Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day (12 page)

Many found it a cheerful place, but Chhiring Dorje’s first impression was the stench. It wafted over from a communal grave to the south, on a rise between the Savoia and Godwin-Austen Glaciers. The Gilkey Memorial, a cairn of rocks piled eight feet high, is K2’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Family photos and unread letters feather the monument. Threadbare scarves wrap around its base like the bindings of a mummy. These scarves, Buddhist offerings called
katas
, beat in the wind, petitioning the gods. On hot days, the cairn stews with the scent of defrosting flesh, and the odor clings to mourners’ hair and clothing. Tin plates, fastened to the rocks, glint in the sunlight. Engraved with names of K2’s victims, they display dates from 1939 onward, June to August, the climbing season.

The Gilkey Memorial is a grisly necessity because corpses rarely make it down the mountain in one piece. For Everest losses, families sometimes send a recovery team. This doesn’t happen on K2. The Savage Mountain devours its victims during the long winter between climbing seasons. It encases the torsos in ice and grates them against the rocks, only to spit out the digested remains decades later, scattering limbs among avalanche debris.

When Art Gilkey’s team gathered stones to honor their friend in 1953, they started a morbid tradition. To keep their campsites sanitary, climbers began using the memorial as a place to dispose of the fingers, pelvic bones, arms, heads, and legs found in the glacial melt. Burying these scraps under the Gilkey Memorial felt more respectful than leaving them to the ravens. For more than half a century, the memorial has been a place to caution the living and consecrate the dead. Mountaineers attempting K2 visit the site to remind themselves of what they are getting into.

Chhiring considered the memorial a travesty. In 2008, he was among the first to arrive at Base Camp for the season, and he felt sick sleeping and eating so close to corpses. Why, he wondered, would anyone pin these people under rocks? All they do is freeze at night, defrost in the morning, simmer in the day, then freeze all over again. Such mistreatment, he worried, trapped the souls inside the bodies when they were suffering for release. He assumed that the mountain goddess suffered along with them. “I would not go near the memorial,” he said. He urged his friend Eric Meyer to stay away from it, too.

Chhiring believed the bodies deserved better. Sherpas and many other Buddhists prefer to cremate the dead. The smoke carries the spirit to the sacred realm above, as it did with Chhiring’s mother. When someone dies above the timberline and it’s hard to find firewood, a
sky burial
substitutes for cremation. Although outsiders consider sky burials barbaric—China outlawed the practice in Tibet from the 1960s to the 1980s—to Chhiring this was the sacred way to free the soul. During a sky burial, Buddhist
lamas
or others with religious authority carry the body to a platform on a hill. While burning incense and reciting mantras, they hack the corpse into chunks and slices. They pound the bones with a rock or hammer, beating the flesh into a pulp and mixing in tea, butter, and milk. The preparation attracts vultures, and the birds consume the carcass, carrying the spirit aloft and burying it in the sky, where it belongs. Souls inside the Gilkey Memorial receive neither cremation nor sky burial, and this troubled Chhiring.

He decided to find out more about the temperament of K2’s goddess, so he approached another Sherpa to discuss it—Pemba Gyalje, a devout Buddhist on the Dutch team. Pemba belonged to the Paldorje, an ancient Sherpa clan of the Solukhumbu. At the top of the ethnic pecking order, Pemba had also summited Everest six times and trained at the prestigious Ecole Nationale de Ski et d’Alpinisme in Chamonix, France. Like Chhiring, he was a Sherpa climbing as an equal member of a Western team. They were natural allies but had opposite personalities. Pemba usually observed discussions in silence, offered some austere logic, then withdrew into silence again. That style put Chhiring on edge, so he ended up consulting someone else. He called his
lama
on speed dial from his $2-per-minute Thuraya satellite phone.

Ngawang Oser Sherpa picked up on the eighth or ninth ring. The
lama
told Chhiring he was praying at the Boudhanath
stupa
in Kathmandu. “I can’t gauge Takar Dolsangma’s mood long distance,” he said. He advised Chhiring to perform a
puja
ceremony and pay attention to the mountain’s reaction. “And don’t climb on Tuesday,” he added. “It’s an inauspicious day for you.”

