Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day (5 page)

In the next camp, it appeared as though a dragon-size raccoon had rummaged through the tents—shredding the fabric, sampling the food, and scattering trash. The air mattresses and sleeping bags had vanished. “I could hardly speak,” Wiessner recalled. “We almost knew that we had been
sabotaged
.” The men dug out a tent, pulled the remaining sleeping bag across their chests, and shivered through the night.

In the morning, Wolfe could barely stand. Pasang and Wiessner left to look for help but found camp after camp had been emptied. The reason for this became clear when they finally stumbled into Base Camp: Pasang, Wiessner, and Wolfe had been presumed dead.

The Sherpas mobilized to rescue Wolfe, but by the time they reached him, critical days had been lost. Wolfe, too debilitated to crawl outside, was using his tent as a latrine. The Sherpas pulled him out of the sewage, poured tea down his gullet, and descended to thicker air, aiming to haul him down the next morning.

A storm grounded the rescue for another day. Then, as the skies cleared on July 31,
three rescuers
—Kikuli, Kitar, and Phinsoo—went up to fetch Wolfe. They never returned. The slope, packed with fresh snow, avalanched, likely burying them alive. Wolfe presumably died in his tent. The Savage Mountain had claimed its first four victims.

Wiessner trudged home defensive: “On big mountains, as in war,” he told the media, “one must expect casualties.” He, like the Sherpas, developed a mythological version of the events. As the years passed, he began to claim that a
nearly full moon
had illuminated the sky on the night of his summit bid. This fostered a myth that Wiessner might have pioneered the first ascent of K2 if a superstitious Sherpa hadn’t held him back. But
lunar charts
show that July 19 was three days past a new moon, and, as seen from K2, that moon was a useless sliver that stayed visible only three hours after dark. Pasang and Wiessner had confronted a
bigger problem than a turquoise dragon
: Headlamps wouldn’t be invented for another thirty-three years, and they faced pitch-blackness. In the gathering dusk, Pasang’s insistence on turning around probably saved Wiessner’s life.

Nobody attempted K2 during World War II. In the aftermath, the British relinquished their Indian empire, which split into two independent nations: Pakistan and India. Suddenly K2 had changed hands, ending up in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, a territory claimed by both countries.

The 1947 Partition of British India led to one of the largest and bloodiest exoduses in modern history. Religious persecution took the form of mob violence as fourteen million people dispersed to their respective nations: Hindus fleeing from Pakistan to India and many Muslims flowing in reverse. Their desperate caravans were ambushed by fanatics of the opposing faith. Refugees were butchered on the railway, and train cars stuffed with mutilated corpses had to be hosed out when they reached their destinations. One million were killed, and the new governments of India and Pakistan blamed each other. There has been constant hostility around K2 ever since.

Nevertheless, mountaineering revived, and the Karakorum reopened for business. A group of Americans cinched a permit for K2 in 1953, and their expedition came to define decency on a mountain.

As the team left for the Karakorum, Art Gilkey, a twenty-seven-year-old geologist, learned that Everest had just been conquered. Gilkey had hoped this would be his lucky summer, too, but eight weeks later he found himself dying at 25,500 feet. He was suffering from what felt like a charley horse in his left calf. He couldn’t walk it off, and the leg kept swelling. A storm blew in, stranding Gilkey and several teammates. The gale pounded their tent for five days. When the wind slowed, Gilkey crawled outside and tried to stand. He collapsed.

A doctor named Charlie Houston examined Gilkey and diagnosed thrombophlebitis, or potentially lethal blood clots that can form when a climber is dehydrated, oxygen-deprived, and immobile for too long. Unwilling to let him die, the team tried to bring Gilkey down. Winds blasted them back, foiling their first evacuation attempt and trapping them inside the tents for another three days. Gilkey’s cough became an incessant hack. As is often the case with thrombophlebitis, the clots had probably broken off and barged through Gilkey’s main pulmonary artery, clogging his lungs. The resulting embolism would have impaired Gilkey’s breathing and circulation.

After a break in the weather, the men decided to try again. They zipped Gilkey into a sleeping bag, wrapped a tent around his torso, stuffed his feet into a pack, and bound him with ropes. They dragged the improvised gurney through the snow with towlines, lowering him through the steepest sections.

When rescuers fanned out to scout the route ahead, one man, roped to a second, lost his balance and slid, yanking his partner and trolling him down the slope. Gaining speed, the pair clotheslined another two. This tangle of four snagged the rope connected to a fifth and to Gilkey. All six men flailed down the mountain, about to launch off a 7,000-foot drop. “
This is it!
” thought Bob Bates, one of the climbers. “There was nothing I could do now.”

Above them was Pete Schoening, a twenty-six-year-old from Seattle. He leaped up and grabbed a rope attached to Gilkey, who—through a series of towlines, tangles, and tie-offs—was also connected to the five tumbling climbers. Schoening wound the line around his shoulders and anchored the wooden shaft of his axe behind a rock.

The line yanked Schoening, but he held the axe and simultaneously clenched the rope. Somehow, it didn’t snap, and Schoening checked the momentum of five falling men while also bearing the weight of Gilkey’s gurney. Mountaineers call this feat the Miracle Belay.

Almost as miraculously, the injuries were manageable. One man lost his mittens, pack, and glasses; another lost his short-term memory. Two were ensnared around a third, who was partially sliced by the rope. But one by one, they untangled themselves and got to their feet. The rescuers re-anchored Gilkey’s gurney and went ahead to scout a route and pitch camp.

