K2 (10 page)

Then—
boom!
The rope came tight in a wrenching jolt, and I was plucked out of my little hole like a knife out of butter. I started careening down the slope fifty feet above Scott. There was just enough time for me to anticipate the 8,000-foot fall to the glacier—and to oblivion.

The instincts born of my years of RMI training clicked in.
Arrest! Arrest!
my brain screamed. Even as I cartwheeled down the slope, I flipped onto my stomach and got my head uphill, with the ax held in
both hands under my chest. I dug and dug with the pick, only to feel it slice through soft snow. Scott, I later learned, had been unable to get in position even to attempt a self-arrest.

We had probably fallen a couple of hundred feet when all of a sudden my ax bit into some ice and we came to a stop. My self-arrest had finally done the job. I rolled over and yelled out, “Scott, are you okay?”

I couldn’t have been more relieved by his answer. “Yeah, but my nuts are killing me!” he screamed. If Scott was together enough to complain about his harness jamming his balls, he had to be all right.

All the same, we had come within inches of taking the big plunge. That was by far the closest brush with death I had experienced in my sixteen years of mountaineering.

Scott and I pulled ourselves together. I got Thor on the radio and warned him not to come down the slope that had just avalanched. “Go over to your left,” I pleaded, “toward this ice-cliffy area, and maybe rappel.” Then we climbed up, still hoping to guide Thor and Chantal down. Finally, at 25,500 feet, we closed the gap. “Man,” Thor exclaimed, “am I glad to see you guys!”

We laid Chantal on her back, right there in the snow. I managed to pry her eyelids open and douse her eyes with anesthetic drops. Then we tied in as a rope of four, with Scott going first and myself in the rear as anchor. Late that afternoon, we at last made it down to Camp III. We got Chantal into a sleeping bag. I checked her feet; they weren’t frostbitten, just terribly cold. We melted pot after pot of snow to nurse both Thor and Chantal with hot drinks.

Throughout the retreat, Chantal never thanked us once. Instead, over and over again, she pealed, “I made the summit! I’m so happy!” It would not be the last time this strong and beautiful Frenchwoman would use up all her reserves getting to the top of an 8,000er only to collapse and depend on other climbers to get her down the mountain.

Scott and I knew what the rescue had cost us. Our summit attempt was now on indefinite hold. The more pressing duty was to get Chantal, still exhausted, and Thor, in only marginally better shape, safely down the mountain.

By midnight on August 6, all of us had made it back to base camp in one piece. Scott and I were pretty tired ourselves, but beyond that, we were profoundly disappointed. Any summit attempt we might make would now require a whole new launch out of base camp. Morally, however, we had had absolutely no choice but to abort our summit try to help Thor and Chantal get down the mountain. That’s why I find it so hard to stomach all the accounts in recent years—especially on Everest—of climbers ignoring others in trouble for fear a rescue effort would sabotage their own summit bids.

The next night, the Russians and Chantal celebrated their victory. Scott and I weren’t invited, so we lay in our own tents listening to their drunken cheers and toasts. That was hard enough to take, but not nearly as hard as the bombshell that exploded in the morning.

Vlad gathered his “team” in the cooking tent at breakfast. Then he announced that the expedition was over! Everyone on his permit would now have to go home. And as if that edict weren’t severe enough, he decided to insult the rest of us for good measure. We Americans, he announced witheringly, just didn’t climb fast enough. We had wasted our time and weren’t willing to push it.

I simply stared at Vlad. I was so angry, I couldn’t get a single word out. I couldn’t remember ever being so pissed off at a fellow climber on a mountain. I couldn’t believe that a so-called leader could be so selfish. If we needed any further proof that Vlad, in the end, was a complete jerk, he had just provided it.

By August 7, Scott and I had been on the mountain for nearly seven weeks. There were five of us on the Russian permit who still dearly wanted another crack at climbing K2. And there was another team still at base camp—Hall & Ball, with their Swedish and Mexican teammates. After so much effort, I wasn’t about to give up just because Vlad had told us to go home.

