No Way Down, Life and Death On K2 (2010) (19 page)

Bhote said he had seen, on the lower sections of the Traverse, a fourth climber following about ten yards behind the two Koreans and Jumik Bhote. But he said another part of the serac had collapsed and had killed him.

“Okay, Pemba, there is one member falling down from the Traverse, the lower section of the Traverse, because hit by serac,” Pasang said on the radio.

Pasang said he had watched as the climber had fallen to his death.

Gyalje wanted to know who it was.

“Can you identify him?” said Gyalje.

“He had a red and black down suit.”

Gyalje heard this description and his heart fell. He knew immediately who it was.

It could have been Karim Meherban, Hugues d'Aubarède's HAP, but in Gyalje's memory Meherban was wearing a pure red suit, like many of the other climbers on the mountain. Alberto Zerain had a red suit, but he had already descended. So did the Koreans but he didn't think the description fit them. Only one person had a red suit with black patches, and that was Gerard McDonnell.

“A red and black down suit. Definitely Gerard.”

Gyalje's friend was dead. Gyalje was devastated. It was too much. The mountain was taking a heavy toll.

Holding Confortola securely on the slope, Gyalje put the radio up to his mouth and told Big Pasang to get out of the Bottleneck and bring Jumik Bhote and the two Koreans down as quickly as he could. It was too dangerous for anyone to be up there any longer.

We are below you. Come down.

It was going to be a hard task for the Sherpa to get them down safely with minimal equipment and he hoped they were going to be okay.

 

Five minutes after the radio call from Pasang, Marco Confortola was concentrating hard on climbing down the slope below the bottom of the Bottleneck when he felt Pemba Gyalje's hand on his arm pushing him harder.

Up close beside him, Gyalje shouted that something terrible was about to happen.

“Run, run!” Gyalje screamed. “Go fast!”

Confortola moved his clumsy legs more quickly. He was exhausted but he tried to hurry. Gyalje, he realized, knew something that he did not.

Then, the world exploded. The serac was collapsing again.

Because the slopes were hidden in cloud, the two men could see nothing at first. But the roar grew louder and they realized an avalanche was spilling onto the Bottleneck. There was a second blast and another and they understood there were repeated icefalls. The avalanches punched down through the fog toward the two climbers, spitting out a great shower of ice and snow that was funneled and multiplied by the Bottleneck.

Struggling down the steep slope Confortola felt something slap hard into the back of his head and throw him forward. An oxygen bottle had been caught up in the avalanche and had been tossed down with the rest of the mess of ice and snow. Reeling from the blow, Confortola was convinced he was going to fall to his death, but as he toppled forward, Gyalje, who was still beside him, pulled Confortola back and pinned him against the snow, covering him with his own body until the rumbling stopped and the avalanche had passed. It had missed them by just a couple of yards.

They had survived. Confortola owed his life to Gyalje's quick and brave action. But several yards below them, visible through the cold fog, four bodies were lying scattered on the top of the ice that had been swept down the mountain.

It was another scene of death. Gyalje and Confortola climbed lower
toward the bodies, Gyalje helping Confortola navigate the big chunks of ice that littered the slope. When they came within a few yards, Confortola sat in the snow while Gyalje stepped across the slope to the bodies.

Watching him walk closer, Confortola could see that it was the climbers who had been trapped up at the other end of the Traverse. The climbers he and Gerard McDonnell had tried to save. They were tangled in ropes and lying on the ice, lifeless bundles in big jackets and climbing gear, the crampons on their boots sticking up in the air.

Big Pasang was also among them. He was dead. Gyalje had spoken to the Sherpa just a few minutes before the serac collapsed and now he was gone.

Gyalje took out his camera and shot some photographs of the dead. Then he returned to Confortola and helped him up and the two men started to climb down the Shoulder through the fog.

They had gone several yards when Confortola heard a voice calling from up above them on the Bottleneck. A person climbed down toward them, waving his arms to attract their attention.

They waited until Chhiring Bhote climbed down. He had accompanied Big Pasang on the rescue bid but he and the other Sherpa had become separated; while Big Pasang had climbed ahead up the Bottleneck, Chhiring had stopped to pick up some of the fixed lines off the lower slopes in case they needed them later. He was about eighty feet below Big Pasang when the avalanche occurred. When he heard the roar, he had screamed and unclipped his safety harness from the rope as the ice swept by. In that way, he had saved himself. He was close to a rump of large rocks, which had protected him.

The young Sherpa was crying as he stepped gingerly past the avalanche debris and joined Gyalje and Confortola.

They went down together, and farther down the slope two Korean climbers and Little Pasang came out to meet them. Near Camp Four, they met Cas van de Gevel.

