No Way Down, Life and Death On K2 (2010) (7 page)

But then finally, at Camp Four, after the long ascent up the Cesen, he had climbed onto a flat space on the Shoulder on the afternoon of July 31, pitched his tent, and gazed down on the gallery of peaks around him. Taking out his satellite phone, he had sent a text message to his family in Lyon. He had been keeping a blog of his days on the mountain so that all his friends could follow his progress.

“I wish everyone could contemplate this ocean of mountains and glaciers,” he had written, impressed by the beauty of what lay below him. “I drooled it was so beautiful. The night will be long but beautiful.”

In the twenty-four hours since then, however, things had gone less well. D'Aubarède was feeling the effects of the altitude and heat. He told the climbers who passed him that, like Bae, he was also thinking of going down.

“My oxygen bottle has run out,” he said, shaking his head sadly.

 

Farther along the rope, the Dutch expedition was making better progress. For Wilco van Rooijen, climbing was an obsession. When he first met the woman who would become his wife, Heleen, he told her his ambition was to climb Everest without using supplementary oxygen, a feat he considered one of the most difficult in the sport.

She replied that she would never marry him while he was trying to do it, or have his children.

In 2004, when Van Rooijen finally sat on the summit of Everest, he called Heleen on his satellite phone—“Will you marry me now?”—and they wed the following year. But as soon as their honeymoon was over, he began to dream of the next challenge, which was K2. Just seven months before he left for Pakistan in 2008, his son Teun had been born.

Van Rooijen complained there was never enough money in the Netherlands for mountaineering. Not the sponsorship available for football players or skaters or sailors. But he was sponsored in the Netherlands by Bad Boys, a Dutch clothing line, and for K2 he managed to raise money from Norit. The company manufactured water purification systems, and so the K2 expedition adopted the slogan “In Search of the Source of Clean Drinking Water,” the source in question being the pure water glacier on top of K2. From North Face he got tents and sleeping bags; from Canon the team received high-definition cameras.

Van Rooijen tried to climb K2 in 2006 but had turned back in storms. However, there he had met a an Irishman named Gerard Mc
Donnell, who worked as an engineer in Alaska, and the two men vowed to return with an expedition this year that would be assured of success.

While Van Rooijen had focused on the financing, the thirty-seven-year-old McDonnell had assembled more of the equipment for the mountain from his home in Anchorage. The Irishman hailed from a dairy farm in County Limerick, southwest Ireland, but in 1994 he had won a visa for the United States and moved to Baltimore. After trying to settle for three years, he took a motorcycle trip across the country to Alaska and liked what he saw. He realized he could be near wild places and the mountains. He found a job as an electronic engineer in the Alaskan oil industry on the North Slope. He made a new life, met a girl, Annie, and played the bodhran, the Irish drum, in an Irish band, Last Night's Fun. One day, he said, he would return to Ireland. He dreamed of starting a mussel farm in County Kerry. After the big Himalayan climbs he went back home. His family was waiting for him now, in the green fields beneath the gray skies: Margaret, or Gertie, his mother; his three sisters, Martha, Stephanie, Denise; his brother, J.J.

He had visited Ireland after he conquered Everest. He was treated like a hero and later met the Irish president. When he drove into Kilcornan and stopped near the church, hundreds of well-wishers greeted him. He had walked along the main road, accompanied by the parade and a bagpiper, past the shrine to the Virgin Mary, to the Kilcornan school and community hall where McDonnell gave a speech and everyone tried to understand why their Ger was so intent on leaving them to climb into the clouds. He didn't climb to be famous. He normally preferred not to talk much about what he achieved in the mountains. But later, at a big hurling game in Munster, the announcer declared on the loudspeaker that Ireland's climbing hero was in the stadium and thirty thousand people applauded.

His father, Denis, had died when McDonnell was twenty. McDonnell had told his mother that his father was one of the reasons he
climbed to the top of the world's tallest mountains. On the summit of Everest in 2003, he ran his father's rosary beads through his fingers, and later he said, “I felt close to my dad up there.” At 26,000 feet, below the peak on Everest's South Col, he took out a
sliotar
, or Irish hurling ball, and pucked it from the mountain with a hurley.

On K2, he had taught Van Rooijen and the other climbers in the Dutch team some Irish sayings, such as “Tiocfaidh Ar La,” which was pronounced as “Chukky Are Law,” an old Irish Republican Army phrase meaning “Our day will come.” Climbing the slopes, Cas van de Gevel and Wilco van Rooijen shouted it back at him in fun.