Chantal, of course, had ignored the whole permit business after her
Swiss team had packed it in. She had climbed the mountain illegally and had apparently gotten away with it. That wasn’t my style, however; I’ve always pretty much played by the rules. And I knew that other climbers who had tried to circumvent permit restrictions had been banned from Pakistan by the Ministry of Tourism.

Since our leader, Vlad, was leaving, technically our expedition was over and all of us had to leave as well. But, working with Hall & Ball and our liaison officer, we eventually cobbled together an arrangement that allowed us to stay on the mountain. Dan Mazur, one of our five determined to give it another shot, became the nominal leader of what was left of our party.

Meanwhile, the weather refused to cooperate. Day after day, we saw fierce storms raking the upper slopes of the mountain. Scott and I had left all our gear at Camp III. But now we started to worry that Camp IV, on the Shoulder, could have been buried under new snow or destroyed by the winds that we had seen scouring the upper reaches of the mountain. Instead of counting on the tents and gear left by others at Camp IV, we’d have to pack up Camp III and carry it up to the Shoulder.

We rested at base camp for four days. I was preoccupied with logistics. On August 10, I wrote in my diary:

It wasn’t until August 11 that the weather cleared. We all decided to head up the mountain the next day. After all our waiting, all our setbacks, all the interpersonal conflicts, I was supermotivated. You can see the tension
in my very handwriting in my diary, and in my use of exclamation marks:

On August 12, Scott and I and Hall & Ball left base camp at 2:00
A.M.,
planning to climb all the way to Camp III that day. Several others had left the day before and spent the night at Camp II, in hopes of meeting up with us at CIII when we arrived. In the lead all the way, I reached Camp III at noon. I’d climbed those 7,500 feet in ten hours—an hour faster than my great time on August 3. Charley Mace, who had spent the night at Camp II, arrived at 2:30
P.M.
Scott didn’t get in until 4:00. Hall & Ball and the rest of their teammates were even slower. From my diary:

But as it turned out, the weather the next morning was decidedly iffy, with lenticular cloud caps covering all the major peaks—almost always a sign of a coming storm. None of us was sure what to do, until Scott and I decided to head up to the Shoulder. We didn’t get off until 9:30
A.M.
The others eventually followed us.

As part of my homework for K2, I had studied all the things that had gone wrong on previous expeditions on the Abruzzi Ridge. In particular,
I’d learned a sobering lesson from the 1986 tragedy. On their descent, a number of climbers that year had been marooned on the Shoulder during a long storm. One reason some of them didn’t seize the lulls in the storm to head down was that they were afraid of losing the route. And the reason for that was that they had not adequately wanded the stretch from Camp III to Camp IV.

“Willow wands” are ordinary garden stakes painted green, with little red ribbons attached to one end. On the way up, if you plant a wand in the snow every hundred feet or so, you’re marking the route so that you can find it even in a whiteout on the way down. I’d been trained on Rainier and Denali always to wand a route.

Thus I’d been stunned to learn that the climbers marooned on the Shoulder in 1986 simply had not brought enough willow wands to mark the route on the featureless white expanse below Camp IV. On a nice sunny day, it’s hard to imagine the need for those markers. But I’d always been taught to plan for the worst and hope for the best. Wanding doesn’t seem to be a European thing—it’s not quite chic to be seen lugging a pack with dozens of green sticks protruding from the top flap. Even the Russians on our trip had not bothered to wand the route above Camp III.

Now, on the way up from Camp III to Camp IV, I placed wands at regular intervals. I knew that this stretch was the most likely place for us to get lost on the way down. As I climbed, I kept repeating to myself, “Remember ‘86!” It wasn’t easy, since we had lost a bunch of wands when the tents were buried. In the end, as I began to run out, I had to break many of the wands in half and plant them short to eke out our supply. We had even scrounged tent poles from broken tents at Camp III to use as wands. Several days later, those markers would save our asses.

