No Way Down, Life and Death On K2 (2010) (6 page)

1 p.m.

T
he nineteen climbers in the tightly pressed line beneath the serac had spent an uneasy few minutes considering whether they should go on in the wake of Dren Mandic's fall.

Below them, the Serbs were distant specks dragging Mandic back toward the Shoulder. The Americans were climbing out from Camp Four. What more could
they
be expected to do? If they descended, they were only going to get in the way of the rescue operation.

Some thought Mandic was still alive. And if he was dead—well, they were used to death. Every one of them had good friends who had been killed in the mountains.

Among them, an Italian climber named Marco Confortola was determined to continue on. The determination seemed to shine in the thirty-seven-year-old professional mountain guide's sharp triangular face, in his brown eyes.

Confortola had grown up in Santa Caterina Valfurva, a ski resort town three and a half hours north of Milan in Lombardy, on the Swiss border; he came from the same valley as his hero Achille Compagnoni, and naturally Confortola had chosen to climb up on the Abruzzi route. Strong as an ox and flamboyant, he had come to K2 to burnish his professional curriculum vitae, but he also wanted to conquer the peak again for Italy. He said he wanted to “bring it back” to his valley.

Before coming to K2, Confortola had worked at a meteorological
station on Mount Everest for fifty days. He had flown back to Milan and spent a week in Valfurva before hopping on another flight to Islamabad. From Askole, he had trekked to Base Camp with a team of eighty porters and their chickens and other supplies.

The ascent from Base Camp had been tougher than he had anticipated. His boots had gotten wet. His HAP had forgotten some of the rope Confortola was expected to supply as part of the cooperation agreement. But still, now, in the group on the ropes beneath the serac, he was determined to go on.

Some of the other climbers shifted uneasily on the lines. The Sherpa in the Dutch team, Pemba Gyalje, said Mandic's fall was bad karma. For him, as for Dorje, the American team's Sherpa, reaching the summit of K2 was going to be a significant marketing coup for his business—these two commercial rivals wanted to beat the other to the top. But the teams were late and Gyalje said he was prepared to turn back if anyone else wanted to.

When he saw the others still looking pensive, Confortola said they had to decide quickly whether to continue higher or go down, but they couldn't simply stand waiting beneath the serac.

As the line turned away up into the Traverse, those who heard him felt a little bit stupid to have harbored any doubts in the first place.

They arrived now at what in some ways was the most challenging part of the day's ascent. The Traverse was a band of steep ice and snow at a slope of between 50 and 70 degrees. It cut directly and horizontally to the left for 200 feet and then, after it, the route rose diagonally for a further 400 feet on a less steep slope of between 35 and 50 degrees covered with deeper snow. As the climbers stared up at the Traverse, they could see that the ice itself was hard and shiny, and when they touched it, it seemed almost alive under their gloves.

The serac hung above, while down to their left were humps of brown rocks, past which was nothing but thin air and, nearly two miles away, the lower gullies and buttresses of K2.

To go across the Traverse, the teams clipped on to the rope with the carabiners on their belts and heaved themselves along the face. The looping rope was secured into the ice at intervals by ice screws. There was the occasional place to rest, a jutting rock or ice lip to lean against. But when the line of climbers was moving, the mountaineers chopped in their ice axes, kicked in the front points of their crampons, and stepped—axe, crampons, step—their breathing coming hard. As they shuffled along, they avoided staring up at the serac directly above or the tiny lines of the Godwin-Austen glacier 10,500 feet below.

By this point, some of them had been climbing nonstop for nearly twenty-four hours, except for the few hours' rest at Camp Four. The midday sun was high in the sky. The Traverse was exposed, and though they had gauged their clothing carefully to avoid overheating and dehydrating—dehydration meant they would need water, and they had left their burners behind at Camp Four—they were dripping with perspiration inside their jackets.

Yet though they were hot and tired, they couldn't dwell on their problems for long. The view was just too beautiful. It made everything right. To their left were the heads of mountains, shining in the sun or wreathed in little trains of cloud. The world was on a gigantic scale. They could see the curving line of the earth's horizon.
They were on K2.