From Alaska, communicating with Van Rooijen by email and Skype, McDonnell had found a special 5mm white, lightweight rope for K2. It was stronger and lighter than the so-called plastic 10mm or 11mm ropes that expeditions usually picked up in Pakistan or Nepal. Its white color meant it reflected sunlight and so was less likely to melt grooves in the ice. He also found himself a strong helmet. In 2006, he had fractured his shull in a serious rockfall on K2, just above Camp One, and after descending was airlifted off the mountain.

As they put together the other members of the team, McDonnell insisted on including Pemba Gyalje, the trusted Sherpa he had climbed with on Everest, an erudite, traveled Nepalese. Van Rooijen advertised in the Dutch climbing press and circulated an email to Dutch Alpine climbers, and recruited two young mountaineers in their twenties: Roeland van Oss and Jelle Staleman, a former Dutch marine. They were the
jonge honde
, or young dogs, of the expedition.

They also included Cas van de Gevel, a tall forty-two-year-old mountaineer from Utrecht. He had made many expeditions with his friend Van Rooijen but he had never climbed above 26,000 feet before.

Years earlier, after university, Van Rooijen and Van de Gevel had started out in business together, mainly fixing up houses. Van de Gevel was a carpenter, Van Rooijen an electrician. They earned enough money to take off regularly together to the Alps in Cas's
Citroën 2CV or Van Rooijen's Volkswagen. One day, Van Rooijen found himself beneath the floorboards and realized he couldn't do that sort of work any longer; he began a career as a professional mountaineer, courting sponsors and the media, showing slides, giving talks to companies about mountaineering as a metaphor for business leadership and teamwork, and eventually writing books. But carpentry was enough for Van de Gevel—it paid for his trips to the mountains and for a monthly visit to his girlfriend in southern Spain.

Van de Gevel, McDonnell, Van Rooijen, and the rest of the Dutch team had enjoyed the weeks in Base Camp in the big strip of tents on the rocks. The cooks ran down to the right over the mangled ice of the glacier to fetch water for the kitchen. The toilet tents dotted the rocks to the left, closer to the mountain. The climbers hung clotheslines between the tents. Their camp was a few yards away from an independent Serb climber who had mounted a goat's head on a pole outside his doorway and a sign that read, “Come Please Slowly Slowly Inside.”

Van de Gevel liked the simplicity of the work, the up and down, the carrying and making camps. Life was straightforward. There were eight climbers in the Dutch expedition, as well as their three Pakistani cooks. They were divided roughly into two teams, alternating the working days so there was always one team on the slopes. Learning how to “sniff” the route: That was how Van de Gevel thought of it. If it was your day on, you woke up early and worked on the mountain. On your rest day, you got up later, drank coffee, had a laugh with Gerard McDonnell, and gazed through your binoculars to see the progress the other men were making.

Such a life gave the Dutchman a lot of satisfaction. Their team worked well, he thought. There was pride in their efficiency, even if sometimes that pride turned into a sense of superiority over the other teams, which they did not always try to conceal. Occasionally, he admitted, there was niggling between the expeditions of the “you-are-
doing-less-than-me” variety, and also within the Dutch team itself. But that was part of mountain life. Van Rooijen expected a lot of his climbers and he made the rules. Van de Gevel was content to leave the organization to his friend. If he, Cas, had been in charge, he knew, things would start to fall apart. He just wanted to climb.

During the bad weather, the Dutch teammates had crammed together in the mess tent to watch DVDs. And they had Isostar protein powder to keep Jelle bulked up; you simply added water for a protein shake. Olives, anchovies, or peanut butter on crackers for Van Rooijen. They taught the cooks how to fry hamburgers, and the cooks also made a tasty pancake mix. They had the dried food you simply stirred with boiling water, such as chili con carne or chocolate mousse. These actually didn't taste too bad. Up in the higher camps, they had soups and sausages.

Then there was the yak, bought for fifty-five thousand rupees in Askole and herded by the Balti porters up the dusty tracks past the great rock at Korophone, past Julah and Paiju and over the blasted glacier below Urdukas. The animal came unwillingly, tugging at its rope. When the expedition tired of dal or chicken and hungered for red meat, the porters bound its legs one day and, as it lay on the ice, they slit its throat.

The blade was blunt, and it took several minutes to hack through the skin. The climbers who had gathered around to watch the ceremony cringed. One of them, Rolf Bae, offered his own knife but the Sherpas warned that no man should give away his knife unless he wants to invite bad luck. Spilling the blood of an animal in such a fashion was disrespectful to the mountain, the Sherpas said; instead they should butcher the yaks and goats at a lower altitude, farther down the glacier, and carry the meat up for the climbers. In the end, the yak bled to death and was skinned and its head was mounted on the rocks outside the cook's tent.

