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

For Abrar, Almas, Asam, Dawa, Jen Jen,
Nima, Rahmin, Umbreen, and Zehan

Contents

List of Maps

List of Characters

Author’s Note

Prologue: The Death Zone

Part I: Ambition

1 Summit Fever

2 Doorway to Heaven

3 The Prince and the Porter

4 The Celebrity Ethnicity

5 Insha’Allah

Part II: Conquest

6 The Approach

7 Weather Gods

8 Ghost Winds

9 Through the Bottleneck

Part III: Descent

10 Escape from the Summit

11 Sonam

12 Survival

13 Buried in the Sky

14 The Fearless Five

15 The Next Life

Acknowledgments

Background Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Photo Insert

List of Maps

Karakorum, Himalaya, and Hindu Kush

Rolwaling, Khumbu, and Arun regions of Nepal

Thomas Montgomerie’s Sketch of K2

Shimshal Valley, Pakistan

Shimshal to K2

The Approach to K2

Abruzzi and Cesen Routes

Camp 4 to Summit

Summit to Camp 4

List of Characters

More than seventy people endeavored to climb K2 in 2008. What follows is a list of the climbers, expedition coordinators, rescuers, staff, and weather consultants who played a significant role during the disaster as described in this book.

Karakorum, Himalaya, and Hindu Kush:
K2 and the surrounding peaks rose from the sea as the Indian continental plate plowed under Eurasia. Still growing, the Karakorum is earth’s youngest mountain range. The weather is much harsher than in the Himalaya.

Author’s Note

by Peter Zuckerman

Many climbing accounts describe a death-defying struggle up fixed lines. But how did those ropes get there? Who performed the rescues? When your life hangs from a knot, it helps to know who tied it.

But some stories get buried. Western journalists seldom speak Ajak Bhote, Balti, Burushaski, Shar-Khumbu tamgney, Rolwaling Sherpi tamgney, or Wakhi. Reporters can’t usually track down indigenous climbers by dialing telephone numbers or sending e-mails, and writers on a deadline rarely have time to trek to remote villages. As a result, testimony from high-altitude workers isn’t broadcast far. Survivors of the Death Zone have imperfect recall, and the media maelstrom makes recovery—and accuracy—elusive as families, fans, friends, and publicists all assert claims on a story. Trauma and oxygen deprivation compound the confusion. As in war, eyewitnesses who were standing next to each other sometimes report different versions of the events.

Nonetheless, Amanda and I have tried to get at the truth and to be straightforward about our reporting. We researched for two years. We took seven trips to Nepal, trekking to regions rarely visited by Westerners and off-limits to journalists. We took three trips to Pakistan and obtained unprecedented access to military and government officials, thanks largely to Nazir Sabir, president of the Alpine Club of Pakistan. In total, we interviewed more than two hundred people and spent countless hours at kitchen tables in France, Holland, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States. We relied on more than a thousand photographs and videos. This book re-creates a true story. Please see the background notes for further information on methods and sources.

The death of Amanda’s friend Karim Meherban was a catalyst for this book. Nursing a newborn, Amanda couldn’t do all the research herself, so I was brought in as coauthor. Amanda and I are cousins, and we’ve been writing together since I was twelve. Before
Buried in the Sky
, I had a comfortable job as a daily newspaper reporter. I had never strapped on crampons. But when I learned about this story, I had no choice but to quit my job, grab a notebook, and head to the Himalaya. The characters were too inspiring, the goal too important, and the journey too compelling to resist.

Portland, Oregon
November 2011

Prologue

The Death Zone

The Bottleneck of K2, Pakistan
The Death Zone: about 27,000 feet above sea level

Hanging off the face of a cliff, an ice axe the only thing between him and death, a Sherpa climber named Chhiring Dorje swung to the left. A massive ice boulder ripped off above, hurtling toward him.

It was the size of a refrigerator.

The underbelly caught, and the mass flipped, cartwheeling down. It tore past, skimming Chhiring’s shoulder, then vanished.

Brooof.
It slammed into something below, shattering.

The mountain shook with the impact. Powder shot up in a column.

It was about midnight on August 1, 2008, and Chhiring had only a hazy idea of where he was: on or near the Bottleneck of K2, the deadliest stretch of the most dangerous mountain. At roughly the cruising altitude of a Boeing 737, the Bottleneck stretched away from him into the darkness below. In the starlight, the channel seemed bottomless as wisps of fog slithered into the abyss. Above, a lip of ice curled like the barrel of a crashing wave.