Chhiring switched off the phone and began hauling rocks to the center of camp, building a
chorten
, a sacred mound to honor the goddess. He attached a string of Buddhist prayer flags to it. The red, blue, white, and yellow squares of calico, stamped with sacred verses and strung along a line, were his
Lung
Ta
, Tibetan for “wind horse.” Eric and other mountaineers joined him at the
puja
ceremony as the breeze picked up. The flags whipped, purifying the air and spreading blessings around camp. Chhiring knew Takar Dolsangma was present. Mindful, he recited mantras, asking the goddess for counsel and forgiveness. He leaned his ice axe and crampons against the
chorten
, balancing a plate of rice beside it and hoping she would accept the offering, bless his equipment, and forgive the injury they were about to cause her. Burning incense, Chhiring dusted the faces of his friends with flour to signify that he wished them to live until they were old and gray. Finally, he asked the goddess for permission to climb.

The ceremony failed. The goddess was still restive. Avalanches roared down her slopes that night, and the jet stream scoured the summit. For a week, she hid behind the clouds. When the Flying Jump arrived in Base Camp on June 15, Chhiring recognized the problem: Pasang Lama’s
boss.

Others saw Mr. Kim as an omen, too. “I was also praying the mountain wouldn’t recognize Mr. Kim,” said Ngawang Bhote, the Korean team’s cook.

Although Kim had made sure the Flying Jump was one of the best equipped teams at Base Camp, he hadn’t been welcome among the Sherpas since a scuffle at Everest in 2007. That year, a member of Mr. Kim’s team discovered a quartz rock with the Korean symbol for Everest naturally ingrained in the crystal. According to the expedition organizer, Mr. Kim had declared the stone holy, and his team erected an altar in the kitchen tent. They believed the quartz would protect them as they climbed Everest’s Tibetan flank.

But the stone disappeared and the Flying Jump panicked. For four days, the Koreans suspended climbing operations, combing Base Camp for their talisman. On the fifth day, the Chinese liaison officer—Base Camp’s equivalent of a sheriff—arrived to investigate allegations that a Korean climber had assaulted a Sherpa for misplacing the rock. Jamie McGuinness, a New Zealander who had organized Kim’s expedition, got into a shouting match with his client.

“I told Kim I’d pull his entire Sherpa staff if they were going to clobber someone over a missing rock,” recalled Jamie, who consulted with the liaison officer about revoking the Korean team’s permit.

Mr. Kim apologized and successfully climbed Everest with his teammates and Pasang’s cousin Jumik Bhote. After Everest, Jumik joked privately that working for the Flying Jump was like jumping off a cliff and expecting to fly. On K2, the Koreans boasted to Chhiring and Eric that the Flying Jump “had sponsors to impress and would reach the summit, whatever the cost.”

Chhiring stayed away from the Flying Jump just as he kept away from the Gilkey Memorial. Still, Mr. Kim’s presence weighed on him. A few months earlier, Chhiring had been consumed with K2, but now he was beginning to think his wife may have been right; maybe K2 wasn’t worth the risk. He spoke with Eric about going home. He asked Pemba for his opinion. He called his
lama
again by satellite phone and asked him to perform another
puja
ceremony at Boudhanath. For a week, Chhiring kept hauling rocks to his
chorten
, which grew seven feet tall, becoming the largest in camp. Climbing the mountain still felt wrong. Ngawang Bhote also sensed it. “I could feel the weather change every time Nadir Ali”—the Pakistani cook for the Serbs—“butchered an animal and served its ground flesh,” he said. Chhiring agreed and stuck to rice and noodles.

Most of the others in camp ignored the goddess. They scarfed down Nadir’s cheeseburgers, played poker, hoarded porn, licked Nutella from the jar, debated the Bonatti Bivouac, updated their blogs, complained about the weather. Chhiring saw that the young man hired by the Flying Jump, Pasang Lama, wasn’t praying much, either. He was too busy leveling tent platforms and digging holes for the Flying Jump’s latrine. Concerned, Chhiring watched him closely. Pasang worked hard and lacked fancy gear. That meant he needed this job and was ready to do whatever the Flying Jump asked of him, no matter the danger. Pasang reminded Chhiring of himself when he started out: eager but oblivious.

Chhiring hoped Pasang would acknowledge Takar Dolsangma soon. If Pasang was going to be on K2 with the Flying Jump, he would need her. Chhiring also recognized something Pasang didn’t: Pasang and his cousins hadn’t landed their jobs because of superior luck, strength, or skill. The Bhotes were climbing K2 because ethnic Sherpas did not want to work for the Flying Jump.

