Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day (16 page)

The Shimshalis, who had less faith in Yan’s statistical model, tried to rest as Hugues grabbed a sat phone and punched in the thirteen numerals for Yan’s home in Chamonix. Shouting above the wind, he kept asking the voice at the other end of the line to repeat the message.

“The winds don’t exist,” Yan said.

“What?”

“I said, ‘They don’t exist.’ ”

“What do you mean they don’t exist?”

Yan explained that he was at his desk, studying two monitors that undulated with waves and darts. They showed a gentle breeze blowing across K2’s Shoulder. That meant the seventy-mile-an-hour wind blasts pummeling Hugues, Karim, and Jehan were katabatic, ghost winds that the supercomputers of Météo-France could not see. Katabatic windstorms form when air at higher altitude cools, becoming more dense, Yan explained. Pulled by gravity and a lower pressure gradient, the air pours down the mountain like water.

These ghost winds were dangerous, but they materialize and vanish so suddenly that they only terrorize climbers for brief periods. Yan told Hugues that if the three of them would sit tight, the gusts should stop within an hour or two.

Straining to catch the words, Hugues listened without saying much. “OK,” he screamed into the receiver. “You have my trust.”

Lower down on the Cesen route, Wilco was having another bad day. He’d been enjoying the view in Camp 3 until he saw Hoselito trudge in, his six-foot, three-inch frame bent over in exhaustion. Hoselito pitched a flimsy tent beside Wilco’s. “It looked like a doghouse,” Wilco decided, “and I doubt he even anchored it.”

But Wilco decided against lecturing Hoselito about the tent. He couldn’t force Hoselito to stop climbing. If Hoselito wanted to risk being blown away inside a poorly secured tent, that was his problem. Wilco had already been explicit enough—he would not babysit a straggler. Those who were weak needed to climb down; those who were strong needed to conserve energy. Wilco ducked into his sturdy North Face VE 25 tent, anchored with aluminum snow pickets, and went to sleep.

He woke a few hours later to the sound of howling. The ghost winds from the Shoulder had sheared down the Cesen route to Camp 3, scouring snow and plastering the sides of Wilco’s tent. The gusts were threatening to turn his tent into a kite.

Huddled in his tent, Wilco pulled out his satellite phone and called the
Archimedes
, a canal barge docked in Utrecht. On the other end of the line, he heard the voice of Maarten van Eck, the liaison for Ab Maas, a forecaster at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. Wilco demanded a scientific explanation for the weather and listened as van Eck assured him that the satellite and infrared photos all showed that the jet stream had pulled off K2. The weather would soon improve, Maarten said.

“Fuck you and your predictions!” Wilco shouted into the receiver.

Maarten told Wilco to put on his downsuit and be prepared to descend. “If your tent rips, that’s your only option,” he said, “but I promise you, tomorrow morning will be gorgeous.”

“It’s something inside me,” Shaheen said between gasps and coughs that sounded like gravel in a garbage disposal.

Nadir knelt down. He pulled Shaheen out of the pool of dark vomit, propped him against his pack, and fished for a brown glass vial. He cracked open the sterile seal and poured the liquid into a syringe. Stabbing the tip into Shaheen’s deltoid, he pushed the plunger until it hit the number 3 on the barrel, just as Eric had explained. Nadir hoped this injectable steroid, Dexamethasone, would help Shaheen.

He pushed three Tic Tac–shaped antibiotics into Shaheen’s mouth, tipped back his jaw, and dribbled some tea onto his tongue, forcing him to swallow.

All this movement was too much. Shaheen vomited and passed out.

“You must get up,” Nadir said. He shook Shaheen’s shoulders, slapped his cheeks. No response.

At least Shaheen was still breathing. Nadir searched the camp for stragglers but found no one. Radioing down to Base Camp, Nadir reported Shaheen’s status to the Pakistani liaison officer, Captain Sabir Ali. “I need help,” Nadir said. Shaheen couldn’t walk and was too big to carry.

Nadir was on his own. Most climbers were higher up the mountain, and nobody lower down seemed eager to help. Fortunately, the ghost winds over the Cesen ridge stayed off the Abruzzi. Nadir wasn’t about to blow away, and the steroid seemed to be working. Shaheen recognized Nadir, said he was feeling better, and tried to stand.

Although Shaheen could walk, he needed help clipping onto the fixed line and barely had the dexterity to use the simple Figure 8 rappel device. After rappelling a steep section and reaching more level ground, Shaheen collapsed. “I tried to motivate him,” Nadir recalled. “I told him his clients wouldn’t be mad if he made it back alive.”

