No Way Down, Life and Death On K2 (2010) (3 page)

10:30 a.m.

I
t was so crowded near the top of the Bottleneck that Dren Mandic was nervous.

The lone mountaineer near the top, the Basque Alberto Zerain, had climbed in front of everybody up the steep gully, then disappeared quickly around into the diagonal passageway of the Traverse. A few Sherpas and a line of South Koreans had followed behind him. But the Koreans had gone so slowly and after half an hour they had stopped moving, causing this backlog down the Bottleneck.

Mandic was waiting near the top of the gully. He stood on a little rock shelf on the right-hand side while he waited to cross over to the mouth of the Traverse on the opposite side. Standing stiff and impatient in a black down suit and a red coat, he waited amid a small group of climbers—four, five, six, more—who were resting, some sitting, their coats unbuttoned and their harnesses unclipped from the rope, basking in the mid-morning warmth.

He glared up at the backs of the mountaineers lined up ahead of him in the Traverse. After the Traverse, the teams would have to climb up onto a long snowfield at about 27,500 feet, which after another three or four more tiring hours would bring them to the summit.

Mandic turned and looked below at the longer line of climbers stretching down the Bottleneck like dominoes. The climbers wore big
jackets, clutched ice axes and ski poles, and had backpacks weighted with phones and radios. They were strangers to each other behind shaded glasses and frosted beards and eyebrows; some were wearing oxygen masks.

Mandic noticed that the crowd was making the Sherpas uneasy. In one place, they had thrust two axes into the rocks above an ice screw and wrapped two short rope lengths around the axe handles and down to the screw to take some weight off it.

The climbers at the bottom of the queue a few hundred yards below were still moving slowly higher. They stabbed their axe handles into the snow and moved their jumars—metal ascending devices that bit into fixed lines—up the rope. But soon the inevitable happened and they ran up against the crowd. Everyone's frustration was boiling over. The leader of the Dutch expedition, Wilco van Rooijen, snapped.

“What's going on?” he yelled. A professional mountaineer, Wilco had been one of the dominant figures over the past few months at Base Camp, one of the chief organizers of the cooperation between the teams. He was dressed today in an orange down suit, a thin, broad-chested man with spiky silver hair, blue eyes, and a silver earring in his left ear. This summer represented his third attempt to climb K2. He had first tried to climb it in 1995 but had been knocked unconscious in a rock fall; he broke his shoulder and lost one and a half liters of blood. This year he had returned with an eight-strong team and a 100,000-euro sponsorship deal from a Dutch water purification company, Norit. He was an impatient man and wanted success.

“Hurry up!” he hollered, in his Dutch-accented lilt.

Above them all, not fifty feet from Mandic's head, loomed the brow of the serac, blue and sweating in the heat. It was barely the middle of the morning and the sun already blazed above them in the blue sky.

 

The thirty-one-year-old Mandic had come to the mountain with a regimented five-man Serbian team with their three Pakistani HAPs, one of the first Serbian expeditions to K2.

There was Predrag, or Pedja, Zagorac, and Iso Planic, who was probably the most experienced among them. Zagorac was from Belgrade and Planic from Subotica. Then there was Milivoj Erdeljan, their gray-haired leader, who didn't climb but guided his charges like a father from Base Camp. His calming voice was always on the radio. A fifth member of the team, who helped with sponsorship, had joined them in July.

Of the three Serbian climbers, Mandic had the least experience. At home he belonged to the “Spider” Subotica mountaineering club. He had climbed Mount Ararat in Turkey, and the previous summer he had summitted Broad Peak, K2's big neighbor, but that was his only Himalayan achievement.

None of the Serbians was a professional climber—few people in Serbia were. Mandic worked as a carpenter in Subotica. But they had prepared well, he was convinced. They had financing from the Ministry of Sport as well as from private companies in Belgrade. They had a mobile weather forecast station, and back in Serbia two meteorologists were on call. They felt they couldn't be in better physical condition. After all, their fitness had been tested and approved at the Provincial Institute for Sport in Novi Sad; and in Base Camp, Erdeljan had sent his men out most days to keep fit by climbing up and down the steep cuts of the Godwin-Austen glacier. The Serbs had brought ten tents to the mountain, and 5,600 feet—more than a full mile—of rope.

