No Way Down, Life and Death On K2 (2010) (22 page)

As they gathered around, Van Rooijen, Van de Gevel, and Pemba
Gyalje asked the climbers from Base Camp whether there had been a sighting of Gerard McDonnell. It became clear as they talked that if there had been any chance that the Irishman was alive, it was now finally gone.

Roeland van Oss got on the radio and satellite phone to report that the rescue party had reached the stricken climbers. “Wilco, Cas, and Pemba are safe,” he said somberly. “But we are now fairly sure that Gerard died in the Bottleneck.”

In Utrecht, Maarten van Eck had called Heleen as soon as Van Rooijen reached Camp Three. He posted the news of the successful rescue on the Dutch team's website:

In Ireland, the hopes of Gerard's family that he was the lone surviving climber were finally extinguished. On Sunday morning, the McDonnells called a news conference at the local school, just a few hundred yards from the farmhouse. It was a gray day. His brother-in-law stood in the parking lot to announce that they accepted he was dead. A few days later the family issued a statement to the press:

On K2, the decisive realization that McDonnell was dead seemed to have the most powerful effect on Pemba Gyalje. From that moment, he hung his head and fell silent, the other climbers noticed.

He was convinced now that the climber in the red and black suit that Big Pasang had reported seeing being hit by ice and falling from the Traverse was indeed McDonnell. That meant the Irishman had not abandoned Jumik Bhote and the two injured Korean climbers on the slopes at the end of the Traverse. He had stayed behind after Marco Confortola had left and had helped them to descend, before he had been swept off the Traverse to his death.

Another Sherpa, Little Pasang Lama, had received a radio call in Camp Four from Big Pasang Bhote before the final avalanche; Big Pasang said again that he had reached the Koreans and Jumik Bhote near the Traverse. Jumik had even come on the radio to say his limbs were frozen and the injured Koreans were suffering from snow blindness but he could walk, and when he reached Base Camp he hoped he could be flown by helicopter to Islamabad and home.

Then Big Pasang and Jumik and the Koreans had died when the serac collapsed.

But it was already becoming complicated. Another Sherpa, Chhiring Dorje in the American team, believed that Gerard McDonnell had probably been the lone figure witnessed at 10 a.m. on Saturday, trapped above the serac and walking up and down on the snowfields. He had either fallen over the serac, Dorje felt, or climbed down onto the Traverse where he was hit by the avalanche and had little to do with the rescue of Jumik and the Koreans.

On the Cesen, it took the three injured climbers and their retinue another few hours to reach Base Camp. It was dark, approaching 9 p.m., when Pemba Gyalje walked in first, assisted by one member of the rescue team. It was a while before the other two men followed across the dark rocks of the Godwin-Austen glacier, hobbling away from the maw of K2 and into the blessed safety of Base Camp.

A lot of effort was now directed toward saving the men's frostbitten toes and fingers. The Americans had converted the big Dutch mess tent into a medical emergency room to receive the injured climbers.
It soon became a busy crowded scene inside. The cooks boiled water and put down blue basins for the men's feet. The Norwegians' heater blasted some warmth from the corner. Eric Meyer and Chris Klinke had their headlamps strapped on their foreheads. Their lights illuminated the prone figures of the two stricken Dutch climbers who were laid on bed mats, their backs propped up against the inflatable Ikea sofa that Rolf Bae had originally carried from Norway for Cecilie and that the Norwegians had also donated to the rescue effort.

In their orange North Face fleeces, both Dutch climbers looked years older. Cas van de Gevel, in particular, seemed shrunken and gray, his skin lined and hanging from his cheeks. Klinke and Chhiring Dorje handed out Pepsi in tin cups and with Lars Nessa they scrubbed and warmed Van Rooijen's and Van de Gevel's hands and feet, while Meyer prepared to apply what medicines he had. Roeland van Oss was relieved to let Meyer take charge, to see now whether the descent had been rapid enough to save the climbers' fingers and toes.

Meyer inserted plastic tubes into veins on the back of their hands and injected a cocktail of medicines. First, morphine and Valium to ease the painful thawing of their flesh. He also possessed two bottles of a new drug, tPA, or tissue plasminogen activator. Normally used to treat heart attacks, it had shown in university trials that it could help frostbite, though it had never before been tested at altitude and it had side effects such as internal bleeding. Meyer was worried about what dosage to try, so he called a specialist at the medical school in Denver, who advised against using it. The drug also had to be injected within twenty-four hours of the initial exposure. This applied only to Van de Gevel, but Meyer was growing so concerned about their condition that he injected it into both men. He followed it with another drug, heparin, to stop the blood clotting in the tiny vessels of their fingers and toes.

Fredrik Strang came into the tent and turned on his camera. Wilco van Rooijen looked disoriented as the Americans filled him in on the full extent of the disaster.