One evening, just before the weather cleared and the teams began their assault on the mountain, Chhiring saw Pasang kneeling next to the
chorten
. Chhiring hadn’t spoken with him yet but decided to join him in prayer. He bent his knees, pressed his hands together, and leaned forward. Instead of directing his prayer toward the goddess or his wife and children, he prayed for Pasang, asking the mountain to protect him.

When he opened his eyes, Chhiring looked up and scanned the horizon. Hidden behind storms for weeks, K2’s summit materialized and seemed to swallow the sky.

7

Weather Gods

Rawalpindi, Pakistan

O
n June 2, 2008, the day Shaheen’s clients arrived in Pakistan, a white Corolla packed with sixty-five pounds of fertilizer, diesel, and TNT rolled through a security checkpoint in Sector F-6/1, near Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave. The driver, an eighteen-year-old jihadi named Kamal Saleem, turned left at Street 21 and parked in front of the Danish Embassy. At 12:10 p.m., Kamal’s car exploded.

The bomb blasted a four-foot crater into the road, incinerated Kamal, flipped the Corolla, caved in the embassy’s metal gates, pulverized most of the embassy’s front wall, blew out the windows, and punched through a quarter of the building next door. Dozens of cars shot off the road and rubble blanketed Sector F-6. “Bodies are littered all over the place,” Al Jazeera reported. “The blast could be heard all over the city, and it has literally taken the leaves off the trees.” Eight people died, including an unidentified child, and twenty-seven were wounded.

Al-Qaeda called the attack retaliation. Danish newspapers had published a series of cartoons satirizing Islam. One ridiculed the Prophet by depicting a bomb concealed in his turban. After the explosion, journalists made it sound as though jihadis were on the verge of taking over Pakistan, seizing its nuclear arsenal, and annihilating civilization. But foreigners heading to K2 considered it a routine delay. As Serbian climber Hoselito Bite put it: “In Islamabad, Armageddon is nothing special.”

Shaheen Baig, however, took the bombing personally. Waiting for his clients’ cargo, he questioned the sanity of the world outside Shimshal. Al-Qaeda was slaughtering children over a cartoon. He instructed the Serbian team to stay inside the hotel. “I will show you the real Pakistan,” he told them. The country Shaheen knew was peaceful, most of the time, and he wanted foreigners to see past the threat of terrorism and behold Pakistan’s beauty.

So did the mountaineering industry. To persuade skittish tourists, the Alpine Club of Pakistan had successfully lobbied for climber-friendly incentives. By 2008, the Ministry of Tourism, using a sliding scale based on altitude and season, had slashed fees for 8,000-meter peaks to half their pre-9/11 rates. Some lesser peaks were on sale at 95 percent off. A K2 permit was $12,000, while Everest cost
seven times more
. At the same time, the ministry stopped enforcing caps on the number of expeditions to K2 and other peaks. In practice, anyone with ready cash could attempt any Pakistani mountain, at any time, by any route.

Most mountaineers appreciated the reduced fees and climber-friendly deregulation. “ ‘Pay to play’ is how we want it,” said the Alpine Club president, Nazir Sabir. “The government has no business deciding who can or can’t climb.” Nepal has policies similar to those of Pakistan. The United States is more restrictive. Although the summit of North America’s highest peak barely reaches the altitude of K2’s first mountain camp, climbers heading to Denali in Alaska must submit a climbing résumé before securing a permit. If prospective mountaineers don’t appear to have enough experience, “I’ll call them and say, ‘I see you’ve been on Grasshopper Glacier for a few days, but Denali is different,” said Joe Reichert, a National Park Service ranger. “We’ll try to talk them out of it, tell them it’s too dangerous.”

The Park Service can’t turn away mountaineers from public lands, but it reviews applications sixty days in advance and requires climbers to attend a PowerPoint presentation about avalanche risk, crevasse rescue, environmental impact, fixed-line etiquette, and sanitation. The Park Service installs and maintains fixed lines on Denali, and U.S. taxpayers pay for helicopter rescues. Injured climbers are airlifted to hospitals regardless of whether they can pay.

In the Karakorum, the bargain price for climbing has had the intended effect. After the September 11 attacks, tourists and mountaineers avoided Pakistan; in 2008, more than seventy foreign mountaineers arrived to climb K2, although half would be culled by illness before a summit bid. Hundreds more were attempting nearby peaks. Instead of cancellations, K2 had a crowd.