Like most of the teams on K2 this year, the Serbs had traveled five hundred miles from Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, to Skardu, a dusty town in the country's northeastern territory. From there they had gone on by cramped jeep for another day to Askole, a mud-brick village and one of the nearest habitations to K2. After that they had trekked in for a week by foot over gushing streams and brittle gla
ciers, forever craning their necks to glimpse the distant peak. On the Serbs' trail in from Askole, one of the mules broke its leg.

In the following weeks, the different national expeditions had gotten to know each other well. They had worked side by side on the slopes, enduring rock falls and storms, loosened ice screws, scraped shins, and snow-crushed tents. In the Base Camp at the foot of K2, a small town of multicolored tents perched on the Godwin-Austen glacier at 16,400 feet above sea level, they had shot the breeze over yak's meat and the Hunzas' sweet tea. They had learned techniques from one another, bragged and swapped stories of conquests of lesser peaks—Annapurna, Chogolisa, Masherbrum—while the frozen tides of the Godwin-Austen shifted outside and cracked.

K2 had provided blunt reminders of its dangers. In Base Camp, one of the Pakistani military liaison officers—each team had to have one to qualify for a permit—got fluid in his lungs from the altitude; one of the Serbians' porters had had to push him by wheelbarrow to the military camp at Concordia. Then on a practice climb to one of the higher camps, a rockfall had showered down on the three Serbs. Mandic had simply lain down and put a knapsack over his head as the biggest stone—at least a hundred pounds—bounced over him.

Mandic and Zagorac were often in the kitchen tent, where they cooked Serbian specialties, Vojvodinean homemade plum dumplings and doughnuts, without plums, however; they had to make do with strawberry jam. It was still delicious. In the evenings, Mandic was invariably at the mess tent table, playing cards raucously with the Pakistani porters. Mandic, who had a special love of nature, told them about the volunteer work he did at the local zoo back in Su botica. He kept spiders, birds, all sorts of exotic creatures in his apartment, where he lived with his girlfriend, Mirjana. He had completed military service in Serbia. He had never moved away from Subotica, but he was restless and liked to travel, especially to places like K2.

Over the weeks, the Serbians and the other teams had established higher and higher camps so that they gradually became used to the altitude and felt more comfortable breathing the rarefied air. Then the altitude headaches were not so debilitating, at least when washed down with a cup of pills.

During the days, the teams fixed thousands of feet of rope to the rock and ice like a handrail so that they did not have to face the mountain unassisted. They followed two routes up—one on the Abruzzi ridge and another called the Cesen route, both of which met near the Shoulder. The teams bound the mountain, just as the yaks the porters led in from Askole had been bound in rope by the Pakistani cooks, their throats slit on the ice, the meat stashed in ice holes in the glacier for the mountaineers to eat. And the dance of the Balti porters in the glare of the torchlight on the festival of Aga Khan was like the celebration of the vanquishing of some mythic beast.

Then the leaders of each expedition team had convened the cooperation meetings, held in the Serbians' and Koreans' mess tents, to discuss logistics. The climbers knew they were too many to ascend in an uncoordinated rush. Around a large green table, they worked out who would bring the ropes, even who would supply what precise number of ice screws or bamboo sticks or lengths of fish line.

“We are working like one team,” said Pemba Gyalje, a Nepalese Sherpa in the Dutch team who attended the meeting. They had turned the crowd to their advantage, it seemed. It was quite an achievement among so many competing languages and egos.

Gyalje banged his fist for emphasis.

“One team,” he said.
Not many
.

 

On the way up the mountain during the final summit push to Camp Four, the teams had climbed up the ropes and rickety aluminum wire ladders suspended in House's Chimney, a 150-feet-high crack in a
huge red-rock cliff below Camp Two. It was named after an American, Bill House, who had climbed it in 1938. And they had scaled the notorious Black Pyramid, a large promontory of broken rock and shingles below Camp Three.

Around this time, unforecast winds had swept in. In the night the gusts had nearly lifted the flapping tents off the ground. The climbers had clung to their sleeping bags, convinced they were going to die. The winds had ripped open one of the tents to toss a backpack full of equipment belonging to another independent Serbian mountaineer into the chasms.