That failed to get Shaheen moving. Praying to Allah, Nadir attached a rope to Shaheen and dragged his body across the snow as though the man were a sled. It was slow going, and, after perhaps an hour, Shaheen awoke. He tried to stand but toppled over, so he inched down the slope on his rear.

When they reached an icy gutter that didn’t have a fixed line, Nadir attached a rope to Shaheen, paying it out as Shaheen slid. As the slope steepened more and that tactic became too dangerous, Nadir pounded a snow picket into the slope and lowered Shaheen down.

Shaheen passed out so many times he barely remembered the descent, and Nadir described it as a blur. Nadir’s focus was so intense and the exhaustion so pronounced that hours went by like minutes. He refused to let himself rest because he knew he’d never get going again. When he considered how much his legs burned and how far they had to go, he prayed and once again was able to focus.

At one point, Shaheen begged him to quit. The pain was too much, and he was tired of being swung around like a gunnysack. He asked Nadir to leave him. Then, passing out, Shaheen went limp.

Nadir prayed to Allah, injected the last of the steroid into the meat of Shaheen’s shoulder, and kept pulling. Shaheen’s body scraped against rocks, and he eventually woke again and stood, teetering.

The two were on their own until they reached Advanced Base Camp at the foot of the mountain. By then, Nadir had been awake for more than thirty hours. He collapsed inside an empty tent beside his friend, choked down an energy bar, and passed out. He was too exhausted to check whether or not Shaheen was even alive.

Leaving a tent during a gale is generally a bad idea. Mountaineers don’t even step outside to relieve themselves—it’s too easy for the tent or the climber to get blown away. But Hoselito had no choice. Around 1 a.m. in Camp 2 on the Cesen route, a ferocious blast peeled his “doghouse” from the ice. Hoselito spread his arms and legs against the tent’s sides to keep the walls from collapsing. This worked, but not for long. Another gust snapped the poles, and the fabric ripped. All his gear—burner, down jacket, food, fuel, and helmet—flew away. Hoselito squirmed out from the ruins, hunching against the wind. Despite the snow and darkness, he managed to get his bearings and weave a few yards to the nearest tent, a three-person heavy-duty dome staked onto relatively level ground. The wind blasted it and the poles shuddered, but this tent stayed secured.

Hoselito shook the dome, hugging it for balance. He felt for the entrance, unzipped the flap, and craned his neck in. Frigid air and snow spat in behind him. Inside, he saw two men, Wilco and his climbing partner Cas van de Gevel. They were doing their best to sleep. “I knew Wilco disliked me, but even a half-human would let me inside,” recalled Hoselito. “I was going to die.”

The circumstances did not allow for much conversation. If they had, Hoselito might have heard Wilco explain himself. Wilco might have noted how his tent clung to a platform that barely supported two bodies, that he’d been straightforward about what help he could offer, and that he had wanted Hoselito to turn around for his own safety. Instead, as flurries swept through the open flap, Wilco got right to the point: Get out.

“Of course, I would have helped him if he had no alternative, but for me it was too easy to say, ‘Of course, my dear Hoselito, you can sleep with us.’ . . . I had warned him before.”

Hoselito crawled backward, zipping the flap behind him. He felt his way above Wilco’s tent to another staked above it. When Hoselito unzipped the flap and stuck his head in, he saw three men crammed inside: Irishman Ger McDonnell, Sherpa Pemba Gyalje, and Dutchman Jelle Staleman. The men pulled Hoselito’s shivering body inside, knowing they’d all have to sleep sitting up.

“He was blue, so we made him tea, and he relaxed,” Pemba recalled. Nobody slept much that night.

9

Through the Bottleneck

Shoulder to Summit
26,000 feet to 28,251 feet
Evening of July 31 to August 1

P
lanets blinked on one by one. The night before the summit bid was moonless and cloudless, with constellations sprinkled across the sky like loose gems over pitch. Most of the mountaineers were too miserable to notice.

More than thirty men and women had pitched their tents on K2’s Shoulder, the frost-tipped saddle of ice where the Abruzzi and Cesen routes converge. Camp 4, the final camp, offered space to spread gear, scoop fresh snow, and shovel platforms, but the altitude was agony. Burning more oxygen than their lungs could draw in, the climbers felt hung over and strung out. Nobody spoke or moved more than necessary.

Crowd control had failed. Delayed by windstorms, most mountaineers now planned to summit in one wave instead of two. If they deferred, the weather window might close, ruining the chance of a lifetime. Twenty-nine people were now aiming for an August 1 summit. Only a handful of climbers had decided to hold back. Among those who remained in the thicker air of Camp 3 were Pasang Lama’s cousins, Big Pasang Bhote and Tsering Bhote, and several Koreans.

