No Way Down, Life and Death On K2 (2010) (24 page)

At 1 a.m., my tea cold, Van Rooijen stopped. My notebook was full as he called a taxi for me.

I heard a faint crying, and when we opened the door to the hallway his young son was screaming.

By now my taxi driver, a young man from Afghanistan, had arrived.

I asked Van Rooijen if his wife was with his son but he said no, it was her night off. He was in charge.

“But she must be in the house.”

“No, in Utrecht.”

I wondered how long the boy, about a year old, had been crying.

Van Rooijen sold me a book about his expedition to K2 in 2006 and I left.

The taxi driver, a doctor, had been watching all of this. “He is a focused man, if I may say so, egocentric,” he said as we drove away toward the highway in the dark. I had to agree.

Still, Van Rooijen had given me insight into mountaineering psychology. Before I left, he had said something unsettling. Leaning back in his chair, he shook his head. “Shame about Marco, though, that he got it all wrong. He was exhausted. His mind was obviously gone. He may have…exaggerated.”

He was referring to the story that Confortola had recounted on the train from Rome to Milan: the struggle beside Gerard McDonnell to free the two trapped South Koreans and Jumik Bhote; McDonnell subsequently wandering away in a hypoxic haze; his subsequent death in the avalanche. It was one of the most devastating chapters of the entire tragedy. But recently, McDonnell's family had begun to dispute it.

Confortola stuck tenaciously to his story, but McDonnell's family put forth a rival account, the rewriting led by Annie Starkey, McDonnell's partner in Alaska. She could not believe that McDonnell would walk away from the trapped climbers, no matter what pressure his mind and body were under. In fact, she insisted it was McDonnell who had stayed and Marco Confortola who had climbed down. It was not McDonnell whom Confortola saw killed in the avalanche but instead another climber entirely, Karim Meherban, Hugues d'Aubarède's high-altitude porter. She had photographs she believed showed Karim on the top of the serac before he fell. McDonnell had freed the trapped mountaineers and was descending behind them when he was thrown to his death by a separate avalanche.

For evidence, Starkey relied, among other things, on a radio call that Pemba Gyalje said he had received from Pasang Bhote. In the call, according to Gyalje, the Sherpa reported having reached the trapped climbers and that he was guiding them back down toward Camp Four, just minutes before they were swept away in the serac collapse. Pasang also said he had seen a climber in a red and black suit following behind. In Gyalje and Starkey's view, this was Gerard McDonnell, who had just freed the Koreans and Jumik Bhote.

When I sought out the opinion of Chris Klinke, the American climber who had been closely involved in coordinating the rescue attempt from Base Camp, he said, “I don't believe Gerard freed the Koreans; they had been hanging there for twenty-four hours, and you don't just get up and walk down after that, though he may have rescued Jumik Bhote. I believe however it was Gerard that Marco saw killed.”

I also called Michael Kodas, a climber and author who writes about mountaineering and who knew some of the people involved in the tragedy. He said he had studied the photographs of the serac and Bottleneck on the morning of August 2, purportedly taken by Pemba Gyalje and published on the website ExplorersWeb, which Starkey claimed showed Gerard working to free the climbers. But Kodas was unconvinced. The narrative Starkey and ExplorersWeb had imposed on them was just “too perfect,” he said. In a follow-up email, he said that the “evidence—Pemba's supposition that the man described in a radio call from a now-dead colleague was Gerard, tiny dots in photos that can't be identified for certain as climbers, much less as specific climbers engaged in a rescue, and a faint line in the top of the glacier—one of scores of such marks—was inadequate “to contradict the description of the only living eyewitness to the events,” Marco Confortola.

It is possible that McDonnell stayed or returned after Marco Confortola descended and helped the two Korean climbers and Jumik
Bhote begin their journey down. If it is true, it could be one of the most selfless rescue attempts in the history of high-altitude mountaineering. Confortola would be right in his speech in Rome to say McDonnell deserved at least part of his medal. Even the fact that, in Confortola's account, McDonnell stayed for one and a half hours alongside the Italian to try to free the climbers is unimaginably brave. It sits alongside other acts of heroism over those three days, such as Chhiring Dorje's descent tied to Little Pasang, Fredrik Strang and Eric Meyer's ascent to try to resuscitate Dren Mandic, the decision by Pemba Gyalje to retrieve Marco Confortola. And, perhaps most of all, the willing climb by Big Pasang Bhote, and behind him by Chhiring Bhote, into the terrifying dangers of the Bottleneck to reach their cousin and brother Jumik, only for Big Pasang to lose his life.