It was the Serbian team's lead guide, a man called Shaheen Baig, who had vomited blood in their little tent on the narrow ledge at Camp Two. While some of the teams, such as the South Koreans, had flown in Sherpas from Nepal, the Serbs had hired three local HAPs—the HAPs were generally drawn from nearby northern areas such as Shimshal. During the storm, the Serbians listened, above the roar of the wind, to Baig's hacking cough. Baig possessed the valuable experience of having summitted K2 four years earlier. But there had been no other option; he had had to climb back down.

The rest of the Serbian team pushed on but the next morning the Serbians' two other porters, Mohammed Khan and Mohammed Hussein, slyly admitted that during the storm they had forgotten to pack everyone's food, so then there were no sausages or biscuits for Mandic and his colleagues, though they found candies and soups in a rucksack and borrowed a bowl of pasta from Alberto Zerain. At that altitude, though, they discovered they were not really hungry after all.

Then, on the steep mountainside at Camp Three, Khan complained of a headache. They gave him ibuprofen and he reached Camp Four; and he had set off with the Serbs this morning. He was to carry two bottles of oxygen for them to the top of the Bottleneck and then turn around. The Serbs were using supplementary oxygen—the breathing apparatus was a Russian-made system—and each climber had two
five-kiloliter bottles. But Khan had stopped about 150 feet before the top of the Bottleneck and refused to go on, complaining he could not breathe. Planic insisted he had to continue, but Mandic and Zagorac took the two oxygen bottles the HAP was carrying and divided his backpack between them so he could descend. The Serbs were two HAPs down. That left just Hussein.

Mandic felt the extra weight he was carrying now as he shifted on the rope at the top of the Bottleneck. He and Zagorac had agreed they would change over to the full oxygen bottles somewhere at the top of the gully. If Zagorac ever made it up there. Mandic's friend was stuck below in the line in the Bottleneck.

Why was everything going so slowly? These were not hard slopes. Steep, yes. Fifty, sixty degrees. But no more difficult, really, than the ones the Serbs had scaled on Broad Peak.

It was the altitude that made the climbing tough. This was high, 27,000 feet. They were in an area climbers called the Death Zone, the region at or above about 24,000 or 25,000 feet where the air pressure is much less than at sea level and a lack of oxygen rapidly depletes human muscle strength and mental functioning. Human life can barely be sustained up here. Many climbers dared venture into these altitudes—well into the stratosphere—only with the protection of oxygen tanks in their backpacks and the nozzles of masks fixed over their mouth and nose. Others, like the American and Dutch teams, chose to confront the mountain unaided. They wanted to take on the mountain on its own terms. Otherwise, why do it? Even those climbers like Mandic who used supplementary oxygen were aware they had to be up to the summit and down in just a few hours. They could not delay; there was a ticking clock before their oxygen ran out. The altitude affected some people more than others, but after a short while even the hardiest found it difficult to think more than a few steps ahead. Bodies shut down. You could no longer trust your own mind.

And besides simply being in the Death Zone, you couldn't rely on
the snow up here. Mandic looked at the rough surface beneath his boots. You could see blue ice shining under the snow. If a climber was unprepared, he could slip, easily, and it was a long way down. Probably sensible to go slowly. But then again this delay was ridiculous. The Serbian team had calculated they would be on the summit by 9:30 a.m. That is what Shaheen Baig had told them was possible. Mandic wished Shaheen was still with them.

Mandic checked his watch. It was already 11 a.m. In his down suit, he could hardly stand the warmth of the day. He stared out at the sea of white mountains around him, their slopes striped by brown and black rock and coverings of snow, with trails of clouds spreading between the peaks.

It was so hot, Mandic noticed, that a Norwegian climber called Cecilie Skog, who was standing only a few yards away from him, had taken off her purple jacket. Diminutive and pretty, the Norwegian woman was wearing dark sunglasses, and her long hair curled from beneath her helmet down onto her shoulders. From Norway's western oil coast, the thirty-three-year-old climber had come to K2 with her husband, Rolf Bae, who was not far below in the line on the rope in the gully.

About twenty or thirty feet below the little rock ledge where Mandic was waiting, three climbers finally let their frustration get the better of them and took matters into their own hands. They unclipped from the rope and began free-climbing in a snow channel up the side of the Bottleneck—as if there were no ice to worry about, and no drop below them.