“Come with me,” the Dutchman said to Confortola, taking his arm.

Van de Gevel was disappointed that his friend Wilco van Rooijen, had not been located, but he was glad nevertheless to see Confortola.

As he was helped down, Confortola couldn't shake the sense that the mountain could have killed him three or four times by this point. It could still claim him, he knew, and he just wanted to get off its slopes.

The snow was falling more heavily, the clouds wrapping even more tightly around the peak. K2 seemed to be closing in on itself.

At Camp Four, he went directly to the Flying Jump tents to talk to the Korean leaders. Confortola told Go Mi-sun and Kim Jae-soo about his attempts to free the Korean climbers and Jumik Bhote from the ropes. He related what they knew about the deaths of the Korean climbers at the base of the Bottleneck. But Confortola couldn't speak much. He was in tears, and as they heard the news Kim and Go cried, too.

Chhiring Bhote had calmed down, but he still seemed in shock about losing his brother. He would return now to Kathmandu without him. He feared the moment when he would have to tell his mother and his older brother about Jumik's death. He wondered how they would support Dawa Sangmu and Jen Jen. Big Pasang also was dead. He had children, too, back in Kathmandu.

Van de Gevel then led Confortola to his tent but the Italian refused to go inside. He was in a terrible condition after thirty-six hours on the upper mountain, and he was badly shaken by all the suffering and violence he had witnessed. He was talking fast, incoherently, wanting to tell his story about what he had seen.

Van de Gevel, however, insisted that Confortola should sleep. He was forced to push Confortola into his tent and help him into a sleeping bag. Then Confortola wanted to call his brother Luigi. He had to tell Luigi he was alive. He searched desperately among his gear for a battery for his satellite phone, but he couldn't find one. At last he gave in and asked to be left alone to sleep.

Saturday, August 2–Monday, August 4

3 p.m.

I
n the huddle of tents on the Godwin-Austen glacier at 16,400 feet, Chris Klinke and Roeland van Oss were busy coordinating information-gathering and emergency operations. The night before, after the early reports came in of the delays and the first serac collapse, Van Oss had worked from the South Koreans' communications tent. But this morning they moved to the Dutch mess tent, which was closer to the middle of the camp and had a better sight line of the routes.

They tried to work out who knew what, who was still missing, and where climbers had last been spotted. They set up a table with a row of four radios, one for each of the frequencies being used on the mountain. They also had a satellite phone, spare batteries, and paper and pen for emergency note taking. There were photographs of the routes pinned to the tent wall. The solar panels for the satellite phone were set up outside on the stones, though Van Oss was anxious about what they would do for power when night fell.

Van Oss was a lanky twenty-nine-year-old with curly brown hair. Through June and July, he had worked hard to get used to life so high up, climbing steadily to the higher camps, but one day he was traversing slowly at altitude when something snapped inside and he realized he would never be able to reach a summit as high as K2. He was relieved to be free of the pressure and expectations, and instead
had become the main point man at Base Camp for the final summit attempt.

Whenever he got any news, he called it through to Maarten van Eck in the Netherlands, who posted updates on the website. Some of the other climbers were keeping blogs—Nick Rice was also posting updates to his site—but it was mainly through the Dutch team's website that information about the escalating tragedy was spreading to the families of the climbers and the rest of the outside world.

Chris Klinke had climbed up to the Bottleneck with everyone else the previous morning but he had gotten a furious headache, a result of being hit in the head by a baseball-sized chunk of ice a couple of days before, and had turned back. As he had climbed down, he had become dehydrated and then he had started to pee blood, like tomato juice, and that worried him. Now he was maintaining a list of the people who were confirmed killed. It was a balled-up sheet of paper he kept in his pocket. Rolf Bae was on it, and Dren Mandic and Jahan Baig. Klinke called it the “death list,” even though it also included the names of everyone who had so far come down safely.

Alberto Zerain had walked into Base Camp. The Spaniard had slept at Camp Three on Friday night, and then descended the Abruzzi, collecting litter at the camps he passed through—an empty gas tank, cans of ham and tuna.

He was oblivious to the problems unfolding above him. When he got down to Base Camp, however, he witnessed a grim scene on the Godwin-Austen glacier. Crowds of people stood about on the gray rocks speaking into their telephones. The place looked like a cemetery. He headed for the little clump of tents sheltering beneath the slopes of Broad Peak a mile away, where he could rest.

Farther up the mountain, Cecilie Skog and her two Norwegian teammates were still climbing down the Abruzzi ridge. They were met on the way by the Singaporean expedition and a climber from the American team, Mike Farris, who had interrupted his ascent be
cause of ear trouble. They were offered consoling cups of hot tea and coffee.