The Dutch expedition was well organized and ambitious and when
one of the
jonge honde
, Roeland van Oss, collapsed from carbon monoxide poisoning while he was using a burner in a tent at Camp Two and had to be helped down, there was no question that they would stay. The weeks of preparation were not all smooth going, however. Van Rooijen was a master organizer but he was not a very beloved leader. He was ambitious, competitive, demanding, and dismissive of others. His abrasiveness and self-focus had seemed to intensify the higher he climbed on the mountain. Some of the other members might be useful to Van Rooijen for ferrying supplies up the routes, but he did not hesitate to rule them out of the final summit group when he thought including them jeopardized his plans. This caused frictions, and even upset his friend McDonnell.

One day in Base Camp, Van Rooijen had clashed with Hugues d'Aubarède, marching into the Frenchman's tent to demand that he lend his two HAPs to the Dutch team to carry and fix ropes all the way to Camp Four. “There is good weather and we are going to go for the summit,” Van Rooijen had said, determinedly.

D'Aubarède had declined, insisting that the porters were not used to the altitude yet and that in any case he needed them for himself. Van Rooijen felt the porters were not doing their share of work but d'Aubarède resented Van Rooijen's presumption that he could just use other people's HAPs. The Dutchman had already charged d'Aubarède and Nick Rice five hundred dollars each for using the ropes the Dutch team had fixed on the route.

“We will carry the ropes up when we are ready,” d'Aubarède said. “We need to conserve their energy for our summit bid.”

Afterward, d'Aubarède felt that Van Rooijen ignored him on purpose sometimes when they passed on the route and he feared he held a grudge.

While Van Rooijen possessed qualities that didn't endear him to everyone, most of his teammates accepted that those were probably what it took to be a great climber. As part of his effort to ensure the
expedition's success, Van Rooijen had hired a support team back in the Netherlands, including a doctor, webmaster, press spokesman, and a high-end weather forecaster. He wanted good forecasting to avoid a scenario such as the notorious series of disasters on K2 in 1986, when thirteen people died from storms and avalanches over the course of the summer, and again in 1995, when another seven climbers were killed on K2 in a single storm.

The webmaster back in Utrecht, Maarten van Eck, had been posting regular updates about the team's progress on the Dutch team's website. The site had become the main source for news about what was happening on K2 this year and was being watched by the families of many of the climbers around the world, especially today, the summit day.

Now, from the Traverse, the Dutch team radioed down to Base Camp, and news of their progress was communicated back to the Netherlands. Within a few minutes, the latest update went live on Van Eck's website.

“Gooooooood Morning Netherlands!” Van Eck wrote. “Wilco, Cas, Gerard and Pemba are way above the Bottleneck and in the Traverse.”

3 p.m.

F
rom where they were standing, the climbers still could not spy the summit. At the end of the Traverse, the great ice face curved up to the right beneath the western edge of the serac, and then the route cut back on itself in a diagonal onto the top of the final summit snowfields.

From this position, they could hear a voice calling out from above around the edge of the glacier, urging them to hurry. They realized it was Alberto Zerain, the lone Basque climber, who had earlier climbed ahead of everyone up the Bottleneck. He had fixed the rope across most of the Traverse but had then gone on. He had rounded the curve after the Traverse and was now waiting out of sight.

“Come on!” he cried. They heard the frustration in his voice. “Come quickly! Watch for those ice screws. No good.”

After a while, Zerain's voice fell quiet. The South Koreans at the front now fixed the remainder of the rope up the ice slope. They took a long time, forcing the climbers behind them to wait again patiently. The route was less steep and covered with deeper snow than farther down the Traverse—and some of the climbers eyed it warily. A massive slab of snow had unloosed from this section of K2 just two years earlier, crushing four Russians.

As they waited, the climbers drank deep drafts of water from bottles they were carrying up. Some had brought flasks of warm tea, which was even better. Keeping their bodies well hydrated was essential in the
mountains—they lost a lot of water through exertion and stress—not least because it helped combat the symptoms of high altitude. The Sherpa in the American team, Chhiring Dorje, shared a sausage—warm from an inside pocket next to his chest—with Pemba Gyalje.

As they waited, a few felt disquiet at the time that was passing but no one was concerned enough to turn around—even though their bodies were deteriorating with each minute from the effects of altitude, dehydration, and exhaustion, the day was moving on, and the oxygen tanks were running low

Gerard McDonnell used the downtime to tell Rolf Bae and a couple of the others about his accident on the mountain in 2006, when the rockfall punched a gash in his skull and he was flown by helicopter to the military hospital in Skardu. He had undergone emergency treatment in a dirty operating room without anesthetic, he said. A cruel hospital official had taunted him, asking, “Where are your friends now?”