It is a terrible sadness that McDonnell died. It is made worse that we will never know for sure about those last minutes of his life, just as we will never know for certain what Big Pasang found at the top of the Bottleneck.

This was the point in the story about which there was sharpest disagreement, but it was not the only one. In piecing together the tragedy, I had expected a clear narrative but I found myself in some postmodern fractured tale. For example, I put it to the Serbs that in the final ascent to the summit, their HAP had turned around and that important equipment he was carrying was left behind below Camp Four. They retorted that this was ridiculous. The lack of equipment for the summit bid was someone else's fault. Chhiring Dorje, the Sherpa in the American expedition, told me how he caught Wilco van Rooijen when the Dutchman slipped on his way up in the Bottleneck, and several others corroborated this version of events; but Van Rooijen reacted with surprise when I asked him about the incident. Many people I have interviewed claimed that it was under the Korean team's influence that the ropes were set low before the Bottleneck and that their climbers were responsible for
the extremely slow progress across the Traverse. But when I caught up with Go Mi-sun and Kim Jae-soo in a guesthouse in Islamabad, they claimed that the ropes on the Bottleneck had been set too far to the right—this had nothing to do with the Korean team and it was this that had caused the delay. And the real reason for the late descent was that exhausted climbers from other expeditions were using their ropes on the way down and holding everybody else up.

There were several more points of disagreement—not surprising given the fact that there were so many strong characters on the mountain with different points of view, and then there is the trick that lack of oxygen can play on memory at 20,000 feet above sea level.

Fortunately, in most cases the differences were a matter of shading. Most people agreed on the significant points, and a clear story emerged.

Ten months after the accidents I flew to Pakistan, intending to travel to K2, still unclear after all my conversations as to why people would risk their lives on such a mountain. The Taliban was intensifying its insurgency and the country seemed in uproar; climbing K2 at this time meant traveling through a nation at war.

One hot night, I crept out of Islamabad in a white Toyota mini-van, sitting beside six climbers who were also heading north to the mountains—in their case, to Gasherbrum I and II, two peaks near K2. We followed the Karakoram Highway, skirting the Swat Valley where the Pakistani Army was launching its latest bloody offensive. From Askole, we trekked six days east surrounded by the cold solitude of the Baltoro glacier to K2 Base Camp.

In the frigid morning, my heart beating wildly from the altitude and exhaustion, I gazed up two miles in the sky, trying to make out the serac's cruel, jagged outline. My seven porters, fearful of avalanches, and superstitious about this place, clattered impatiently around me, eager to leave these altitudes. Finally, in the presence of this awesome mountain, I considered its reputation for death, the group of people
who had challenged it, and the questions that had filled my mind ever since I wrote the first story in the
New York Times
about the disaster.

K2 was terrifically beautiful—its beauty exceeding anything I had expected. Yet, still the questions remained. Why had they come? Why had I come? For me, their story possessed an archetypal force, specific to their time and location and the personalities involved, but also basic and timeless.

They had broken out of comfortable lives to venture to a place few of us dare go in our lives. They had confronted their mortality, immediately and up close. Some had even come back to K2 after serious injury in earlier years, attracted like flies to the light to some deeper meaning about themselves, human experience, and human achievement.

In return, K2 had required from them heroism and selflessness and responsibility. It had also laid bare fatal flaws and staggering errors.

I thought about Rolf Bae waiting below the summit for his wife—forever waiting now.

I thought of Pasang Bhote, doing his duty by his clients and climbing back along the Traverse to reach Jumik Bhote and the other trapped men.

Some had emerged from the ordeal; others had perished. All had burned brightly in their lives.