With crowding came disorganization. Crucial gear had been left behind, including the Italian team’s 100-meter rope. When questioned at Camp 4, the Italians’ high-altitude porters said they’d misunderstood instructions to carry the coil up. Others besides the Italian team had also failed to bring the supplies they’d promised to carry, but exactly who was responsible and what they’d left behind was unclear. Park Kyeong-hyo had agreed to lead an inventory once everyone arrived at the Shoulder, but he fell asleep instead.

“Rope was missing, ice screws were missing, and I was thinking, ‘What the fuck? We’re at 8,000 meters’ [about 27,000 feet] but we don’t even have
the essentials
,” recalled Swedish climber Fredrik Sträng, who had come to make a documentary. With the summit bid due to start at midnight, nothing could be done anyway, so Fredrik tinkered with his video camera. “It was a beautiful night. We were a big team, and I thought, ‘We can probably do this. We can probably do anything.’ ”

Pasang spent the evening preparing oxygen canisters, which were carrot-colored and had the Russian word
poisk
(search) scribbled across the side. Each three-liter aluminum cylinder contained 720 liters of oxygen, weighed five pounds, and cost
$385
. When turned on, the odorless gas hisses out of the can, past a regulator, and into a face mask originally designed for fighter pilots. Pasang set the flow rate to one liter a minute. He rubbed moisturizer on his clients’ cheeks and fitted the masks onto their faces. That night, as his clients sucked bottled oxygen, every inhale and exhale sounded mechanical, a Darth Vader-ish
pwuh-kwah
. Pasang told his clients to
turn up the flow
from one to two liters per minute when they started climbing in the morning, and each planned to consume three bottles during the twenty-hour trip to and from the summit.

Chhiring wasn’t using bottled oxygen, which made his summit gear simpler. In his tent, he slurped two liters of tea and sprinkled sacred salt in his soup. The excitement quivered to his fingertips. With a grin, he asked Eric whether he was ready for the Bottleneck.
Sure, Eric replied
.

As Eric nodded off to sleep, Chhiring remained awake, anxious, as though he’d never climbed a mountain before. He leaned to his side and cupped his
mala
prayer beads. Blowing on them, rolling them in his palms, he tried to interpret the mood of the goddess. If all went well, he would reach the Bottleneck before sunrise, tag the summit before 2 p.m.—Shaheen’s suggested turnaround time—and return to his tent in Camp 4 before dark. Chhiring recited a mantra under his breath. The Death Zone distorted his sense of time, and it seemed as though only minutes had passed when his Suunto wrist altimeter glowed a quarter past midnight. Time to move.

With a rustle, he slid out from the warmth of his sleeping bag and, sloughing off the ice crystals, zipped up his downsuit. Stomping his feet into the heels of his boots, he scooted toward the tent flap, stuck out his legs, and strapped on his crampons. Hoisting his pack, he left to find the rest of the lead team.

They were waiting: Pasang and Jumik of the Korean team; Pemba Gyalje of the Dutch; Muhammad Hussein and Muhammad Khan of the Serbian team; and someone else, a Basque climber Chhiring didn’t recognize. Who was this stranger, and where was Shaheen, who had promised to supervise rope placement through the Bottleneck?

The stranger introduced himself as Alberto and explained that he had climbed from Camp 3 in the night. “Shaheen is sick,” he said. “
He won’t be coming
.”

Chhiring was indignant. “Right when we needed him, Shaheen was gone,” he recalled. “We did not like [Shaheen]. All the sherpas were saying things about him that we probably should not have said.” Their voices brittle in the dry air, they wondered whether Shaheen had feigned illness to avoid the toughest climbing. They questioned whether the truant had actually summited K2 before.

Even though the Pakistanis didn’t speak Nepali, they understood enough from the conversation’s tone and a few familiar words: The Nepalis were ridiculing them. “It was unjust,” recalled
Muhammad Hussein
. “K2 is our mountain, and Shaheen is our brother, the greatest climber in the region. He taught us to show respect to Buddhists and other foreigners, but the sherpas didn’t respect me.” Nobody bothered to ask him, but Muhammad had summited K2 in 2004 and was familiar with the route and the rope-setting in the Bottleneck. “They assumed I didn’t know where I was going,” he said, “and dismissed what I had to say.”

Or they would have, if they understood him at all. With Shaheen gone, nobody could translate from Urdu to English. Discussion was disjointed, split between Nepali and Pakistani factions, and when Alberto tried to take charge, he was not recognized as their leader.