When they prepared to move on, Skog said she didn't want to go down.

“I want to stay with Rolf,” she said. She was tired and her hips ached from her fall and she couldn't stop thinking of Bae up there on the mountain.

Lars Nessa was beside her. He said she had to go on.

Skog emptied her mind and tried to avoid thinking about her husband. It was then that she heard a voice speaking inside her head. Quiet at first, and then more insistent.
Cecilie
. She realized it had been there all along. It was Bae talking to her. He was with her, she was convinced.

Come on
, he said.
Get down.

“Yes, yes,” she whispered.

You can do it, Cecilie. Just keep going.

“Yes, I can.”

At Camp Two, where they had left tents to sleep in on the way down, including one for Rolf Bae, and where they had stashed their satellite phone, Skog summoned up the courage to call Bae's parents in Norway. Bae's father was a retired pilot and his mother was a nurse. Rolf was their only child, and now they would have no grandchildren.

“Jacob,” Skog said. “I am sorry.”

“It's okay,” Bae's father reassured her. “We only have you now. You must get down safely.”

They rolled up their tents and tossed them down a long slope below House's Chimney. They collected them when they got down to Advance Base Camp at about 17,500 feet, where they planned to spend the night before they walked the three miles farther to Base Camp on Sunday.

Another climber, Nick Rice, the young American who had been a close friend of Hugues d'Aubarède, came into Base Camp. Like
Zerain, Rice had gone to sleep at Camp Three on Friday evening unaware of the troubles up above him. He woke on Saturday morning to a 6:43 a.m. text message from his mother in Hermosa Beach, California: The disaster on K2 was all over the news, she said.

“A big chunk of ice has fallen below the summit, taking a large part of the fixed lines with it,” she reported. “Twelve members are stranded high on the route. Sta—”

The last sentence was cut off but Rice was sure she had signed off, “Stay safe.”

When Rice finally climbed down onto the rocks at Base Camp, another mountaineer from a different expedition rushed at him and declared excitedly that everyone who was still up on the mountain was dead, but Rice refused to believe it.

He felt the world was going crazy. Later, in one of the tents he passed, someone was speaking on a telephone, negotiating to sell a photograph of an icefall on the serac.
Let's make some money
, he heard the climber say.
This is a money shot!
Rice was overcome with exhaustion and emotion.

 

In the early afternoon, Eric Meyer radioed in from Camp Four to inform Klinke and Van Oss that he was starting his descent.

A few hours later, Klinke got an update that Cas van de Gevel had probably seen Hugues d'Aubarède falling the night before. Klinke sadly moved the Frenchman's name from the “presumed missing” column on his list to “presumed dead.” Pemba Gyalje radioed in from Camp Four to relate what he had witnessed in the Bottleneck. Klinke learned that the three missing Koreans and two of their Sherpas were probably dead but Marco Confortola was back safe.

He had nine climbers who were presumed dead—d'Aubarède, Dren Mandic, Jahan Baig, Rolf Bae, Jumik Bhote, Kim Hyo-gyeong, Park Kyeong-hyo, Hwang Dong-jin, Big Pasang Bhote.

There were still three people missing—Gerard McDonnell, Wilco van Rooijen, and d'Aubarède's HAP, Karim Meherban. Klinke did not yet know of Pemba Gyalje's conviction that McDonnell was the climber in red and black who had fallen from the Traverse; or Confortola's belief that McDonnell's were the remains he had discovered in the icefall.

At Base Camp, they had received the reports that Wilco van Rooijen had telephoned his wife in Utrecht to tell her he was lost. When Klinke heard that news, he thought,
Shit
, since he knew the story of climber Rob Hall on the South Summit of Everest in 1996 who had made a final call to his pregnant wife in New Zealand just before he died of hypothermia. Van Rooijen had a baby son at home.

Things also looked bad for Gerard McDonnell, in truth. It was getting late and the chance of anyone else coming off the mountain was slim. But no one knew absolutely for certain what had happened to him, and his family in Ireland still held out the hope that he had survived. In Kilcornan, when his mother and sisters had gone to bed on Friday night, they had known that he had reached the summit. But on Saturday morning they heard nothing from him and there was no fresh sighting. The local newspaper, the
Limerick Leader,
reported McDonnell's triumph on its website, but telephone calls to his satellite phone were not going through. McDonnell's brothers-in-law sent text messages to friends around Kilcornan to announce that he had reached the top. They cautioned that descending was the hard part. Then the news had come through of the icefall and Rolf Bae's death; they had heard that the fixed ropes had been swept away.

As Saturday wore on, his family gathered in his mother Gertie's farmhouse in Kilcornan. They swapped reminiscences of McDonnell to keep up their spirits and reinforce their belief that somewhere, four thousand miles away, he was alive. They laughed and made cups of tea.