In researching
No Way Down
, I relied heavily on interviews with the climbers and their families, friends, and colleagues. Unless indicated otherwise, all of the following interviews were conducted in person:

Qudrat Ali, Skardu, Pakistan, June 2009, also by email, April, June 2009; Judy Aull, by telephone, February 2009; Alan Arnette, July 2009; Barbara Baraldi, Rome, Milan, Valfurva, November 2008, and by telephone, January, March, June 2009; Chhiring Bhote, interview by local stringer, Tilak Pokharel, Kathmandu, January 2009; Chuck Boyd, by telephone, December 2009; Serge Civera, by phone, April 2009; Marco Confortola, Rome, Milan, Valfurva, December 2008, also by telephone, August 2008, and by fact-checker Elettra Fiumi in New York via telephone, December 2009; Agostino da Polenza, by email, December 2009; Kurt Diemberger, by telephone December 2009; Chhiring Dorje, New York, January 2010, and Kathmandu, January 2009, with local stringer Tilak Pokharel, and by telephone, December 2008; Mine Dumas, Lyon, France, January 2009; Milivoj Erdeljan, interview by email, December 2008, and in Belgrade, Serbia, by local reporter Alisa Dogramadzieva; Mike Farris, January 2010; Pat Falvey, Ireland, August 2008, and by telephone, July 2009; Donatella Fioravanti, by email, May 2009; Yan Giezendanner, Chamonix, France, January 2009; Go Mi-sun, and in Seoul, January 2009, by local reporter Peter Chang (Islamabad, June 2009) Yannick Graziani, by telephone, December 2009; Maurice Isserman, by telephone, April 2009; Kim Jae-soo, Seoul, 2008, by local reporter Peter Chang, and Islamabad, June 2009; Chris Klinke, interviews by phone, November 2008, August, September, October, November, December 2009; Michael Kodas, by telephone and email, October 2009; Eric Meyer, Denver, Colorado, December 2008, and by phone and email, December 2008, and April, October, and December 2009, January 2010; Nicolas Mugnier, Chamonix, France, January 2009; Lars Flato Nessa, Stavanger, Norway, January 2009, and by telephone and email, October, November, December 2009 and January 2010; Bruce Normand, by email, January 2010;
Jerome O'Connell, Kilcornan, Ireland, August 2008; Virginia O'Leary, New York, April 2009, and by telephone and email January, July, and December 2009; Asghar Ali Porik, Islamabad, Pakistan, June 2009; Phil Powers, Denver, Company, December 2008 and by telephone and email, May 2009; Nick Rice, interviews by phone, from K2 Base Camp, August 5, 2009, and by phone November 2008 and January 2009; Nazir Sabir, interview by email, December 2009; Bjorn Sekkesæter, interview by email, December 2008, December 2009; Andy Selter, by phone, December 2009; Sajjad Shah, Islamabad, June 2009; Cecilie Skog, Denver, Colorado, December 2008; Jelle Staleman, by telephone, December 2008; Annie Starkey, by email, October and November 2009; Fredrik Strang, interviews by phone, December 2008, April 2009, June 2009; Christian Trommsdorff, by phone, December 2009; Cas van de Gevel, Utrecht, the Netherlands, January 2009 and by email and phone, December 2009; Maarten van Eck, Kilcornan, Ireland, August 2008, and by phone, December 2008; Roeland van Oss, Lyon, France, January 2009; Wilco van Rooijen, Voorst, the Netherlands, January 2009, and by email, December 2009; Philippe Vernay, Lyon, France, January 2009; Raphaele Vernay, Lyon, France, January 2009; Paul Walters, by email, December 2009; Chris Warner, by telephone, February 2010; Predrag Zagorac, by telephone, December 2008, and in person with local stringer/reporter Alisa Dogramadzieva, Belgrade, Serbia; Alberto Zerain, Subillana-Gasteiz, near Bilbao, Spain, January 2009, and by email, December 2009.

For perhaps understandable reasons, two of the climbers, Pemba Gyalje and Pasang Lama, did not agree to an interview. Pemba's friend Gerard McDonnell had died and Little Pasang had lost friends. As a result, some parts of the story are weighted away from them more than I would have liked, especially in the case of Gyalje, who was a pivotal figure. However, I managed to see filmed video evidence Gyalje gave in Islamabad in August 2008, and which was provided for me by Annie Starkey.

PROLOGUE

The confused departure from Camp Four in the early hours of August 1 was described to me by many people, including Eric Meyer, Nick Rice, Alberto Zerain, and Chhiring Dorje. These moments, and other parts of the story, were captured to differing degrees by some early and excellent magazine treatments of the 2008 accidents. These early accounts include: Michael Kodas's “A Few False Moves,”
Outside Magazine
(September 2008); Freddie Wilkinson's “Perfect Chaos,”
Rock and Ice
(December 2008); and Matthew Power's “K2: The Killing Peak,”
Men's Journal
(November 2008).