Shaheen wanted to give the climbers a good impression of his religion and his country, and when he arrived at Base Camp with the Serbian team, he tried to be an ambassador. “Part of my job is to keep harmony,” he said. Still, diplomacy was tough when expeditions made unreasonable demands. The Singaporean team, for instance, ordered Jehan Baig, their Shimshali high-altitude porter, to carry loads through what Jehan believed to be an avalanche zone. Jehan balked. The team fired him.

Afterward, Shaheen found Jehan another job. Jehan’s new employer, Hugues d’Aubarède, the sixty-one-year-old French insurance salesman, paid well, and he had already hired another Shimshali, Karim. But Shaheen soon had misgivings about Hugues. Hiking along the moraine near Base Camp, he and Karim had spotted Hugues crouched down as though tying a shoelace. On the rocks in front of him lay a gray forearm, chopped at the elbow, fingernails intact enough for a manicure. The empty shoulder socket was fringed in tendon. Hugues snapped several photos, aiming his lens at the man’s desiccated lips.

Shaheen and Karim were sickened. Muslims consider the mouth, which recites the Qur’an, to be the holiest part of the body. Upon death, as Allah sends an angel to coax the soul from its body, Muslims traditionally close a corpse’s mouth, shut its eyelids, and comb its hair. The body is bathed in scented water, shrouded in clean sheets, and lowered into the earth on the right side, facing Mecca—all before night falls on the day of death.

Shaheen gestured toward the dead man. “That could be any of us,” he told Karim.

Karim asked what they should do.

“Let me handle this,” Shaheen replied.

Several hours later in Base Camp, Shaheen intercepted Hugues. “What do you plan to do with those pictures?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Hugues replied. Plenty of climbers photograph human remains along the glacier, he said. When Hugues climbed Everest, he had nearly tripped over a frozen cadaver. Death is part of this sport, Hugues noted, and he was simply “documenting it, as usual.”

Shaheen knew what that meant: “Are you going to post those photos on the Internet?”

No, absolutely not, Hugues said. He vowed to keep the images to himself. “Exposing a body like that
would be obscene
. The dead man’s family might even recognize him online.”

Shaheen left satisfied. On July 11, he invited the Frenchman to a party. The celebration was in honor of the fifty-first anniversary of the Aga Khan’s coronation, a day of solidarity for Ismaili Muslims who accept this direct descendant of Muhammad as their spiritual leader. Nadir, the Serbian team’s cook, slaughtered a goat, set up a line of tables in the sunlight, and spread out a buffet of almond cakes and meat skewers. Shaheen, meanwhile, corralled guests into a circle, clapping his hands as Karim and Jehan sang in Wakhi. A dance pit formed and Hugues boogied into the center. Dressed in slacks, a button-down shirt, a sportsman’s cap, and a cashmere sweater, he hopped and flopped his arms to the music like an injured seagull. The crowd adored him. Amid catcalls, Hugues ceded the dance floor to Karim. “I’ve got rheumatism,” Hugues announced. Laughing, Shaheen decided he’d misjudged the good-natured Frenchman. He hadn’t. Shortly after their conversation on the glacier, Hugues had downloaded the images onto a laptop. He composed an entry for his blog, speculating about the identity of the pieces. Then he tapped 
SEND
.

In many ways, the climbing community is like high school. The number of high-altitude mountaineers is small enough that almost everyone knows one another. With the added stress of death and dismemberment, cliques form and peer pressure builds. Mountaineers swap allies, trash-talk, tussle, hook up, and show off. In the weeks before the tragedy, some even squabbled like tweens.

Dutch expedition leader Wilco van Rooijen, for example, “did this, like, 13-year-old-girl thing to me,” recalled Nick Rice, the climber from California. “Cold shoulder,
completely bitchy
, he wouldn’t say ‘hi’ if I said ‘hi.’ ”

“Because I couldn’t believe what he was wearing!” Wilco explained. Nick wore only a lightweight Petzl Meteor helmet, too flimsy for K2. “A plastic bicycle helmet.”

“Wilco just hates me,” Nick said. “I don’t know why.”

“And he didn’t bring his own rope,” Wilco continued.

“The American team brought my rope.”

“He surfed the ’net all day and mostly brought petrol so he could run his generator.”

“Wilco had generator envy.”