Behind them on the sideboard, McDonnell's hurling stick had
pride of place in a case beside a picture of him on Everest. McDonnell had sold it at a charity auction but his family had bought it for him. Ger's older brother J.J. was on vacation in Lanzarote and was due to return to Ireland the next morning.

After a while, they moved to Gerard's sister's house and waited. They had their laptops open and constantly checked for email updates and refreshed the Dutch team's website for news.

 

At about 4 p.m. on K2, Eric Meyer and the four climbers who were descending together to Base Camp from Camp Four arrived at the top of a steep, 60-degree ice slope above Camp One.

Two ropes had already been fixed in parallel down the slope. The Australian climber, Mark Sheen, rappelled down first and waited at the anchor 150 feet below. Then it was Meyer's turn.

The two ropes appeared somewhat worn to him. There were other ropes partially buried in the snow but these two were probably as good as any the climbers would find; they looked as though they had probably been fixed by one of this year's expeditions. He selected what appeared to be the newest, and clipped it into the special descending carabiner on his safety harness. As he descended, he watched the rope spool quickly through the carabiner near his waist.

He was about one hundred and twenty feet down when he saw the three distinct strands of the rope passing through the mouth of the carabiner unravel, and a second later, disintegrate as the rope split. Meyer fell backward from the mountain.

He swiveled head over heels; the world suddenly turned in fantastic slow motion around him. He could see Broad Peak and some of the other beautiful Karakoram mountains hanging weirdly upside down.

Meyer thought,
I guess this is how it is going to go down. I am going to die
.

Before he had started to rappel, he had attached a two-foot-long tubular nylon safety sling from his belt to the second fixed rope.
Now, he somersaulted and crashed down onto the ice but stopped ten feet below Mark Sheen as the sling snapped tight. He had fallen forty feet but he could have gone airborne over the 4,000-foot drop if it weren't for the sling.

“I can't believe you didn't keep going!” Sheen called down to him.

Meyer's adrenaline was pumping. “I can't believe I am alive,” he said.

His weight—and he wasn't a heavy guy—must have found a weakness in the rope that had caused it to snap; it had probably already been weakened by someone else's ice axe or crampon. In the air, as he fell, he had reached over with his right arm and caught the safety line in the crook of his elbow in an attempt to stop himself. That had left a sharp rope burn on his skin, but otherwise he was okay.

He remembered thinking, as he tumbled, how beautiful a way it would have been to die. The other three climbers still up at the top of the slope—Chhiring Dorje, Paul Walters, and Fredrik Strang—climbed down cautiously after him.

 

Klinke and Van Oss stood outside the tents at Base Camp peering up thousands of feet at the gullies and ridges on the enormous southern face of K2. To watch the slopes, they had three pairs of binoculars and a telescope. The telescope, which the Serbs had donated to the rescue effort, was mounted on a tripod on the rocks.

Earlier, it had been warm in the sunshine but the temperature was dropping again. Clouds drifted across the sky. The two men were surrounded by other hopeful mountaineers. Wilco van Rooijen was still unaccounted for and everyone prayed that he and the other climbers who were missing would put in an appearance before night fell. They were unlikely to survive another night out in the open.

The climbers gathered at Base Camp had divided up the mountain
into grids in their heads, and each had taken a grid to watch. Gazing carefully through the binoculars, Klinke's eyes roamed up and down his grid, which was to the left of the Cesen route. After a while, he switched to the Serbs' telescope.

At about three o'clock, the clouds parted and Klinke thought he saw an object moving on the southern face but no one else could make anything out—only the mist and black shapes of rocks amid the dull fields of snow. Then the clouds closed together again. The slopes were getting darker. The sun would set in three or four hours.

Back in the Netherlands, in Utrecht, Maarten van Eck had an idea about how to locate Wilco van Rooijen. By now Van Rooijen had called in a handful of times on his Thuraya. So perhaps they could track the GPS coordinates of his satellite calls?

He contacted the company in Colorado that had rented Van Rooijen his phone, and asked for the position of his last five calls. At first the people at Thuraya said the data was personal and refused to give it up. But when the circumstances were explained to them by a furious Van Eck, they relented and Van Eck plotted the coordinates on a 3-D model of K2 on Google Maps he had on his desktop.

The first three calls were all over the place. But Van Rooijen's last two calls showed the same position. Van Eck called Base Camp.

“Where is he?” said Van Oss.

“Seventy-five hundred meters near the Black Pyramid!” Van Eck declared, confident they had found him.

On K2, Klinke was still watching the mountain, and at around 5:30 p.m. the clouds cleared and he saw a small orange dot scaling down the southern face.