“How many victims are there?” he said.

“Eleven,” said Meyer. “Eleven people.”

“Missing?”

“No, dead. Rolf, Gerard.”

Blowing out his cheeks, Van Rooijen gazed emptily around the tent.

They told him Marco Confortola had left Camp Four and that another rescue party was climbing up to meet him on the Abruzzi. Down at Base Camp, Roberto Manni, Confortola's Italian colleague, had been desperate for volunteers to help Confortola and had offered money to any Sherpa who was willing to go up to find him and bring him down. Eventually, after a day's delay caused by the need to get equipment together, another American climber, George Dijmarescu, had set off up the Abruzzi with the two Sherpas in his expedition.

Lying beside Van Rooijen, Van de Gevel sank lower against the mattress. Initially Meyer was most concerned about Van Rooijen's frostbite. He had slept two nights in the open, the first night at about 27,000 feet, the second at somewhere around 25,000 feet. But Van de Gevel's hands looked bad, too. He told Meyer about waking up with his gloves off. The Dutchman was a carpenter, Meyer knew, and his fingers were important to him. But the fingers on his left hand were limp blocks of gray, with purple streaks across the mid portions. Meyer could see hemorrhagic blisters, which meant serious frostbite damage.

They dunked his hands in a tin basin of warm water and soaked his feet in a bowl but repeatedly he dozed off, trying to stretch out, and pulling his hands and feet out of the water. Chris Klinke had to keep lifting them back in.

Looking in a concerned fashion at both men, Meyer said, “I hope they will keep their digits.”

After a few hours, the only thing left that Meyer could do was bandage the two men up and prepare them for their departure. It was about 3:30 a.m. There was talk of helicopters flying up from Skardu to airlift them out.

Monday, August 4, 8 a.m.

H
elicopter transportation for injured climbers is being organized for tomorrow morning,” Maarten van Eck wrote in an update on his website late on Sunday night.

At K2 on Monday morning, Roeland van Oss thought the helicopters would not arrive until late, but at eight o'clock one of the military liaison officers at Base Camp rushed to his tent with the news that they were only forty minutes away. The Pakistani military had established a private company precisely with the aim of plucking injured mountaineers out of the Karakoram, and it had choppers stationed at the military airport at Skardu. Van Oss had spoken by satellite phone with the owner of Jasmine Tours, the Dutch expedition's organizer, and he had made the arrangements.

Suddenly Van Oss had much to do. He scurried to collect Van Rooijen's and Van de Gevel's bags. The Dutch climbing leader sat upright in the mess tent shooting instructions at Van Oss about all the jobs he had to do after Van Rooijen was gone, such as paying the porters and dealing with the remaining food barrels.

Away from the tents, about three-quarters of a mile down the glacier toward the southeastern shanks of the mountain, the Serbian team's liaison officer and a team of helpers shifted rocks to build a landing pad for the helicopters. They marked it with flags and a windsock.

At nine o'clock, two former Pakistani military Eurocopter Ecu
reuils, or Squirrel helicopters, flew in from the south, casting shadows against the mountainside. They came noiselessly at first but then thudded above the glacier near the tents.

Almost everyone left in Base Camp took turns in the scrum helping to lug Wilco van Rooijen over the rocks on a red stretcher. After they set him down, Chris Klinke shielded the Dutchman's head with his arms as the chopper blades billowed gusts of wind over the rocks. Then they lifted Van Rooijen through the helicopter door and the chopper hovered into the air and flew away.

Roberto Manni persuaded the pilot of the second Squirrel to take a detour up the Abruzzi ridge to attempt a long-line cable and harness rescue of Marco Confortola. The arrangement was that Confortola would climb down onto a flat space below House's Chimney, but when the helicopter got up to 19,000 feet the pilot could not see him. Confortola hadn't managed to descend to that point yet. The weather forced the chopper to wheel away without waiting.

The Squirrel flew back down to the Godwin-Austen glacier for Cas van de Gevel. His hands bandaged, the Dutchman walked from the tent to the landing strip.

The trip was a stunning hour back down the Baltoro glacier, past Masherbrum and Trango Towers, to Skardu. There, Van de Gevel was reunited with Van Rooijen, and the two men were hooked up to monitors in the military hospital, a one-story complex of run-down cream-colored buildings beneath the hot, sandy hills on the outskirts of the town, where military officials strode the grounds and loudspeakers repeatedly called people to prayer.

 

Back at K2, more porters were arriving to carry away the teams' gear. Mules waited around on the rocks. The big South Korean team climbed down to Base Camp, and Nawang, the cook from Nepal, prepared a special meal in the mess tent. His
bibimbap
—warm rice
mixed with vegetables, chili, and meat, when they had some—had become a favorite of the Flying Jump team. Now he cooked the meal even though he had lost two friends from his own region, Jumik Bhote and Big Pasang. From outside, people heard him crying.