Some of them heard the muffled shout. The climbers returned to where Gilkey had been tied and saw freshly plowed snow. Charlie Houston later speculated that Gilkey “
wiggled himself loose
from the line” so his teammates wouldn’t have to risk their lives to save him. It’s more likely that an avalanche swept him off the slope. Whatever the truth, Gilkey was gone. His friends limped down the mountain, devastated but alive. Near Base Camp, their porters piled up stones, creating a memorial cairn that remains today. Although the team had lost Gilkey and the summit, their expedition was hailed as a high point in alpinism. The team had banded together, and no one had sacrificed his humanity for self-preservation.

After Gilkey’s death, the Savage Mountain became an object of desire for Italians. Robert Peary had touched the North Pole; Roald Amundsen had tagged the South; Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary had summited Everest—but no one could conquer K2. Now the highest untouched summit, it was the hardest place to reach above sea level.

Still demoralized by World War II, the Italians pursued the mountain to restore national pride. Expedition leader Ardito Desio secured a permit for 1954 and made sure his climbers understood the stakes: “If you succeed in scaling the peak, as I am confident you will, the entire world will hail you as champions of your race long after you are dead.” The Italian expedition was to become K2’s most controversial, triggering
fifty years of polemic
—all over the disappearance of a tent.

The climb began with six hundred Pakistani porters carrying thirteen tons of gear to Base Camp, including 230 vermilion oxygen cylinders, but by late July, only four men were in serious contention for the summit. The strongest of them, twenty-four-year-old Walter Bonatti, had been relegated to the B-Team.

Two days before the summit bid, Bonatti was ordered to lug eighty pounds of oxygen cylinders to the two members of the A-Team. To manage it, Bonatti wanted to enlist help from
Amir Mehdi
, a Pakistani high-altitude porter who had carried Austrian mountaineer Hermann Buhl down Nanga Parbat the year before. Mehdi wanted the summit for himself, so Bonatti cut him a deal: If Mehdi delivered the oxygen to high camp, he could sleep in the A-Team’s tent and
join their summit bid
. Mehdi agreed, and the next day he and Bonatti left for the drop-off point at 26,600 feet.

But when they arrived that evening, the A-Team had disappeared, along with their tent. Bonatti scoured the slopes for shelter, shouting for the missing climbers. At one point, Bonatti heard someone hollering instructions—“Leave the oxygen and descend.” Mehdi, meanwhile, was pacing and kicking the snow “like an unchained force of nature . . .
yelling crazily
,” as Bonatti recounted. Mehdi’s toes were cramped inside Italian army boots
two sizes too small
.

Bonatti decided it was insane to descend in the dark with a screaming man who couldn’t feel his feet, so he gave up looking for the tent and stomped out a platform in the ice. He and Mehdi huddled together chewing caramels, expecting to die. Frostbite consumed all of Mehdi’s toes and about a third of one foot. In 1954, it was the highest open bivouac in history.

Meanwhile, Achille Compagnoni, the captain of the A-Team, was resting in his tent, quietly
sipping chamomile
and clutching a typed memorandum stating that he was in charge. But a soggy paper has no authority in the Death Zone, so Compagnoni had taken another precaution: He’d moved his tent to an unstable traverse so Bonatti couldn’t supplant him on summit day.

At first light, Bonatti and Mehdi left the oxygen cylinders and descended. Only then did Compagnoni and his climbing partner, Lino Lacedelli, crawl out of their tent to retrieve the oxygen. They avoided the Bottleneck, but the rocks below the southeast face were no easier. The
oxygen allegedly ran out
, and the men staggered and slipped. Hallucinating, Lacedelli saw his fiancée tailing him. Compagnoni met the ghost of a teammate who had died in June. Their Due Lupe gloves became soaked and froze over their thumbs. Finally, at dusk on July 31, 1954, the A-Team planted the Italian flag on the summit. They descended in darkness, resting to take a swig of brandy, and reached their tent late that night.

Once at Base Camp, Compagnoni was unapologetic about hiding the tent and demanded to know why his oxygen cylinders had run dry, but euphoria soon smothered all argument. Steaming home on the
Asia
, a luxury cruise ship, the climbers presented a united front. No one disclosed the details of the forced bivouac. Radio and TV stations broadcast Italy’s triumph worldwide; the Italian and Pakistani governments decorated the climbers; Pope Pius XII offered blessings. Compagnoni and Lacedelli’s ascent was commemorated on postage stamps and cigarette cartons. As mountaineer Reinhold Messner later put it, the victory on K2 helped bring a “psychological reconstruction of Italians” after the trauma of fascism and war.

But a decade later, bizarre allegations emerged. Through a journalist, Compagnoni accused Bonatti of siphoning oxygen from his bottles, even though the mask and tubing had been inside Compagnoni’s own tent. Furious, Bonatti successfully sued for libel. “
Like an elephant
,” he never forgot the sins of the A-Team, and neither did anyone else. When Compagnoni died fifty-four years after the climb, his obituary in the
New
York
Times
focused on his choice to move the tent. A snap decision on K2 had cemented his reputation as the Judas of mountaineering.

Mehdi, after the amputation of his toes, returned home to Hunza and left his ice axe in the garden shed. Gradually, he learned to walk on his stumps. He was informed by mail that the Italian government had awarded him Cavaliere status, the equivalent of knighthood. Compagnoni sent him dozens of letters over the years, but Mehdi never had them translated.