Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day (13 page)

Chhiring sometimes wandered the moraine as Dren did, but when he needed a retreat, Chhiring usually sought out the happiest people around, the newlyweds Cecilie Skog and Rolf Bae. They invited Chhiring to lounge on their inflatable IKEA couch and watch the comedy
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
The lack of oxygen made the film’s antihero more hysterical than he might normally have been, and they played and replayed it.

Cecilie, who had once called climbing a “male-dominated affair,” was the first woman to complete the Explorer’s Grand Slam, reaching the top of the tallest mountain on every continent—the Seven Summits—and the North and South Poles. K2 was a kind of honeymoon for her and Rolf. They had been married only a year. After K2, they were planning a more conventional adventure: They wanted to have a baby.

Chhiring admired the newlyweds, and seeing them made him miss Dawa. He sometimes felt alone in a swarm of strangers. His friend Eric helped him practice reading English, and Chhiring helped Eric dispense medicine to the sick. They treated everything from bronchitis to appendicitis, stocked camps, and waited for the weather to improve.

For twenty-seven days, storms prevented anyone from going far. Shaheen flexed his diplomacy, Nick stoked his generator, Wilco cried in his tent, Ger told cautionary tales, Marco flashed his tats, Dren studied moss and birds, Rolf and Cecilie watched
Borat
, and Pasang set ropes for the Flying Jump. The jet stream battered the mountain, and snow flurries buried the camps. Until the weather cleared, the climbers could only wait.

Around the planet churns an invisible sea of waves, swells, and currents. Alfred Russel Wallace, codiscoverer of evolution by natural selection, called it “The Great Aerial Ocean.” Gas expands and contracts, rises and falls, warms and cools. Solar rays zip through atmospheric layers and strike the land, transforming into heat. Jet streams, cyclones, and ocean currents traffic the earth’s energy.

Stuck in Base Camp, the teams monitored a raucous layer of atmosphere called the troposphere. The stakes were sky-high: Windless days deliver the summit; unpredicted storms kill. As Buddhists perform
pujas
and Muslims kneel in
salat
, all denominations worship the meteorologist. Well-funded expeditions engage one for the entire season at $500 per day.

Nothing predicts weather with absolute precision, but infrared photos, satellite images, weather-station data, and an ensemble of statistical models run through supercomputers can foretell the future up to ten days in advance. For most of the year, the models predict the same thing for K2. Week after week, the jet stream blasts the summit. Yet, in summer, for a few hallowed days every few years, the winds die. This weather window is brief and precious. Until it opens, climbers acclimatize so they can bolt up the mountain when the forecaster calls.

Acclimatization hinges on genetics. Some mountaineers can adjust to altitude in two weeks; others will never get used to it. No matter how much they train, they can’t climb high mountains without bottled oxygen. These different physical responses help explain why climbing is rife with theories about how best to acclimatize. Climbers will tell you to eat bananas, meditate, practice yoga, sleep on your left side, swallow Diamox, or avoid it and instead chew
yarsagumba
, a mummified caterpillar with a mushroom spore shooting from its brain.

Almost all altitude-adjustment routines involve climbing in order to stock camps, followed by a period of recovery at lower altitude—
ideally, below 18,000 feet
. Mountaineers ascend in the morning and descend before nightfall. Doing this seems to jolt the body into faster adjustment until about 27,000 feet.

Above that is the Death Zone. Nobody can adjust to it. At this extreme altitude, the percentage of oxygen in the air is the same as at sea level, but the air pressure is much lower—the same volume of gas has fewer molecules in it. As a result, the body can’t extract enough oxygen from the air. The more time spent in the Death Zone, the weaker and sicker a climber becomes. The digestive system fails and the body devours its own muscle tissue. “It’s living hell. You feel your body deteriorating,” said Wilco. “Ever tried to run up a staircase while breathing through a straw?”

Acclimatization increases the amount of time climbers can survive in the Death Zone. During acclimatization, the kidneys excrete more bicarbonate ions, acidifying the blood, which quickens respiration. The bone marrow revs up red-cell production so the blood can transport more oxygen. Blood flow surges in the brain and lungs. Without acclimatization to altitude, someone dropped off at the summit of K2 would black out within minutes. Those who have acclimatized can last several days.

These adjustments nevertheless come with dangers. A higher concentration of red blood cells thickens the blood. Clots form more easily and the heart has to pump harder. The rise in blood pressure can dislodge the clots, which then travel up the legs and clog the coronary artery, causing heart attacks; or the clots can cut off oxygen supply to the brain, causing strokes. There is also the specter of edema, or fluid buildup. Desperate for more oxygen, the body’s cells release nitric oxide and other chemical signals to the capillaries, directing them to accept more blood. As the capillaries expand, they expose themselves to higher blood pressure and tear. Fluid leaks, pooling in places it shouldn’t.

