No Way Down, Life and Death On K2 (2010) (21 page)

Sunday, August 3, 5 a.m.

A
s the morning light started to brighten the vast white and gray snows above Chris Klinke, clouds were still gusting across K2's massive promontories but most of the mountain was visible. And that is when he saw the orange figure again.

At 5:15 a.m., he woke Roeland van Oss, who was in his warm sleeping bag in his tent.

“Roeland, he is moving!” he shouted urgently. “Wake up! He is moving!”

The climber in orange was now about nine hundred feet to the left of the Cesen route and about three hundred feet above Camp Three, which itself was at about 24,000 feet, and he was traversing to the right.

Several more climbers joined them on the rocks and one of them, an independent Serbian climber, could also see another figure above Camp Three struggling down the fixed lines of the Cesen, and they realized that this had to be Cas van de Gevel. They were relieved he had survived though they didn't know what injuries he had sustained after being outside all night.

They called up on the radio to Pemba Gyalje, who was in one of the tents at Camp Three, but there was no answer. Perhaps he was sleeping or his radio was off. A few minutes later, however, the Sherpa's voice abruptly broke the silence. He sounded flustered.

Here is Pemba
,
over.

A rock had been dislodged from above, probably by Van de Gevel as he descended, and it had smashed into Gyalje's tent, waking him with a fright. But he had stuck his head outside and he could see his Dutch colleague making his way toward him.

“I see Cas!” he told them. “He is twenty to thirty meters above me.”

Within a few minutes, Van de Gevel arrived at the tent and both men spoke on the radio again to Base Camp. Klinke and Van Oss suggested that the two men step outside their tent and begin shouting to attract the attention of the climber in orange.

“He must be two hundred and fifty to three hundred feet away from where you are,” Van Oss said.

They wouldn't be able to see him yet because of the large ice fins and promontories that crossed the southern face. Van Rooijen was on the western side of one of these. No one looking from Camp Three could spot him yet, and they were invisible to him.

“You will see him soon,” said Van Oss. “He has to cross around the ice corner.”

Gyalje put on his down suit and boots. He melted water on the burner. Then he and Van de Gevel went out. As soon as they started calling, the climbers at Base Camp, gazing through the Serbs' telescope and the binoculars, saw the orange figure respond. He stood up and began moving faster.

Klinke and Van Oss saw that Van de Gevel and Gyalje were so close to reaching the climber in orange. They prayed that they weren't going to miss this chance to save him.

 

Cecilie Skog, Lars Nessa, and Oystein Stangeland were met at Advance Base Camp by their cook, who helped them carry their equipment the final three miles back to the tents at Base Camp, where three or four mountaineers from other expeditions greeted them. Just outside the camp one of the other climbers tried to take
Skog's backpack but she insisted on holding on to it because it was Bae's.

After wanting to stay up on the mountain, Skog was now intent on leaving K2 as soon as possible. It was a place of so much pain and death.

Then at Base Camp she climbed inside her tent, the tent she had shared with Rolf.

Inside, Skog looked around at their belongings, lay down on her sleeping bag, and felt again suddenly that she couldn't leave him behind. It was too hard to think that he was still up there, his body left alone in the snow.

Over the next few days, she would appear outside the tents on the glacial moraine for a few hours but would become inconsolable. At night, the others in the expedition heard her crying.

Skog felt paralyzed. She couldn't go back to Norway, to the little apartment she and Bae had shared in Stavanger, back to their life, back to their friends and their families, back to Fram Expeditions, back to all the questions—not without Rolf.

She sat alone inside the tent, but soon she realized Bae was in truth no longer on K2. He had gone. She had known it all along. Then she wanted to pack up and leave before the Norwegian media descended on her.

Nessa and Stangeland said they would stay for a few more days to get the team's gear together, call porters, and help with the rescue, but Skog started to prepare to leave quickly.

 

High on the southern face, Wilco van Rooijen picked his way down the rocks at the bottom of the gully. The world stretched out before him in the morning light—hundreds of miles of beautiful, startling peaks, though he cared nothing for that now, only his survival.

Amazingly, he felt better after his rest and it seemed the energy gel had worked.