This view, this feeling, this achievement is what they had come for. Despite the nagging anxiety about how long things were taking and the frustrations caused by the crowd, the climbers felt a sort of inner transcendence, an inner peace. When space opened up on the rope and they could start marching up and across the ice wall, they felt truly alive. The summit was a few hours above them. Now at last, after weeks, months, years of preparation and toil, they were closing in.

About one hundred feet across the Traverse, the line stopped again. Up at the front, four climbers from the South Korean team
converged in pairs to change their oxygen tanks. Helping one another to unbuckle the empty cylinders, they started to refix full ones.

With fifteen members, the South Korean expedition was the largest on the mountain this year. Its proper title was the “Korean Flying Jump” team and its tents, national flag, and sponsor flags had dominated Base Camp.

It was divided into two teams—an A and a B team—and they were in the process of trying to bag all fourteen of the world's 26,000-foot peaks. The expedition was led by a prickly, ambitious mountaineer named Kim Jae-soo and his star woman climber, Go Mi-sun. The forty-eight-year-old Kim was president of a company called Power Heat, which manufactured heated mattresses and insoles for shoes.

There was no doubt a distinction between the Korean and the Western—American and European—teams. In the modern mountaineering age, the Western expeditions no longer climbed for their country—that belonged to a different, old-fashioned era. Their teams were sometimes organized along national lines but more than ever they were a loose multinational collection of friends.

But for the South Koreans the idea of bearing a national responsibility in these mountains resonated. They recognized a broader cultural mandate, and success was essential. Failure was to be avoided as humiliating.

They generally climbed in bigger groups than the Europeans and Americans and, certainly in the eyes of the other expeditions, they were more aggressive and took greater risks. Mr. Kim had told some of the other climbers his departure date for leaving K2 was whenever he climbed it.

He was a man who believed in protocol and the superiority of his climbers. Go had earlier moved swiftly and easily up the rocks beside the Bottleneck, shadowed by Kim like a bodyguard. But some of the other Flying Jump climbers were struggling in the Traverse.

The painstaking maneuver with the oxygen bottles caused another
backup down the rope. The climbers waiting behind found places to perch and catch their breath. They expected the Koreans would resume climbing any moment, but it was as if they were moving in slow motion. The minutes dragged.

Eventually the South Koreans hung the empty orange oxygen bottles on an ice screw and moved on up. The other teams climbed past the bottles, which dangled delicately and precariously on the side of the mountain.

They were climbing once more but it was still slow going, and the delay allowed resentments to simmer, repeating the frictions that had arisen during the months at Base Camp. The truth was that climbing attracted strong characters, egos, oddballs, and they rubbed up against one another. Some of the climbers cursed the tardiness of other foreign expeditions. Outwardly they had respect for each other but in truth each considered the others slightly ridiculous—inferior, unprofessional, ignorant of the kind of monster K2 could be.

Now, they cursed the state of the ice screws, or the condition of the rope or the way it had been tied. Some in the big groups resented the small teams for parachuting in at the last moment on their weeks of preparations, while some in the smaller independent teams resented the space the larger expeditions occupied on the mountain and the way they had tried to dominate the slopes.

Some had brought only one ice axe, rather than the usual two, because they knew the fixed ropes would be in place to help them descend. This practice earned the scorn of other climbers, who believed two axes were essential, not least because you might drop one.

Those climbing without the help of supplementary oxygen quietly looked down on those who were relying on it; and the teams that climbed alone without Sherpas or HAPs believed they were purer climbers than those who were paying thousands of dollars for help. The HAPs could have a bad day. The oxygen could run out. A person who relied on aides like that, some thought, should not be tackling K2.

As they continued to wait, most of the climbers on the Traverse realized that the cooperation agreement, which had filled everyone with hope about teamwork and sharing, had in reality reduced them to the lowest common denominator. The ones waiting behind could pass the slower climbers but the ice made it dangerous. If one person stopped for a drink, or to adjust a backpack, they all stopped. Yet despite these misgivings, a kind of groupthink had set in. They continued anyway—because everyone else was still going on. They resented the other teams and at the same time felt protection in numbers. There was a manifest lack of leadership, no one to tell them to go back.