Capillaries in the eyes explode like fireworks, and this hemorrhaging blurs vision in severe cases. When the fluid collects in the lungs, which have the body’s greatest concentration of capillaries, climbers suffer from high-altitude pulmonary edema. Instead of breathing normally, victims of high-altitude pulmonary edema can only pant. The cough resembles the bark of a sea lion. The pulse races. Lungs cannot deliver oxygen. Death comes within hours unless the climber descends fast or is entombed within an inflatable pressure bag.

Like the lungs, the brain, which draws in an enormous supply of blood, can also leak fluid. When this happens, it’s called high-altitude cerebral edema. Its first symptoms are often mild; they may be what causes acute mountain sickness. However, victims can deteriorate fast. The headache feels as though a sadist is testing a jackhammer on your cranium. Balance wavers and speech slurs—almost as though you’ve downed ten martinis. Half the body may go numb. Unreal smells, sounds, tastes, and visions appear. During an altitude-induced hallucination on the 1954 K2 expedition, “I found myself inside an ice cream parlor in Padova,” recalled Italian scientist Bruno Zanettin. “I told myself, ‘This can’t be real. I’m alone inside a tent in Pakistan,’ but I could still taste the flavor of the ice cream.”

It’s hard to predict whom these afflictions will strike. They can break even the best climbers, ones who have always excelled in thin air. Bizarrely, the dying commonly fail to notice how sick they are. And even those handling the altitude well or breathing bottled oxygen can feel the drain. Viagra can help. The drug relaxes the vessel tone of the pulmonary arteries and can increase exercise tolerance, so mountaineers commonly take it.

Experts debate whether altitude causes permanent brain damage, but oxygen deprivation certainly impairs judgment. In 2008, for example, Roeland van Oss of the Dutch team nearly gassed himself. On July 1, at 23,000 feet, he was melting a pot of ice inside his tent without adequate ventilation. “On the burner there’s a big sticker: ‘
Only use this outside
,’ ” explained Wilco. Carbon monoxide filled the tent, and Roeland fell flat. He would have died if his teammate, Court Haegens, hadn’t immediately dragged him into the open air. Although Roeland’s mistake was just an oversight, the Savage Mountain had nearly claimed the first victim of the summer.

Climbers call him “The Weather God,” but meteorologist Yan Giezendanner is an atheist—“to the point of
eating priests
.” Multiple sclerosis consigns him to a wheelchair, but his reach extends six miles into the troposphere. From his ground-floor apartment in Chamonix, Yan was responsible for choreographing the movements of Hugues, Karim, and Jehan.

On July 22, Yan studied two screens streaked with yellow slashes and green waves superimposed on the contours of Kazakhstan. A cyclonic circulation was blowing east. As the eye moved into China, a ridge of high pressure developed over the Karakorum on the cyclone’s west side. In this ridge, right over K2, winds would become preternaturally calm for three to four days. “In ten years, I had never seen such a beautiful window,” Yan recalled. He didn’t pick up the phone right away. “I sat in my kitchen, stalling. I knew August 1 would be perfect. I also knew my prediction might cause a friend to die.” Reluctantly, he dialed Hugues’s number. When the Frenchman’s satellite phone chirped at Base Camp, Hugues, Karim, and Jehan were packing to go home. Hugues had no sponsors to impress. After four dreary weeks stuck in Base Camp, he could catch a flight to Paris without disappointing anyone but his dentist, who wanted a photo of Hugues’s teeth gleaming from the summit.

But once he heard the news about the weather window, Hugues resolved to stay, and so did many others. That day, Thuraya phones all over camp were bleating, and ecstatic climbers were zipping from one tent to the next. “Base Camp turned upside down,” said expedition manager Maarten van Eck, who had received an earlier forecast from the
Dutch weather god
. Although they still had nine days before the window opened, climbers lined their axes, ropes, and pickets across the moraine like butchers primed to gut a hog. They huddled around laptops. They filed their crampons. And soon the problem became obvious: With so many mountaineers planning to climb the mountain at once, crowds would pack the slopes. Nobody wanted to miss this one chance, and forecasters had only predicted four days of good weather. The teams decided to work together.

Four days after the news came in, about two dozen mountaineers crowded into the Serbian mess tent for the last logistical meeting of the summer. A jaundiced light filtered through the nylon fabric. A Warhol-style collage of food labels hung from a string overhead. Climbers drinking sugar-laced tea fidgeted as though waiting to be strapped inside a roller coaster. They discussed the siege of the Savage Mountain. Teams would advance along two routes, the Abruzzi and the Cesen, which converge at high camp, or Camp 4. Twenty-six climbers had claimed the Abruzzi; ten had chosen the Cesen.