Such spats ranged from essential to existential, and when Chhiring overheard them, he drew into himself. Compared with those who climbed Everest, the K2 mountaineers more blatantly blurred the line between crazy and courageous. Many were hoping to bag all the 8000ers—the fourteen peaks taller than 8,000 meters—and their swagger sometimes overshot their skill. The strong resented the weak, the weak resented being discounted, and the arrogance unsettled Chhiring. Anticipating that they’d all have to work together, he sized up the most ambitious of the group.

Chhiring found the Basque climber Alberto Zerain astonishing; he had never seen a European who could climb like a Sherpa. Alberto had struck a deal with Shaheen, agreeing to work as a high-altitude porter in exchange for a tent spot.

In addition to Alberto and Shaheen, Chhiring considered Wilco among the most capable mountaineers at Base Camp. A knight of the chivalric Order of Orange-Nassau, Wilco was on his third crusade. He had attempted the Savage Mountain twice before and failed. In 1995, a rock smashed his arm “so the bone was jutting out through the skin.” During the 2006 season, bad weather had beaten him back.

This time, Wilco was the first to arrive at K2, setting 3,000 meters of rope along the Cesen route. But when the knight abandoned chivalry and tried to charge the
customary toll
for use of these lines, his popularity tanked. On most days, he wanted to go home and see his wife and seven-month-old son. “I wanted to feel love,” he recalled. “I was crying inside my tent, thinking, ‘I’m done with this mountain.’ ”

Chhiring recognized Wilco’s homesickness, but he rarely spoke to him. He preferred the company of Wilco’s Irish teammate, Gerard McDonnell, who got along with everyone. A musician and engineer, Ger had acquired the nickname “Jesus” because of his messianic beard and his role as the camp peacemaker. He had also experienced a resurrection of sorts and had a dent in his head to prove it.

In 2006, climbing K2 with Wilco, Ger was at about 23,000 feet when a rock slide hissed down the slope. As Ger ducked behind a boulder to shield himself, a gneiss hockey puck spun at him and smashed into the left side of his Kevlar helmet. Climbers use Kevlar because it is tough—it’s a common component of bullet-blocking body armor. Nevertheless, the helmet dented, and the impact chipped off a shard of Ger’s skull, exposing his brain.

Ger’s climbing partner, Banjo Bannon, tore a wool sock from his pack and wadded it over the peephole. Delirious and losing blood, Ger stumbled down the mountain. After several desperate hours, he staggered into Base Camp and passed out. Storms kept the helicopter from landing that afternoon. The next day, Ger was airlifted to Skardu’s Combined Military Hospital.

Chhiring would have retired if he had a hole in his head, but this was a minority view. Base Camp was crawling with adrenaline junkies. Extreme skier Marco Confortola was in the vanguard, amusing his friends with videos of himself zipping down vertical drops in an aerodynamic catsuit. A tattoo of gothic script scrawled across the back of his neck cautioning,
Selvadek
(Wild Thing). His right bicep sprouted a row of edelweiss tattoos, each one signifying an 8000er that he had climbed. A Buddhist mantra was etched into the flesh of his wrist:
Om mani padme um
, a meditation for benevolent attention. The thirty-seven-year-old Italian lived with his mother. When anyone asked about his long-term plans, Marco said he refused to be tied down: “I am married to the mountains.” K2, however, wasn’t his type. “She is not a lady like Everest,” he said. “K2 is a surly and disagreeable man.” Marco was positive about the mountain’s gender because women coddled him, and no female, not even a goddess, could reject him the way the Savage Mountain had. In 2004, a windstorm on K2 had slapped Marco’s tent off the slope, taking his gear with it. Determined to succeed this time, Marco paraded around Base Camp wearing a patchwork of corporate logos and pumping hands with anyone he came across.

In contrast to the voluble Italian, Serbian mountaineer Dren Mandic spent his free time away from the crowd. Chhiring often watched him pacing the moraine, photographing birds or stooping to admire a clump of moss. At home in Serbia, Dren volunteered at an orphanage, and over the years he’d cared for a menagerie of strays and pets, including dogs, fish, geese, a goat, hamsters, parrots, pigeons, a squirrel, snakes, spiders, and turtles. As a child, Dren even refused to step on the grass. “How would you feel if someone stomped on your neck?” he had told grown-ups. Named after a medicinal tree whose sharpened sticks are used to lance boils, Dren was now thirty-two and in love with a woman who worked at the zoo.