He passed some of the big crevasses, cutting between them and some of the huge rumps of brown rock that lay farther over to the left.

The sun must have warmed up Van Rooijen's phone in his jacket because it started to ring. He realized he had left it on after trying it during the night. It was Heleen. She had waited for his call but had finally given up waiting and in the darkness in Utrecht at 2:30 a.m. had tried the number. She hadn't expected him to answer.

She screamed, “Wilco!”

He said he was feeling confident. The terrain was easing off. He was nearly down.

“I think I can see Camp One,” he said.

“Keep on going!” Heleen was overjoyed by how positive he sounded. “I am here on the couch with Teun,” his wife said. “Do it for us,” she said, speaking so loudly that she woke her son. “You have to keep on going. Keep on going!”

He told her he would call her again when he reached the camp.

He rounded the corner, and he saw some fixed ropes snaking lower. He had stumbled onto a route, though he didn't know whether it was the Cesen route. A long way below were what looked like two yellow North Face tents.

Van Rooijen realized now that two figures were climbing across toward him, between him and the tents. They appeared to speed up. When he saw them, he was overjoyed. Climbers meant a stove, and that meant melting snow for water. It would be an end to his thirst. Van Rooijen walked on slowly, pausing every few steps and bending down on one knee to lean on his ice axe, catching his breath.

The two men were still about three hundred feet away from Van Rooijen when they came into focus. The one at the rear was wearing a dark blue suit. The one leading was dressed like Van Rooijen in orange.
Shit! It's Cas!

When Van Rooijen reached Cas van de Gevel, he embraced his friend and Van de Gevel hugged him back. Chest to chest, they
screamed their joy into the other's face. Both men cried, so desperately happy to have found each other and cheated death.

“I didn't think we were ever going to meet again!” Van de Gevel said.

He looked into Van Rooijen's gaunt, sunburned face. Van Rooijen's lips were sore and blistered, and his eyes were bloodshot. The wind and the cold had marked his cheeks with red blood vessels.

Van de Gevel helped Van Rooijen down the Cesen and they crammed into one of the Dutch tents. He was in shock and they helped him get himself together. Gyalje had already melted two liters of water from snow in a pan and Van Rooijen gulped it down. He also breathed some oxygen from the tank Gyalje had carried lower, and forced a Sultana biscuit into his mouth.

Van de Gevel took out his video camera and filmed Van Rooijen speaking into the lens under the low roof of the tent, his silver hair sticking up crazily. Even after his adventure he was well enough to give an interview for posterity. But when they explained he was only at Camp Three, he was disbelieving and then angry.

“What do you mean?” he said. He was convinced he had been climbing so long that he must have bypassed the top three camps. “Not funny.”

After all his hard work there was still about 7,000 feet between him and Base Camp.

“It's true!”

Van de Gevel told him about the deaths on the mountain. They had rescued Marco Confortola. But Hugues d'Aubarède was dead. They also thought that Gerard McDonnell was gone. Van de Gevel and Gyalje didn't go into greater detail because they didn't know more. Chris Klinke had the list at Base Camp.

Van Rooijen was devastated and shook his head ruefully, only half comprehending. He said he thought he had been the only one caught in this nightmare.

He said he could not feel his feet and asked Van de Gevel and
Gyalje to take a look. They peeled off the outer part of his boots, then his inner boots. It looked bad. His toes, swollen and hard, had turned gray and light blue. They had severe frostbite.

They radioed Base Camp to report the news that the lost climber had been found. It was a terrific, joyful moment. After all the bad news, there was immense relief. The voices on the radio were full of congratulation.

Van Rooijen thanked them all. “Now you have to focus on finding Gerard and getting Marco down,” he said. The Italian, still above them at Camp Four at 26,000 feet, was in a bad way.

They discussed the state of Van Rooijen's injuries. Eric Meyer's gravelly voice came on the line, and he told them they had to lose height as rapidly as possible if they were going to save Van Rooijen's toes. Some of the teams at Base Camp had made a rescue plan and offered to climb up carrying ropes and oxygen tanks to help lift Van Rooijen down. But Gyalje demurred, saying they would manage on their own; the mountain was dangerous and there had been too many deaths already.