Chhiring Bhote was preparing to return to his village near Makalu to observe two months of mourning for Jumik.

The Korean climbers drank suji, which they had brought to K2 intending to celebrate Go Mi-sun's birthday. Instead they were marking the deaths of their two Sherpas and three of their own climbers. The Koreans were not going to wait around. They were crushed by the deaths. They rolled up their flags and their gear. Then the survivors walked out of Base Camp and left the tents standing for the porters to dismantle. They walked for two hours down to Broad Peak Base Camp, which was at a lower altitude for the bigger helicopters they had ordered up. Then the sky was full of helicopters, which flew them out of the Karakoram toward Islamabad.

Before they left, Lars Nessa spoke to Go Mi-sun. She was distraught at the deaths in the Korean team and she offered her commiserations for Rolf Bae. But she was not going to give up climbing; she was leaving to move on to the next peak in her quest to reach the top of all fourteen 26,000-foot mountains. She would die a year later on Nanga Parbat, another tough mountain in northern Pakistan.

Nessa thought about what he had learned from K2. The human costs of mountaineering. Not just those costs inflicted on a climber caught up in a tragedy like this, but the pain for the families left behind.

The Serbs from Vojvodina were leaving. Without Dren Mandic. Predrag Zagorac and Iso Planic intended to sell the team's spare oxygen cylinders and give the money to Jahan Baig's family.

Cecilie Skog had left earlier on Monday, trekking out alone with a single porter to reach Askole as quickly as possible, planning to barely stop to eat. Sixteen months later she would trek across Antarctica, her love for the wilderness undimmed. Nevertheless, her burden was
heavy. And, Nessa thought, was it fair on his own family, his parents, who were farmers near Stavanger, or his girlfriend? Nessa had decided he would climb again but never on a killer mountain like K2.

 

After Van Rooijen and Van de Gevel had gone, Roeland van Oss left a lot of what he couldn't take with him for the porters to burn. Wastepaper, his Alistair MacLean and Tom Clancy novels, all the other garbage. He would never return to K2, never again face those weeks of climbing, all that danger, just to stand on a summit. What did it mean? Most of the people who died had been victims of bad luck, he thought. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As the remaining Dutch climbers were packing up the equipment in Gerard McDonnell's tent, they discovered a bottle of beer among his belongings. That night, a group gathered in the Americans' mess tent and toasted the Irishman. They went around the table reminiscing about him.

“He was a gift to the world,” said Eric Meyer in his toast. “He was a gentle, kind spirit.”

A Serbian climber borrowed two tin plates from the kitchen tent and punched out the names of the dead. It took him five hours. He made a mistake with one plate and had to go back for a third.

Lars Nessa also made a plate for Rolf Bae, using a hammer and chisel.

Before they left K2, the climbers scaled the brown cliffs at the western edge of Base Camp to hang the plates on the Gilkey Memorial.

One of the oval plates was for Dren Mandic. It read:

 

DREN MANDIC

13.
XII
.1976–01.
VIII
. 2008

SUBOTICA

SERBIA

 

The Serbs sprinkled whisky on the plate and knocked some of it back themselves in honor of Mandic.

Another plaque was for Gerard McDonnell.

 

GERARD M
C
DONNELL

20.01.1971–02.08.2008

LIMERICK

IRISH

 

Rolf Bae's plate had a cross hammered above his name:

 

ROLF BAE

19.01.1975–01.08.2008

NORWAY

 

On Monday morning, Marco Confortola had woken up alone at Camp Three, anxious because he had to navigate the Black Pyramid on his own. His feet throbbed as if they had nails in them, he feared he had frostbite in his left hand, and his penis was frozen.

He heard the sound of a helicopter and saw it rising from below, but then it went away and its buzzing faded. As he got down the Black Pyramid, clouds and snow blew in, and out of the mist he saw the three figures of the rescue party from Base Camp approaching. It was George Dijmarescu and two Sherpas from the Makalu Valley, Rinjing Sherpa and Mingma Sherpa. They gave him extra oxygen. They helped Confortola down to Camp Two, where he borrowed Dijmarescu's satellite phone so that at last he could call Luigi. He told his brother he was alive.

Confortola limped down to an area below House's Chimney where Dijmarescu and the two Sherpas had cleared a landing space for the helicopter. Confortola was excited that he was finally going to be delivered from his torment. But then Dijmarescu's radio blurted out
the dispiriting news from Base Camp that the helicopter was canceled because of poor weather. Confortola's suffering was not going to end quickly and he realized he had to find yet more energy from he knew not where to keep going down.

