No Way Down, Life and Death On K2 (2010) (20 page)

He grabbed a pair of binoculars, which had a wider field of view.

“There!” he shouted. “I see something. I see someone moving on the south face.”

Everyone stared where Klinke was pointing. Was he sure? No climber was supposed to be in that area of the mountain.

Klinke was also confused. The Black Pyramid and the coordinates from Van Eck were nowhere near that part of the southern face where he had glimpsed the orange figure. Eventually he realized that Van Eck was mistaken and he had confused the real Black Pyramid with another area of black rock where the climber in orange had been seen.

“It's a climber.” Klinke was adamant. “I am not sure but I think it's Wilco.”

By now, the others had picked out the figure, too. They cheered when they saw him. They thought it was a climber in an orange suit, although it could have been a different color. Whoever he was, he was about 1,500 feet to the left of the Cesen route and 1,800 feet below the Shoulder. And he was on the move.

A dozen mountaineers stood in the middle of Base Camp near the Serbian tent staring up at the south face of the mountain.

Van Oss called through to Van Eck in the Netherlands, who posted a report on the website:

Who was it?

The Dutch team hoped it was Van Rooijen. As the news spread to Kilcornan, Gerard McDonnell's family prayed it was him.

Soon, however, the clouds closed in again, concealing the climber from view.

To try to make sure of the identity of the climber in orange, Van Eck called the clothing company North Face. It had supplied the gear for many of the climbers on K2. Of the list the company gave him of mountaineers wearing orange suits, only Van Rooijen was unaccounted for.

Klinke was not ruling out McDonnell or Karim Meherban or even Hugues d'Aubarède but gradually a consensus grew. It had to be Wilco.

At around 6:30 p.m., the clouds drifted apart, and in an opening they saw the figure in orange again. He was still there, and this time he seemed to be sitting down. Whoever it was, it was a survivor. The mood at Base Camp was jubilant. Van Oss and Klinke jumped up and down on the rocks.

They still had to bring the climber down alive, they realized. They had to act quickly if they were going to get him to safety before nightfall. If it was Van Rooijen, they had no idea what sort of condition he was in. Clouds filled the gullies again and the sky was growing even darker. Daylight was failing.

Ten thousand feet above Base Camp, Cas van de Gevel and Pemba Gyalje had stayed in their tent at Camp Four, resting and still not willing to go down while Van Rooijen was missing. Klinke and Van Oss decided they had to call them on the radio to tell them the news and ask them to attempt a rescue.

They knew they had to be quick before night came in but it took a while to raise them. Eventually Klinke and Van Oss got through and told them a climber had been spotted somewhere below them between Camp Three and Camp Four. It was probably Wilco van Rooijen.

“Go down the Cesen and signal over,” Van Oss said.

It was not going to be easy for the two exhausted climbers to climb down the Cesen. The rocky slope was steep at any time of day; in the dark, it was deadly.

“We go down,” said Pemba.

It took the two men about an hour to hastily grab some food, zip on their suits, and gather Chhiring Dorje's extra oxygen bottle. Then Klinke watched two headlamps set out from the tents up on the Shoulder and begin to move lower.

“Cas and Pemba will descend from C4 toward C3 to try to locate the lone climber,” Van Eck reported on the website. “More news to follow as soon as we hear something.”

7 p.m.

W
hen Wilco van Rooijen woke up on the ledge of rock, he was alive but he was trapped at 25,300 feet.

Although it was still light, he realized some hours had passed. He felt stiff and cold.

He called his wife again, and the battery worked. He left the phone on so that Maarten van Eck could get through to him. This was the first time that Van Eck had managed to speak directly to his friend. Van Rooijen told Van Eck he was stuck at the top of a large ravine. His eyes were in such a bad state that he could see almost nothing now. He was so thirsty he could hardly speak. All he wanted to do, he said, was fall asleep again.

“You must not sleep,” said Van Eck. Van Rooijen heard the words leach into his brain over the satellite phone and he knew his friend was right.

By now, since he had the phone coordinates, Van Eck believed he knew where Van Rooijen was. He told him he had to continue climbing to his left.

“That's the only way back to the Cesen.” It was imperative, he said.

Once Van Rooijen had gotten off the phone, he sat for a few minutes. Then, when the clouds thinned, he spotted a narrow snow gully a few hundred yards to his left as he faced out from the mountain. If he could reach that gully, he could drop down six hundred feet.

He stood up and climbed around the ledge. Then he slid lower, letting himself go, taking a chance, and he made it. After that, the going was easier.

Soon, however, he saw that there were huge crevasses that split the snow along the bottom of the gully. They were like toothless mouths, and he was terrified he was going to fall into one.