Meyer's Talus cold-weather mask warmed and added moisture to the air he was breathing—important because at altitude the air is especially cold and dry.
The volume of air breathed per minute increases with altitude, and this also adds to the dryness of a climber's airways—causing mountaineers' well-known “Khumbu cough.”

The description of the ropes situation is drawn from interviews with Wilco van Rooijen, Chris Klinke, Cecilie Skog, and Lars Nessa, among others.

Meyer and Fredrik Strang provided details on their climb up the Shoulder, and their deliberations about whether to turn back, which are also captured on Fred Strang's film,
A Cry from the Top of the World
(Mastiff AB, Stockholm, Sweden, 2010).

The description of their return to Camp Four is based on interviews with Strang, Meyer, and Rice.

The documentary film
Disaster on K2
, shown on the Discovery Channel in March 2009, provides a good setup for the climb, and includes footage from the weeks surrounding the final ascent, as well as interviews with the climbers.

For climbing statistics, I relied on data from adventurestats.com or www.alpine-club.org.uk; explorersweb.com; 8000er.com, and the Himalayan Index.

CHAPTER ONE

Details of the journey into the Karakoram from the Pakistan side come from my own trip to K2 in June 2009. For historical treatments of K2, I relied on: Jim Curran,
K2: The Story of the Savage Mountain
(Seattle: Mountaineers, 1995); and Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver,
Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008). Another overview is provided by Kenneth Mason's
Abode of Snow
(New York: Dutton, 1955).

For further details on the Duke of Abruzzi's early expedition, see Mirella Tenderini and Michael Shandrick,
The Duke of the Abruzzi: An Explorer's Life
(Seattle: Mountaineers, 1997).

For insights into the 1954 successful summit attempt, Lino Lacedelli and Giovanni Cenacchi's
K2, The Price of Conquest
(Seattle: Mountaineers, 2006), provides Lacedelli's account. David Roberts also provides a considered assessment of that expedition in “K2: The Bitter Legacy,”
National Geographic Adventure
(September 2004); Ardito Desio provides an account of his climb in
Victory Over K2
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1956); as does Walter Bonatti in
The Mountains of My Life
(New York: The Modern Library, 2001).

Kurt Diemberger supplies a great overview of the attraction and challenges of K2 in
The Endless Knot
(Seattle: Mountaineers, 1991).

Sivalaya, Explorations of the 8000-meter Peaks of the Himalayas,
by Louis C. Baume (Seattle: Mountaineers, 1979), is a good handbook of the world's biggest mountains.

CHAPTER TWO

The details of Dren Mandic's climb in the Bottleneck are from Predrag Zagorac. His life and weeks on the mountain are based on interviews with Zagorac, Milivoj Erdeljan, and on the team's blog reports. Zagorac's thoughts and comments inform my description of Dren's point of view. The account of the team's ascent from Base Camp is drawn from interviews with Zagorac and Qudrat Ali, and from the Serbian expedition report: http://www.vojvodineanexpedition.net/index.php/K2-2008./REPORTOF-THE-EXPEDITION-SERBIA-K2-2008.php4

Details of conditions and events in the Bottleneck were provided by Lars Nessa, Cecilie Skog, Zagorac, Wilco van Rooijen, Marco Confortola, and Chhiring Dorje.

There is some dispute about whether Mandic stood up or not before falling a second time.

CHAPTER THREE

Eric Meyer, Nick Rice, and Fred Strang described the scene at Camp Four after Mandic's death. Some of these moments are also shown in
A Cry from the Top of the World.

Strang's ascent, his meeting with the Serbs, and confrontation with Jahan Baig were related to me by Strang and Predrag Zagorac. Along with Eric Meyer, Strang and Zegorac also provided an account of Baig's death. Again, there was some divergence in accounts: Strang insisted Baig had an ice axe, but Meyer reported that Baig had no axe to arrest his fall. Nick Rice provided insight into Baig's possibly hypoxic state at Camp Four, as well as background on Baig's behavior around Base Camp. Baig's background is from Qudrat Ali, both an interview in Skardu and several email exchanges. Details of the return to Camp Four are based on interviews with Strang, Meyer, Zagorac, and Paul Walters.

Charles S. Houston, David E. Harris, and Ellen J. Zeman's
Going Higher: Oxygen, Man and Mountains
offers an excellent overview of the effects of high altitude on the body.