McDonnell, Bae, and the others talked about the chances of the good weather holding and whether they still had time to make the summit.

McDonnell spoke of the delight they would feel when they finally climbed up onto the summit snowfields. “Just wait until you're up there and you can see the top,” he said, speaking with some relish. “Then it'll look like it's reachable. No problem.” He added: “You will want to go for it.”

The ropes were gradually fixed and the line of climbers moved higher, but a final vertical ice wall proved too much for some of the Koreans up at the front. Two of the Korean climbers pawed at the ice, thrashing ice flakes into the air, unable to find any purchase with their crampons.

The Koreans' two Sherpas did their best to lift the climbers up, issuing frantic instructions. They were two of the four less experienced Sherpas on the mountain. These four Sherpas were all drawn from the same poor region in northern Nepal. In contrast to Pemba Gyalje and Chhiring Dorje, they had only started out in the guiding business in the last few years and were trying to establish themselves.

One of them, Jumik Bhote, a tall, smooth-faced man, had recently been promoted to the position of lead Sherpa for the South Korean team, a big achievement, though it had put him on a busy schedule. He had climbed with the Flying Jump team on Lhotse, the fourth-highest mountain on earth, that spring, then returned to Kathmandu for only a few days before he had flown back out to K2, leaving his partner at home, even though she was expecting their first baby any day. His younger brother, Chhiring Bhote, was also on the expedition to K2. Chhiring was somewhere down the mountain with his clients in the Flying Jump B team, which was due to set off for the summit from Camp Four later that night.

The climbers behind could have passed but the two Sherpas were working so diligently that they waited politely, and anyway it was easier to wait for the Sherpas to fix the ropes. One of the Koreans was trying to scale the bank with only one ice axe and he kept slipping back, so Wilco van Rooijen loaned him his axe.

Some of the climbers were again raising doubts about continuing. Marco Confortola assured them that if everyone worked together, and shared the task of breaking the trail, they would reach the summit. “Compagnoni and Lacedelli got to the top in 1954 at six p.m.!” he said in his halting English, as he pointed up toward the summit. “And they came down okay. If they could do it then, so can we.”

At last, Bhote hung a rope down from the ice wall, and the two climbers dragged themselves up with a shout. Finally everyone on the line could see a way forward. Forgetting their frustrations, they surged over the top of the serac and into the summit snowfields. From here, for the remaining three or four hours to the top, there was no need for any more fixed lines. They passed the last anchor and unclipped from the rope, feeling free.

For the first time, they could see the final summit ridge, although the actual summit was still not visible. It was what they had waited for and it was a wonderful sight.

Sometimes the jet stream blasted the top of K2, creating a furious white summit plume, but today the top was clear. At the end of the long summit snowfield, it rose up in a hump against the blue sky. The climbers began to move up toward it in a line. Soon the first climbers appeared to those following behind as dots on the plane of white.

Breaths of snow swept across the snowfields, on this, the upper mountain. On this section, the climbing was less steep, the slope about 30 degrees. The snow was deep, however, and some of the climbers were worried about avalanches, or crevasses. They were on top of the hanging glacier and as it inched forward it left yawning gaps behind it. A few of the climbers were carrying ski poles, just like snow sticks, and they reached forward with them and prodded the snow. The area was deadly—a French couple, Liliane and Maurice Barrard, had disappeared somewhere between here and the bottom of the Bottleneck after reaching the summit in 1986.

At this point, they discovered that Alberto Zerain's patience had run out and he had gone on ahead. The sight of the summit, however, gave many of them fresh encouragement. Despite his exhaustion and empty oxygen cylinder, Hugues d'Aubarède decided to continue. He slogged away toward the distant peak beside Karim Meherban.

Wilco van Rooijen climbed onto the snowfield and rested for a while to let his colleagues in the Dutch team catch up. He was tired but he urged them onward.

“Let's go!” he cried. “Let's not hesitate now!”

Rolf Bae, however, had emerged from the Traverse shaking his head. He felt no better.

Whenever he led an expedition, Bae had three iron rules the team had to follow. One: Get home. Two: Stay friends. Three: Reach your goal. In that order. Today, it just wasn't working for him. If he was going to get home, he had to stop there.

“I am not going to the top,” he told Skog reluctantly.

“Are you sure?” Skog was worried about him.