The only other way down was to turn to the east onto a big ridge of brown rocks. But the rocks were steep and Van Rooijen had no idea where they would lead him.

By now, the sun had set. A bright line cut across the horizon. He was desperate to continue but he discovered that his headlamp had slipped from his pocket. He searched his coat but it was gone, as was his camera.

He raised his eyes to the sky and cursed. He couldn't go on. If he stumbled in the dark, he risked falling forever into one of the crevasses.

There was nothing to do, he soon realized, but to stop and bivouac for a second night.

The prospect appalled him. At least on the first night's bivouac, he had Marco Confortola and Gerard McDonnell for company. And that bivouac had started past midnight and lasted for only a few hours. Now it was 7:30 p.m.; he had hours ahead of him alone in the freezing dark.

The bivouac was a terrible thing, he felt, but necessary. Before he stopped, he climbed a few more feet toward the rocks. There in the twilight he made another grim discovery. A few yards away, a dead climber dressed in a yellow jacket lay on a shallow incline. He was tied by rope to a second dead climber, who was sprawled a little farther up. Van Rooijen didn't know who it was, though he thought it was somebody from this year's groups.

He sat down beside the corpse in the yellow jacket. By now Van Rooijen was desensitized to the terrible things he had seen on the
mountain and the corpse didn't register with him. There was also the fact that his mind was no longer functioning properly after the days at high altitude. He didn't focus on the body. Kneeling down beside the corpse, he reached up with his ice axe and climbed onto a higher part of the slope. He climbed on and found a place to spend the night. Sitting down, he crossed his long legs. He stabbed his ice axe into the steep slope behind him so he could attach a rope.

Wind gusted across the face. Now it was really cold. Van Rooijen tried to keep his back to it and, now and then, he stood up and turned around to stretch his limbs and keep the blood circulating, especially in his feet, which were feeling numb. That was how he was going to survive. The numbness of his feet was a bad sign, but Van Rooijen had no energy to rip off his boots and massage his toes.

He closed his eyes, but after a while he opened them again and concentrated on the line of the horizon, the dark shadows of the tops of mountains and the huge blankness of the sky. What with the wind and the cold and the cramps, sleep was impossible. He waited. He took out a tube of energy gel he remembered he had in a pocket and ate it with some snow. That he had only remembered it now was another sign of his deteriorating faculties. He avoided looking at his watch. He didn't want to be disappointed by how slowly the minutes passed.

Once during the dark night, Van Rooijen thought he saw a bright light flash less than nine hundred feet away. He followed its progress with his eyes for a while but it abruptly shut off. He remembered his Thuraya and pulled it out. He tried it twice but either the battery was too cold to work or the charge had seeped away. Hoping his body warmth would revive it, he slipped the phone back in his coat, closer to his skin.

He may have slept after all. He wasn't sure. He wasn't certain of anything anymore. Finally, the sky over K2 grew light. It was Sunday morning, August 3, 2008. He was still alive.

At last, he allowed himself to check his watch. Five a.m. More than two days since he had set out from the tents at Camp Four leading the Dutch expedition gloriously toward the Bottleneck. And it was more than thirty-six hours since his lips had touched any water.

I am going down
, he told himself.

He decided he could cut a path down the side of the rocks, thus avoiding both the hump of the ridge and the crevasses that frightened him. He stood up from the bivouac and climbed uncertainly downward.

 

On Saturday night, when they received the joyful radio call from Klinke and Van Oss at Base Camp, Cas van de Gevel and Pemba Gyalje had set out as quickly as they could from Camp Four.

The idea was to descend rapidly to Camp Three on the Cesen route. Van Oss and Klinke had given them directions about where they should be able to see the climber in orange. They knew they were risking their own lives and they wanted to get off the Cesen route before dark, although it was already nearly black outside.

The Sherpa climbed ahead down the rocky fissures. Van de Gevel was moving more slowly and he watched his friend gradually moving away from him down the steep route.

Snowflakes blew across the Cesen but from time to time Van de Gevel could see a little distance ahead. He hollered out Van Rooijen's name, but his voice was sucked away by the gray emptiness of the snow and rocks. All he could see in the sweep of his headlamp were dark empty slopes freckled with rocks and silent stone ledges.

“Wilco! Wilco!”

Van de Gevel had only climbed down a few hundred yards when his headlamp lost power and flickered out. The batteries were dead. He was carrying a radio, which also had batteries. Crouching on the slope, he radioed down to Gyalje to say that he was switching his
radio batteries to the headlamp and would be off air for a while. He opened the back of the radio, but when he lifted out the batteries they were encased in plastic and he couldn't pull them apart. He picked at them with his axe but fumbled and dropped the batteries. They slid away down the mountain. It was a bad mistake. Alone without communication or light, Van de Gevel realized that he was stuck.

