run up into the Bottleneck without any idea of where they were likely to be.

“This is not a guided tour,” added Meyer. “If there were one person, we could go get him. But there are nine missing.”

Down in Base Camp, the Dutchman Roeland van Oss and the American Chris Klinke, who together were now leading the informa
tion gathering and setting up the emergency operations, made plans for people still in Camp Four to organize and send a rescue party into the Bottleneck. At the high camp, however, there was an overwhelming reluctance to go up. As far as Meyer and Strang could tell, they had no ropes, save those that were pinning down the tents. And they had only a single bottle of oxygen, which was the six-kilo bottle Chhiring Dorje had taken all the way to the summit and back again without using.

By 10 a.m., the serac and the Bottleneck were cut off from view as the weather turned. Gray clouds rolled over the summit and billowed around the great face of K2, closing around it like a curtain. The temperature plummeted again to minus twenty degrees or lower.

By noon, most of the climbers decided they had had enough and they couldn't wait any longer. Who knew what was going to happen to the weather next? Not to mention the fact that they had been above 26,000 feet for nearly forty-eight hours.

“We're going down,” said Meyer. He knew it would be dark before they reached the base of the mountain.

The American team packed up their belongings but left their tent. A second American expedition had arrived at Base Camp and they had an agreement they would use Meyer's tent for their summit push.

Van de Gevel was still lying inside his tent. He was going to wait at Camp Four. Pemba Gyalje said that he would stay awhile as well, in case there were any survivors, but he wasn't going to wait for long.

“I stay for a few more hours but I come down today,” he said.

The Koreans were also staying.

A group of five climbers led by Meyer and Strang came together on the slope outside Camp Four to begin their descent. Some of those who had come up a day late to try for a second night's summit attempt were disappointed that they had never gotten the chance because people had not turned back when they should have. They were not going to go for the summit while climbers were still missing.

The mountaineers had a big descent ahead and Meyer handed out a few more drugs—Provigil, dextroamphetamine—to give a kick to their systems. They left Chhiring Dorje's oxygen bottle with Gyalje along with a bag of resuscitation pills. One by one, they climbed down the last hundred yards of the Shoulder and over the brow onto the Abruzzi ridge.

 

Up on the great hump of the Shoulder, the two Sherpas Chhiring Bhote and Pasang Bhote scoured the area below the Bottleneck for the missing Korean climbers.

Just after noon, through the mist, they noticed something in the distance. Thirty or forty yards away, a climber was crawling on his hands and knees.

When they reached him, he wasn't making much sense. Pasang, who was carrying the radio, called Pemba Gyalje farther down the mountain.
We have found someone! He is collapsed.

They said the climber was wearing a green and black suit, and hearing this description, Gyalje realized the climber had to be the Italian, Marco Confortola.

He told the two Sherpas to get out of the Bottleneck area quickly and bring him down. But Pasang said the climber was out of the most dangerous area and they still planned to go higher to search for Jumik Bhote and the Koreans.

You climb up to bring this one down?

Gyalje thought about the Bottleneck, and the hell he had survived the previous night.

Pemba?

Big Pasang and Chhiring said they were setting off.

Pemba relented. His teammates in the Dutch expedition were still missing. He wanted to find them.
Okay. I come. I will bring the oxygen.

 

Pemba Gyalje and Cas van de Gevel packed up and climbed out tentatively onto the wasteland of the Shoulder. They were following the same route over the snow they had climbed a day earlier. This time, Van de Gevel thought, he was without Wilco van Rooijen and Gerard McDonnell. He looked from side to side but he could not see his colleagues anywhere in the snows.

Occasionally, the mists above them parted, revealing the great summit slopes. At one point they saw two black figures moving several hundred feet above them. It was the two Sherpas from the South Korean expedition who had gone out to search the slopes.

Then the clouds came down again and Gyalje and Van de Gevel could see nothing.

Van de Gevel felt his body giving in. It had been a long few days. He stopped and said to Gyalje, “If I go onto the Bottleneck, I will never come back.” Even for Wilco, he couldn't go on.

“We should not split up,” said Gyalje.

“It will be safer,” said Van de Gevel. “I am sorry.”

The clouds were thick now, and the two men agreed that Van de Gevel would sit where he was and mark the way back to Camp Four for Gyalje. They each had a radio and could communicate if they got into any trouble. The Sherpa turned and climbed up into the mist.

 

The man in the black and luminous green climbing suit lay unconscious in the snow. His hands were folded behind his head. He wasn't wearing any big climbing gloves and his harness was half off. Pemba Gyalje saw that the snow was cut and churned up around him.

Gyalje took a photograph to record the state of the climber and then he took out the oxygen tank he had carried up and tried to rouse Confortola. As the gas began to flow into his body, Confortola
struggled and pushed the mask away. Confortola had reached the summit of K2 without using supplementary oxygen, and even now he didn't want to diminish his accomplishment.

Gyalje forced the mask back over Confortola's mouth. Confortola stopped struggling. After a few minutes, taking gasps of air, he was able to stand.

Gyalje's top priority was to get the exhausted man down to Camp Four as quickly as possible. It was hard going—Confortola's feet were frozen, and Gyalje had to watch every step he took. Gyalje knew they had to keep him moving at a steady pace to be really sure they were out of the reach of the serac; he urged Confortola on.

As the two climbers struggled down the top of the Shoulder in the mist, Gyalje received another crackling radio call from Big Pasang Bhote, who was still about six hundred feet above them. Pasang had more news.

He had climbed to the top of the Bottleneck, Pasang told Gyalje, and there he had met up with the Sherpa Jumik Bhote and the two South Korean mountaineers who had been trapped on the ropes. They were injured but they had been able to make their way slowly across the Traverse. Incredibly, they were still alive. Big Pasang was now helping them to descend.

“We met at the top section of the couloir and we come down now together,” Pasang told him. “There are three. Two Koreans. One Sherpa.”

Gyalje listened to the report and could hardly believe it. It was the best news in the world. Jumik and the Koreans had survived!

“We come down, though we have no ropes,” Bhote said on the radio.

Gyalje looked up in the direction of the mountain but the mist was so dense that he could see nothing beyond ten yards away. Somewhere up there Big Pasang was now helping the injured climbers down the Bottleneck.

The radio continued to crackle. Awkwardly, Gyalje paused with Confortola on the Shoulder and held the set close against his ear. Big Pasang had something else to tell his friend.