Oxygen depletion had turned Chhiring’s mind to mush. Hunger and exhaustion had broken his body. When he opened his mouth, his tongue froze; when he gasped for breath, the moistureless air scoured his throat and lashed his eyes.

Chhiring felt robotic, cold, too tired to think of what he’d sacrificed to get to K2. The Sherpa mountaineer, who had summited Everest ten times, had been consumed by the mountain for decades. A far more difficult peak than Everest, K2’s summit is one of the most prestigious prizes in high-altitude mountaineering. Chhiring had gone despite his wife’s tears. Despite the climb costing more money than his father had made in forty years. Despite his Buddhist
lama
warning him that K2’s goddess would never tolerate the climb.

Chhiring had made it to the summit of K2 that evening without using bottled oxygen, vaulting him into an elite group of the most successful mountaineers, but the descent wasn’t turning out as planned. He had dreamed of the achievement, a heroic reception, even fame. None of that mattered now. Chhiring had a wife, two daughters, a thriving business, and a dozen relatives who depended on him. All he wanted was to get home. Alive.

Normally, descent would be safer. Climbers usually go down during the early afternoon when it’s warmer and daylight shows the way. They rappel, leapfrogging off the ice while attached to a fixed line to control their speed. In avalanche-prone areas around the Bottleneck, climbers descend as quickly as possible. This cuts exposure time, minimizing the chance of getting buried. Getting down fast was what Chhiring had planned on, depended on.

Now it was black and moonless. The fixed lines had vanished, severed by falling ice. Turning back wasn’t an option. Without rope to catch him, Chhiring had only his axe to arrest a fall. And more than one life was in play: another climber was hanging from his harness.

The man suspended below him was Pasang Lama. Three hours earlier, Pasang had given up his ice axe to help more vulnerable climbers. He had thought he could survive without it. Like Chhiring, Pasang had planned to rappel down the mountain using the fixed lines.

When the ropes through the Bottleneck disappeared, Pasang had figured it was his time to die. Stranded, he was unable to climb up or down without help. Why would anyone try to save him? A climber who attached himself to Pasang would surely fall, too. Using an ice axe to check the weight of one mountaineer skidding down the Bottleneck is nearly impossible. Stopping two bodies presents twice the difficulty, twice the risk. A rescue would be suicidal, Pasang thought. Mountaineers are supposed to be self-sufficient. Any pragmatic person would leave him to die.

As expected, one Sherpa already had. Pasang assumed Chhiring would do the same. Chhiring and Pasang were on separate teams. Chhiring had no obligation to help. But now Pasang hung three yards below him, attached to Chhiring’s harness by a tether.

After dodging the block of ice, the two men bowed their heads and silently negotiated with the mountain goddess. She responded a few seconds later. The sound was electronic, the amplified pluck of a rubber band run through distortion pedals.
Zoing.
It continued, echoing louder, longer, faster, lower-pitched, from the left, from the right. The climbers knew what it meant. The ice around them was calving. With each
zoing
, fractures zigzagged across the glacier, ready to drop cinder blocks of ice.

If the men sensed one coming, they could shuffle to the side and contort themselves away. Failing that, they could sustain a hit. But eventually a mass the size of a bus would break off. Not much to do when that happens, except pray. Chhiring and Pasang had to get down before the falling ice crushed them.

Chuck.
Chhiring hacked his axe into the ice.
Shink.
He kicked, stabbing the ice with his crampons. He descended like this for a few feet—
chuck, shink, shink, chuck, shink, shink
—and jammed himself against the slope so that the man attached to him could move to the same rhythm.

Pasang punched the hard ice with his fist, trying to compact it into a dent he could grip. Shallow and slick, the hold couldn’t bear his weight. As Pasang extended his leg downward, he leaned on the safety tether that tied him to Chhiring.
Shink.
Pasang kicked in his crampons, relieving the pressure on the tether.

The weight on the rope threatened to pry Chhiring off the mountain’s face, but he managed to cling on as they maneuvered around the bulges, cracks, dips, and lumps. Sometimes he and Pasang went side by side, holding hands, coordinating their movements. At other times Pasang went first, while Chhiring braced in a holding position with the axe and controlled the safety tether between them.