CHAPTER FOUR

The story of Fritz Wiessner's attempt on K2 is told brilliantly in the aforementioned books
K2: The Story of the Savage Mountain
and
Fallen Giants
. See also Andrew J. Kauffman and William L. Putnam's
K2: The 1939 Tragedy
(Seattle: Mountaineers, 1992).

CHAPTER FIVE

The conditions in the Bottleneck and the Traverse on K2 appear to have changed somewhat over time. A few decades before the teams arrived in 2008, snow was so heavy on the Traverse that in some years expeditions required no fixed rope at all, only their ice axes, and ascended to the summit and descended without fixed lines, according to Chris Warner, an experienced American climber who summitted in 2007.

The definition of what constitutes the Traverse and the Bottleneck has also shifted. Earlier in the mountain's history, “Bottleneck” may only have referred to the very narrow passage at the top of the couloir, but by 2008 most people understood it as the entire part of the route rising from the Shoulder to the Traverse. The Traverse proper is the short but steep horizontal crossing beneath the serac. The name, however, is also often extended to include the rising but less steep diagonal that climbers follow around the edge of the serac up to the top of the hanging glacier.

There are differing accounts about the amount of time spent considering whether to continue to the summit. Marco Confortola, Lars Nessa, and Wilco van Rooijen described the frustration experienced by the climbers who had to wait in the Traverse. Confortola's book,
Giorni di Ghiaccio
(Milan: Baldini Castoldi Dalai editore, 2008) conveys this, and also provides an overview of his climb. As Michael Kodas pointed out to me, the groupthink that leads expeditions onward often happens and is regularly cited as a cause of accidents in the mountains. For insight into the South Korean team, I relied on interviews with Go Mi-sun and Kim Jae-soo. It is a feature of many mountaineering seasons that some expeditions arrive late to take advantage of the resources put in place by the bigger expeditions. The wait for the Koreans was related by, among others, Lars Nessa, Van Rooijen, and Alberto Zerain. The dynamics of the Norwegian team, and details of Rolf's life, were drawn from interviews with Cecilie Skog, Bjorn Sekkesaeter, and Lars Nessa. Jelle Staleman, Chhiring Dorje, and Lars Nessa contributed the story of the yak. Lars Nessa and Marco Confortola provided details about Hugues d'Aubarède's condition; d'Aubarède's blog, maintained by Raphaele Vernay, also served as a terrific resource on Hugues's time on the mountain. Other information about Hugues came from Yan Giezendanner, Serge Civera, and Nicolas Mugnier. For physical descriptions of the Traverse, I am grateful to Nessa, Van Rooijen, Confortola, Phil Powers, and to Chris Warner. Details on the Dutch team were provided by Cas van de Gevel, Roeland van Oss, Jelle Staleman, Maarten van Eck, Nick Rice, and Van Rooijen. Insights into its dynamics were also drawn from the Norit blog and from Nick Rice's blog, http://www.nickrice.us/index_files/k2dispatch.htm, which
provided good exposition on the weeks at Base Camp. Additional information on Marco's life was provided by Donatella Fioravanti and Enrico Dalla Rosa.

Information about Gerard McDonnell at this point on the climb was supplied by Lars Nessa and by Van Rooijen. Details on McDonnell's early life and preparation for K2 were drawn from interviews with Van Rooijen, Annie Starkey, Pat Falvey, Jacek Teler, Alan Arnette, Chris Warner, and Jerome O'Connell.

CHAPTER SIX

Details on Alberto Zerain's ascent and his background are drawn from an interview at his home, and from his wife, Patricia Prevost Zarate. The order of the climbers he passed on his descent varies in other accounts.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Information on the Norwegians' ascent to the summit was provided by Cecilie Skog and Lars Nessa. The account of the South Koreans' summit was drawn from an interview with Go Mi-sun in Islamabad. For the Dutch team's arrival, I drew on interviews with Wilco van Rooijen, Cas van de Gevel, Maarten van Eck, and the Norit blog, and from Van Rooijen's book,
Overleven op de K2
(Netherlands/Belgium: National Geographic/Carrera, 2009). Gerard McDonnell's call from the summit was confirmed by Annie Starkey. Hugues d'Aubarède's conversations at the summit were related by Raphaele Vernay, Mine Dumas, Chhiring Dorje, and Agence France Presse. Virginia O'Leary and Go Mi-sun provided background on Jumik Bhote's call from the summit. Marco Confortola and Cas van de Gevel described their last-minute picture-taking.