Van Rooijen insisted he could walk, and with the oxygen tank on his back the three men descended toward Camp Two. If anything, Cas van de Gevel was more exhausted than Van Rooijen. As they climbed, his colleague passed him the bottle of oxygen, and breathing the extra gas gave him some new energy, though the bottle was empty after a few minutes.

At Camp Two, Gyalje melted more snow for water and Van de Gevel was so tired that he crashed into a deep sleep outside the tent. When he woke up, he told the others he wanted to stay at the camp for the night. It looked like he had some frostbite on his hands; his fingers were turning rigid and painful. “You must get up,” said Gyalje, insisting. The other two men forced him to his feet and they began climbing down the route again.

Van de Gevel fell behind. Walking down alone, he forced himself onward. Later, he would think about what K2 had done to him and
to his friend; Van Rooijen had lost twenty-two pounds. Van de Gevel had lost thirty. They had both nearly died. He would think how dreadful it would be to face Gerard McDonnell's family. He had met the Irishman for the first time on this expedition. They had gotten to know each other on the trek in from Askole. Now McDonnell was gone. Ger's mother, his sisters, his brother would hate them all for having allowed this to happen.

The tragedy would no doubt stop some people from coming back. But it would not keep Van de Gevel from returning to the mountains. If he gave up climbing, he knew, he wouldn't be the same person. When he was climbing, he felt at ease, the most comfortable he ever was.

He couldn't stop thinking about the moment on the summit when the guys—d'Aubarède, McDonnell, and Van Rooijen—had embraced under the dome of the perfect blue evening sky.

That is what it was all about. Even this disaster could not rob him of that.

Ahead of Cas, Van Rooijen, for his part, reflected that he had finished with K2. After three attempts, he had conquered its summit. K2 was a mountain you climbed only once in your lifetime. To try again would be stupid. As he hobbled lower, he knew he was not coming back.

 

Marco Confortola had woken up alone on Sunday morning at Camp Four with only his two Balti HAPs for help. The last of the large South Korean contingent had cleared out without waiting to assist him down.

The sun was high in the sky. Confortola felt dizzy. After his hours outside unprotected on the mountain, and his fall down the Bottleneck, he ached, and pains burned in his left hand and in his feet, but he climbed over the misty ridge onto the rocks of the Abruzzi. He was familiar with it, whereas the Cesen was strange to him.

The two HAPs followed him down, but they stayed a few hundred
feet behind him, as though Confortola were bad luck or too much work. He cursed them. He knew he couldn't rely on them.

The Abruzzi was deserted. He followed the ropes alone. When he climbed down onto the cut-up snows at Camp Three, he found nobody. No one to wave or run to him or bring him in.

The climbers who had waited to help the Norwegians had abandoned the camp, but he found a Sprite in one of the tents and drank it, and found two energy bars in another tent and ate them. He found a battery for his phone and called Luigi at his bank in Valfurva.

“This is Marco!” he said, pressing the phone eagerly to his mouth.

But Confortola's luck wasn't getting any better. Luigi wasn't there. His brother was out.

Confortola nodded. “Okay.”

He hung up, and then slept.

 

As Wilco van Rooijen, Cas van de Gevel, and Pemba Gyalje dropped onto the steep paths near the bottom of the mountain, they were met by climbers from Base Camp. There had been no ropes on the lower thousand feet of the Cesen so the rescue party had fixed new lines to help the injured climbers get down.

Roeland van Oss and others from the Dutch team, including the Base Camp manager, Sajjad Shah, gathered around the men. They had brought water, Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Snickers and Kit Kat bars.

One of Sajjad's jobs in Base Camp had been to keep Van Rooijen in supplies of cookies and peanut butter. It was one of his favorite foods, so much so that halfway through the season Shah had had to send down for another dozen jars from Skardu. Now, when Van Rooijen saw the Pakistani, he bellowed out: “Sajjad!” Then added with a smile: “Where are my peanut butter and cookies!” Shah could see that the ebullient Dutch leader had emerged from his trials with his spirits undiminished.