The four men climbed down to Camp One, where they spent the night.

The next morning, Tuesday, they climbed down to Advance Base Camp, where a welcoming party hiked out from Base Camp to meet them, Red Bull, Coca-Cola, and salami in hand. The group included Eric Meyer, Chris Klinke, Chhiring Dorje, and the members of another newly arrived American expedition. They were carrying a stretcher but it was too difficult to walk with it on the rocks. They had heard he had been hit by an oxygen bottle, and Dijmarescu had radioed down that Confortola had also been caught in a rockfall. But Confortola was not in as terrible shape as they had feared, and his mood was improving now that he was convinced he was going to survive.

The weather was turning again. It was cold and damp, and a mix of snow and rain was coming down. Confortola sat on the rocks. The others gathered around while Meyer tried to diagnose his frostbite and they attempted to work out how they were going to carry him back to Base Camp. But Confortola soon lost patience and after ten minutes he stood up and started walking, and the others scrambled to catch up.

They walked slowly on the path between the mangled walls of the icefall. Despite his eagerness, he was unsteady on his feet and they coaxed him on for the three miles to Base Camp.

Halfway to Base Camp, he met another Italian climber, Mario Panzeri, who had hiked across from Broad Peak after news of the K2 disaster spread. Seeing someone he knew burst something inside Confortola, it seemed to the others, and he broke down. Sipping Red Bull, he sat for half an hour with Panzeri.

When the group reached Base Camp later on Tuesday, Confortola was surprised by how many of the tents had been taken down. The
long strip of rocks was much barer. He learned about the number of people who had died. He hadn't known.

The Americans helped him inside the large, comfortable domed tent he shared with Roberto Manni, and Meyer treated him there, filling him with pain-relief drugs. He took off his boots and there was a purple line across his toes as if they had been burned. His worst fears were borne out. It was the damage wreaked by frostbite.

Confortola looked up at the doctor. “What a disaster,” he said in astonishment.

Meyer shook his head. “I don't know,” Meyer said uncertainly.

Confortola was angry at his HAPs, and at the whole country of Pakistan. One of his HAPs came to the tent and spoke to the other climbers. The Americans' Sherpa, Chhiring Dorje, chided him for not doing enough to help Confortola, for showing no respect to the people who employed him. The HAP went away looking embarrassed.

Meyer had no tPA left over since he had used both doses on Wilco van Rooijen and Cas van de Gevel. He would not have given it to Confortola anyway because of the blow the Italian had received to his head at the bottom of the Bottleneck, which increased the risk of internal bleeding. Instead, the only thing he could do was scrub Confortola's skin clean and try to kill the pain as much as possible.

Klinke thawed Confortola's feet in warm water, careful with the ribbons of frozen flesh that were peeling away. The feet didn't look as bad as Van Rooijen's or Van de Gevel's had but if the frostbite worsened, Meyer said, it could lay bare tendons and bones. They wrapped iodine-impregnated gauze around his toes.

As they worked on him, Confortola tried to talk about some of the things that had happened up above Camp Four. The story of his terrible experience was boiling inside him, they could see. Starting to cry, he talked about stopping to help the Koreans and he mentioned Jesus. But he was so emotional and exhausted that Meyer and Klinke could not understand much. They felt sorry for him.

“What do you know about Gerard?” Meyer said.

“I am grateful for you helping me,” Confortola said.

The next day, Wednesday, August 6, a helicopter came up the valley and took Confortola away. He spent a night at the military hospital in Skardu, where he related the story of his rescue of the Koreans to the Italian embassy staff. Then he caught the Pakistani Airways flight back to Islamabad. From there he flew via London to Milan.

In the next few weeks, he became increasingly upset, and on some days he drove around the roads near his hometown and he didn't know where he was going, sometimes in tears, unable to come to terms with the deaths on the mountain, until he went to a friend for help. His feet were in a bad way by then but he was given emergency medical treatment. About six weeks after he left the mountain, he was treated in a hyperbaric chamber at a hospital in Padua. It was one of the best hospitals in Italy for frostbite and burns. The people around him assured him he was going to be all right but he knew his condition was bad, and in the end all of his toes were amputated.

 

After packing up at Base Camp, what was left of the Dutch team trekked out in a line down the Baltoro glacier, passing quickly through the camps at Concordia, Goro II, and Paiju, and skirting the big rock at Korophone, until in a few days they reached the muddy campsites at Askole.

From there they sped in dirty blue jeeps on the mountain road, packed tightly, swaying through the dust clouds thrown up by the Toyotas' wheels. Sajjad Shah, the team's bearded Base Camp manager, had traveled to K2 with the team on this same road two and a half months earlier. Now he gazed at the seat left empty by Gerard McDonnell.