Rocks and chunks of ice spun at them, dinging their helmets, but they were halfway down and thought they’d survive. The night was windless—minus four degrees Fahrenheit—almost warm for K2. The lights of high camp were smoldering below. Chhiring and Pasang didn’t expect it to happen.

A chunk of ice or rock knocked Pasang on the head. Batted off the ice, he swung like a piñata.

The force of Pasang’s body on the rope peeled Chhiring from the slope.

The men tore downward.

Chhiring gripped his axe with both hands and slammed it into the mountain. The blade wouldn’t catch. It cut surgically through the snow.

Sliding faster, Chhiring heaved his chest against the adze of his axe, digging into the slope. No good. Chhiring fell faster, another seven yards, another ten.

Pasang punched the slope with his fists and tried to grip, but his fingers skated along the ice.

The men dropped farther into the darkness.

Their shrieks, muffled by snow, must have funneled up the Bottleneck to the southeast face, but the survivors there heard nothing. They were deaf to the thud of falling bodies. All of them were lost. Dazed and hallucinating, some wandered off-route. Others calmed themselves enough to make a measured decision between two grim options: free-climb down the Bottleneck in the darkness or bivouac in the Death Zone.

Gerard McDonnell, who hours before had become the first Irishman to summit K2, cut a shallow ledge to sit on and another to brace his feet. Patience wouldn’t stop an avalanche, but at least he had a perch to wait out the night.

Another climber, an Italian named Marco Confortola, squished in beside him. To stay awake, they forced themselves to sing. With hoarse voices, the men crooned the songs they could remember, anything to avoid dying in their sleep.

Earlier, a French summiter had made a promise to his girlfriend. “I’ll never leave you again,” Hugues d’Aubarède had told her via satellite phone. “I’m finished now. This time next year, we’ll all be
at the beach
.” That night, he slid down the Bottleneck to his death. His Pakistani high-altitude porter, Karim Meherban, strayed off-route, reaching the crown of the glacier that hulks over the Bottleneck. He slumped down and waited to freeze.

Farther down, a Norwegian newlywed had just lost her husband to several tons of ice. This climb had been their honeymoon. Now she was clawing down the mountain without him.

Many of the alpinists considered themselves to be among the best in the world. They hailed from France, Holland, Italy, Ireland, Nepal, Norway, Pakistan, Serbia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. Some had risked everything to scale K2. Their climb had devolved into a catastrophe. The final toll was bleak: within twenty-seven hours, eleven climbers had died in the deadliest single disaster in K2’s history.

What had gone wrong? Why had the climbers continued up when they knew they’d never make it down before nightfall? How had they made so many simple mistakes, such as failing to bring enough rope?

The story became an international media sensation, landing on the covers of the
New York Times
,
National Geographic Adventure
,
Outside
, and in more than a thousand other publications. It ricocheted around the blogosphere and inspired speculation, documentaries, a stage-play revival, memoirs, and talk shows.

Some considered the climb an example of hubris, a waste of life fueled by machismo or madness: thrill-seekers trying too hard to get noticed by corporate sponsorship; lunatics climbing in a final act of escape; oblivious Westerners exploiting the lives of impoverished Nepalis and Pakistanis in a bid for glory; the media feeding off deaths to sell papers and products; gawkers observing the spectacle for entertainment.

“You want to risk your life?” a response to one of the
New York Times
stories said. “Then do it in service of your country, or family, or neighborhood. Climbing K2 or Everest is a selfish stunt that benefits nothing.”

“Heroes my ass,” sniffed another; “. . . these egomaniacs should stay off mountains.”

Other people saw courage: explorers pitted against the adversity of nature; lost souls embracing risk to find meaning in an empty world.

“Climbing can expand the view of human potential for all of us,” read a letter to the media from Phil Powers, executive director of the American Alpine Club.

Paraphrasing Teddy Roosevelt, another letter read, “Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

Others raised basic questions: What do men and women do when they are on top of a mountain, dying? And why are some people driven to take such risks?

Before they were trapped on the mountaintop; before the deaths and funerals; before the rescues and reunions; before the fistfights and friendships; before the recriminations and reconciliations—everything had seemed perfect. The equipment was checked and rechecked; the routes, established; the weather, cooperative; the teams, intact. The moment they had spent so much time and training and money to reach—summit day—had finally come. They were going to conquer K2, stand on top of the most vicious mountain on earth, howl in triumph, unfurl their flags, and call their sweethearts.

Chhiring and Pasang, as they fell into the blackness, must have wondered: How did this happen?