Resentment, language barriers, and oxygen deprivation all contributed to the flawed decision-making that followed. The lead team members carried willow wands, but nobody used them to mark the trail. Worse, the lead team squandered rope. Jumik directed the Pakistanis to set lines along moderate terrain, where climbers could use their ice axes to arrest a fall. Unaware of the rope shortage, the Bhotes were accustomed to the
procedure on Everest
, where, on the north side, new rope is laterally fixed from the bottom of the North Col to the summit, with only a single break at Camp 1. Jumik probably didn’t realize that trying to set rope all the way up to K2’s summit was a mistake.

Muhammad Hussein did. “Save the rope for the bad places,” he tried to tell Jumik. But nobody could translate his warning, and “nobody cared until our situation was obvious,” Muhammad recalled. The lead team didn’t have much line to begin with, and soon it was gone.

“All of a sudden we were asking each other, ‘Do you have any more rope?’ ” recalled Pasang. “We did not understand. How could we run out? Where had it all gone?” They checked their packs, argued, and backtracked, plucking out line already set and anchoring it higher up. They’d hoped to reach the Bottleneck before sunrise. When the barbed horizon flushed red, the lead team was still climbing along the Shoulder.

Back at high camp, the mountaineers tracked the progress of the lead team with binoculars and radio calls. The climbers had planned to leave camp before dawn, but, seeing that the lead team was off to a bad start, several delayed their departure. By sunrise, Nick Rice still hadn’t left his tent. He had spilled a pot of snowmelt on his gear and was drying a soggy sock over a burner. By the time he had finished, Nick decided that August 1 wasn’t going to be the day he would reach the summit of K2. He’d lost too much time. The mountain would still be there next season. “I wanted to make sure I would be, too,” he recalled. A simple mistake—sloshing a pot of water—probably saved his life.

Above the Bottleneck of K2, a restless glacier appears to be lunging off a cliff. For centuries it has inched forward, midleap, creating formations known as
seracs
, massive hunks of ice that frequently calve. The mountaineers had been training their binoculars on these seracs for weeks, evaluating the gutter below.

American mountaineer Ed Viesturs calls this section The Motivator, because the seracs overhanging the gutter inspire climbers to get the hell out of there. Nazir Sabir, who pioneered K2’s West-Southwest Ridge, calls the channel below the seracs Death Throat, because it resembles a giant’s gullet. Most people call this narrow passage the Bottleneck. The Bottleneck is not the end of danger. Above it, the route turns left onto the Traverse, a steep, exposed slog up K2’s southeast face. But the Bottleneck’s nearly vertical, 30-story rise is the most stomach-churning section of the climb. Falling ice and traffic are the killers. The Bottleneck only lets climbers squeeze through one at a time, in a queue that moves only as fast as the slowest legs will allow.

Camp 4 to Summit:
A lead team of Balti, Bhote, Sherpa, and Shimshali climbers broke trail and set ropes toward the summit. Language gaps and miscommunication led to problems with the ropes, which caused a deadly delay in the Bottleneck.

By the time the lead team had reached the Bottleneck, an impatient, single-file line had formed behind them. “I was waiting and waiting, and everybody was waiting,” Wilco said. “And the Bottleneck is not the place where you want to wait.”

Several stories above Wilco, Alberto stood near the front of the line; around 9 a.m., he pulled ahead of the pack. Hard, blue ice, its air bubbles expelled by compression, rejected his pick, and loose snow balled beneath his crampons, but Alberto advanced up the Bottleneck, twisting in ice screws and tying in rope until he had climbed so high he vanished from view.

Skeptical about clipping onto the lines Alberto had set, the Sherpas on the lead team hung back. They were accustomed to the thicker lines for the Everest crowd. Alberto’s Endura five-millimeter seemed recklessly thin, unable to support the weight of several bodies and unsuitable for jumars rated for eight-millimeter rope. Chhiring decided to set a secondary rope. He placed it parallel to the Endura but ran out after about 50 yards.

So Chhiring backtracked, weaving through the line of climbers and once again plucking out rope from lower slopes. He waved to some stragglers on the Korean team. They were squatting in the snow, unclipped, observing his gyrations. Chhiring then made his way up, past the spectators, and handed the coil to Jumik. This line went another 75 feet, more than halfway, but another 100 feet would be needed to reach safer ground.

Chhiring turned back to collect more rope, but when he looked down, he saw that fifteen climbers had clipped onto the lines directly below him. They were advancing through the steepest area of the Bottleneck, forming a head-to-toe snarl. Chhiring wasn’t sure why they were advancing. Without fixed lines, they wouldn’t be able to get far.

Chhiring knew they shouldn’t all be weighing on the same anchor. One falling block could bowl everyone over. He stepped to the side, twisted in an ice screw, and clipped himself onto it, hanging to the right of the oncoming train. Others saw Chhiring’s logic. Pasang, Wilco, and three others followed, unclipping from the main line and free-climbing toward a rock ramp.