 

Rolf Bae had been more shaken than Cecilie Skog by her collision with Dren Mandic when the Serb fell.

The fair-skinned, red-bearded Bae was a good rock climber and experienced polar explorer. Yet, today on the Traverse, for all of his prowess, he was having a difficult time. Sweat glistened on his red beard and he looked pained.

“Not a good day for me,” he said to the others around him on the line, wincing. “I am having problems.”

Like his wife, he was breathing supplementary oxygen. The thin pipes from a new British-made system—it released oxygen on demand rather than piping it constantly—curled like transparent straws around the side of his face to his nose.

He had spent the early summer rock climbing on Great Trango Tower, a 20,500-foot spire of rock about twenty miles down the Baltoro glacier from K2, and so he had arrived at Base Camp a few weeks after Skog. Maybe Trango had taken it out of him or maybe he hadn't given himself enough time to get used to the height on K2, though Skog knew he was never really comfortable at extreme altitudes.

He and Skog had tried to summit K2 once before, in 2005 on the
Cesen route, but they had turned back, and they were eager this time to reach the top. Still, Bae said he was thinking of turning around, although he would try to go as far as he could with Skog.

The two climbers had been husband and wife for little over a year. They had met in Russia in 2003 after an expedition to Mount Elberus. She had trained as a nurse and guide and Bae was working as a professional guide. He was a well-traveled man. He had lived in the United States; when he was seventeen, he had spent a year in Amherst, Massachusetts, living with a local family and studying. Between 1999 and 2001, he had spent seventeen months in the Antarctic in a naval base on Queen Maud Land.

Skog had soon learned that this was the sort of thing Rolf Bae did. He was also a serious bird-watcher; he knew the Latin names and most springs took the train to northern Norway on special bird-watching trips. When they were on an expedition, he loved to sing Bob Dylan songs as he walked along the trail. In the camp at night, he sat and played his guitar or his harmonica.

A week after they had got to know each other, Skog and Bae flew to the Himalayas and spent three months climbing in Tibet and Nepal. When they returned to Norway, they moved in together and started their own travel company, Fram Expeditions, named after the ship that took Norwegian explorers to the Arctic and Antarctic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They began a life of guiding, writing books, and giving talks about their expeditions in the wilderness. It was a wonderful way of making a living, doing what they loved. They had a little apartment in Stavanger but they were rarely at home. In 2005, they traveled together to the South Pole. In 2006, they reached the North Pole.

Skog, dubbed the Polar Princess in the European media, had become the first woman to stand at both poles and on the tallest peaks of every continent, including Everest. She had wanted the achievement of climbing Everest; Rolf hated the crowds on Everest these
days and had chosen not to go with her. Their fame at home in Norway was just taking off, Cecilie's especially.

 

Ahead of Bae and Skog on the line, the dark-haired Frenchman Hugues d'Aubarède crouched on an ice ledge beside his Pakistani HAP, Karim Meherban. Both men were concerned about d'Aubarède's condition.

D'Aubarède, who was wearing a dark yellow climbing suit, was getting tired. The sixty-one-year-old was a stubborn, proud, noble man, neat and cultured, and he had invested a lot in his expedition to get to K2. He had left behind his partner, two daughters, and a grandchild in France to pursue his dream in the Himalayas. It was his third attempt to reach the summit of K2, and he thought it would probably be his last try. He was not the oldest to climb on K2, but he was close—a sixty-five-year-old Spaniard had summitted in 2004.

It had been a long climb up from Base Camp. When the storm hit around the night of July 29, some of the other expeditions had waited at an intermediate camp, forcing d'Aubarède to wait, too. He had used up valuable energy, food, and also gas for melting snow for water. The wind had whistled up inside his glasses, the slopes too steep even to stop to put on his goggles. He had had to wade through snow that drifted around his knees, by carving a corridor with his hands.