Scott and I reached Camp IV at 2:00
P.M.
Once again the others straggled in hours later, some as late as 8:00
P.M.
I’d deliberately placed our campsite as high on the Shoulder as was feasible, to shorten the climb on summit day. Now we all settled in to wait. In this incarnation, Camp IV was a small cluster of freshly erected and newly occupied tents. Charley Mace was camped just below us. In various tents were the members of
Hall & Ball’s team: Rob and Gary, two Swedish climbers, and the three Mexicans.

Scott and I had also chosen to go superlight. Our tent was not a regular two-man model but a five-pound bivy tent. We had only one sleeping bag to share between the two of us. The idea was to sleep in our down suits, with the bag unzipped and draped over us like a blanket. In the claustrophobic confines of our cramped tent, we thought, this arrangement should keep us warm enough.

Our only rope was the fifty-foot line I had scavenged at Camp III. All of the rope we had originally brought had either been fixed in place or lost in the intervening storms.

That evening, August 13, Scott and I planned to get up at 10:30
P.M.
and be out the door by midnight. But I knew better than to count on perfect weather for the next day. As I wrote in my diary—presciently, it turned out—”Weather is so fickle on K2 the only way to get good weather is to go high & wait it out. That’s our plan. Hang out here @ CIV until it looks good enough to go.”

The days that followed severely tried our patience. Scott and I got up to check the weather at 10:30
P.M.,
then again at midnight, 3:30
A.M.,
and 5:30
A.M
. Each time we stuck our heads out the tent door, we saw that it was blowing hard and snowing—too nasty for a summit attempt. We had decided that if we could not take off by 5:30
A.M.,
it would be too late to get to the summit and back with a margin of safety. Once we’d made up our minds not to go on August 14, we simply lay in our cramped tent, trying to make the hours pass. “Dozed all day,” I wrote in my diary. “Didn’t eat shit. Try again tonight.”

During our time at Camp IV, we tried to yell over the wind to let the others know our plans. All of Hall & Ball’s team, including the Swedes and the Mexicans, were now intermittently using their bottled oxygen even while they slept. That made for a cruel trade-off: the longer they hung out at Camp IV, the less oxygen they’d have left to go to the summit with. We weren’t surprised, then, in the middle of the day on August 14, when two of the Mexicans, Ricardo Torres-Nava and Adrián Benítez, decided
to bail. They were experienced climbers—both had topped out on Everest—so we figured they wouldn’t have any trouble getting down to Camp III.

What happened on their descent we learned about only secondhand, over the radio from Dan Mazur and Jonathan Pratt, two of our teammates who were still at Camp III. The news shocked us badly, but I’m disturbed, upon rereading my diary, to see that I recorded it at the time with more outrage than compassion:

Below the Shoulder, at about 25,500 feet, there was a small ice step. Rather than downclimb it, Ricardo and Adrián set up a rappel. Despite having gotten up Everest, the two Mexicans apparently weren’t very technically skilled. As the anchor for their rappel, they simply thrust a ski pole into the slope. Even in the most desperate situation, that would have been an incredibly foolish thing to try. In fact, I’d never before heard of anybody trying to rappel off a ski pole. Ricardo got away with it, but when Adrián put his weight on the rope, the pole pulled. He never had a chance to stop himself. Even though they were sure he was dead, Jonathan and Dan spent the better part of two days trying to get to Adrián’s body; eventually they decided that it was so hazardous, they would be inviting another accident.

I’d guess now that the tone of my diary entry reflected the weeks of tension and frustration that had built up inside me by mid-August. The accident showed how close to the edge some of the climbers were on this unforgiving mountain. Adrián was a friendly and likable guy, and we were all saddened by his death. But the accident was entirely avoidable. He could have easily faced in and downclimbed the steep step where he fell; he didn’t need to rappel.