He wasn't going to give in, however. He grabbed one of the ropes that led down the slope, following it for several yards, but it came to a dead end and he stopped himself abruptly.
Not that way.

The rock and snow beneath him were cold as he slumped down in the snow to wait until dawn. Taking off his gloves, he unfolded a lightweight sleeping bag. He lay back on the snow and spread the sleeping bag over his head like a cover. There was a little warmth at least for his body.

An hour or so later he blinked open his eyes and realized he had fallen asleep without putting his gloves back on. A sharp pain ate into his hands and he realized it was frostbite. Hastily, he grabbed for his gloves, pulling them over his stiff fingers, but it felt like he was too late. It was still dark, and all he could do was sit tight and wait.

He had set out to rescue his friend but he himself was lost in the night. Below him, Pemba had probably made it down to Camp Three by this time. Van de Gevel wondered how many hours were left until the sun came up, what had happened to Wilco van Rooijen, and what now would become of him. He pondered his fate.
No one knows where I am.
It was a terrifying thought.

 

When night enveloped the mountain, like a hand closing its grip, the climbers in front of the cluster of tents at Base Camp watched the lone figure in the orange suit being swallowed up by the darkness.

Van de Gevel and Gyalje had not reached him before nightfall.

Then one of the two headlamps shimmering down the Cesen
route from the Shoulder suddenly blinked off. The remaining lamp moved lower for an hour or so before it disappeared into a tent at Camp Three. Shortly afterward, Chris Klinke received an alarmed radio call from Pemba Gyalje, who said Cas van de Gevel had not come in.

“I have lost him,” Gyalje said, sounding both frightened and exhausted. “Cas is not here!”

Gyalje hadn't been able to see the climber in the orange suit, either, he said, although he had shouted for more than an hour.

The Sherpa said that while he had been outside, he had heard a satellite phone ringing. He thought it had to be Van Rooijen's. But it had stopped. The ringing was coming from an area that was prone to avalanches and Gyalje was wary of searching further, though he offered to go.

“I don't want you to go out,” said Klinke, who was getting worried about the latest turn of events. “We don't know where Wilco is. Cas's light has disappeared. This is getting scary!”

He told Gyalje to stay where he was and sleep.

As the night closed in, the failure to locate the climber in orange depressed the spirits of the climbers in Base Camp. Roeland van Oss, who had only had about three hours of sleep during the last two days, ducked into his tent to get some rest. Wilco van Rooijen was spending a third night on K2 above or close to 26,000 feet. Van Rooijen was tough, Van Oss thought, but few people could survive that.

After Van Oss had gone, Chris Klinke stayed outside to keep vigil, sitting on a big rock and gazing up at the darkened south face. The rock was the size of a dinner table and flat on top. The thirty-eight-year-old Klinke had given up his job as a vice president at the financial advisory firm Ameriprise to follow the mountaineering life. Now he had the sheet of paper, the “death list,” folded in his pocket. He looked for the distant dots of headlamps but he saw none. He listened for any voices on the radio but there was an eerie silence. He shivered.
Damn
,
it was cold.
He was wearing a down coat, down booties, and insulated pants. But the rock and the stones beneath his feet seemed to rip the warmth out of him.

Now and then, the American expedition's cook, Deedar Ali, or his assistant brought him warm tea or biscuits and stopped to watch with him. Just after 9 p.m., Klinke received the news on the radio that the remainder of his own American expedition, including Eric Meyer, Fredrik Strang, and Chhiring Dorje, were descending the last few hundred feet of the Abruzzi and were at Advance Base Camp.

At about 1 a.m., Deedar walked up to them with hot tea and more biscuits. They would be glad to get them. Klinke walked out a few hundred yards from Base Camp to meet them and was relieved when at last he saw headlamps, and Meyer and the team walked wearily across the boulders toward the tents. The descent had been a tough one. Meyer's fall down the 60-degree ice slope had been a reminder of how close anyone was to losing their life on this mountain.

Other members of the team, Paul Walters and Mike Farris, joined them and the whole team went inside the mess tent to sit and decompress. They drank whisky from tin cups. The mood was grim because people were still missing. Klinke told them the news that Van Rooijen was alive. If the Dutchman survived to the morning, he was going to need medical treatment.

Klinke went back out onto the rocks. It was past 2 a.m. Now and then he touched the list of the missing and the dead in his pocket. He had made contact with the Pakistani military to arrange for a plane to fly over K2 to locate any survivors. But the plane that would conduct the “low-and-slow” was being kept on the runway at Skardu by the bad weather. The conditions had to be perfect for a low-and-slow.