He nodded. Skog saw it was a brave decision. He had come a long way to get this far but he could not go on. Rather than descend immediately, though, he said he would wait for Skog and meet her when she came back down. He wasn't going to leave her. He intended to climb a little higher before stopping.

Having made up his mind, Bae bid farewell to Gerard McDonnell. The two men had become good friends a couple of years earlier on an expedition to South Georgia.

“It's been nice climbing with you today, mate!” Bae called. There was disappointment but also certainty in his voice as he watched the others go on.

Skog was already climbing ahead and he waved to her. His oxygen tank had nearly run out, so Skog dropped hers in the snow by the side of the route for him to collect as he climbed up. She could go on without oxygen. And then she waved to him one last time and was gone. For his part, Bae took a spare headlamp from inside his jacket and asked a Sherpa to give it to Skog at the summit. Just in case she needed it on the way down.

 

Alberto Zerain had pushed on ahead, and now he sat at the summit of K2 staring at his wristwatch. The watch was his father's, a gold-faced Zodiac. He had made perfect time, but the climbers below him were late.

Zerain was forty-six years old but he looked younger. He had short black hair and his suntanned skin showed off his fine cheekbones. He came from Subijano, a land of rocky hills, pine trees, and yellow stone houses on the southern edge of Basque country in northern Spain. He gazed down the length of the snowfields toward the distant lip of the diagonal that led down to the Traverse. Surely, he thought, the others would emerge soon. When they did, what would they see? A man in red crouched on the edge of a snowy ridge, sipping tea.

Back down the mountain, he had waited for two hours at the end
of the Traverse. He had had to wait. When he began to climb across the ice face, he had handed his camera to one of the Sherpas—he wasn't sure of his name—so that the man could take a picture of Zerain opening the trail on the Traverse. He was the first person to cross it this year. But the Sherpa hadn't followed him across straightaway, and so Zerain had to wait. He felt he could not go to the summit without it; these days, sponsors wanted proof you had actually been to the top. He also didn't want to lose the camera. It was an Olympus, and he had bought it in Skardu on the journey in.

Eventually his patience ran out, and he had stood up and gone down a little way to look along the Traverse. The scene shocked him.

Earlier, Zerain had fixed the rope along the Traverse. On the way up, at the top of the Bottleneck, another one of the Sherpas had brought the length of rope to him, and though Zerain had thought it looked old, not fit to tie his shoes with, he had fixed it up along the ice face anyway.

He knew there had been meetings down in Base Camp but he had kept away from them so he knew nothing of what they had decided.

He also had three screws, though for a while he thought he had lost the third screw, and at one point he had had to dangle from his ice axe until he managed to find it in his backpack.

Now five people were bunched together on a single section of that old rope, edging slowly up and across in the bright sunshine, all their weight on the same screws he himself had rammed in. The Sherpa to whom Zerain had given his camera was back down in the line.

Fine
, he thought.
No camera.

By that time, it was 11 a.m., and Zerain had turned and climbed up onto the snowfields. At last he could see how far he had to go to the summit. Reaching it was possible, he told himself, nodding, psyching himself up. He was feeling good but he had to tell himself this. He felt a burning inside, the
gusanillo
, the passion to go on. It looked so close.

He was barrel-chested, with a confident, strutting gait. When he
walked, his arms swung at his sides, and he gave the impression he could walk forever. He ran mountain marathons in the Basque hills. He had climbed in the Alps and in the Andes, where he met his wife, Patricia, a translator. He had been to the Himalayas. He had raised two sons; now that they were both nearly teenagers he could travel the world and climb again. But climbing was only part of his life, and not the most important thing.

He was attracted to K2 because of its shape, a beautiful pyramid. You could fit sixty Matterhorns in it. And he was attracted because of its dangers; only the most extraordinary climbers dared to challenge it.

He had arrived in the Himalayas in June with a team sponsored by, among others, Marqués de Riscal, the Basque wine company. He had intended to climb Broad Peak, a nearby mountain, first but two friends were airlifted out and Zerain also got headaches near the top. He knew when a mountain didn't want him—he had an inner voice that told him when to go up and when to go down—so he decided to switch to K2, an hour's walk along the glacier.

Alone among the other teams, he gravitated to the Pakistani HAPs in the Serbian expedition, who made him welcome. He helped to fix the ropes on the Abruzzi route and in return they let him share their tents.

The porters worked hard, each day shouldering heavy loads of oxygen tanks, ropes, and the Serbs' food up the mountain. They mostly had only wheat and dried apricots to eat so Zerain shared his cheese from his Tupperware container and sometimes made them a treat of strawberry-flavored milkshake. One night, he cooked risottos and pastas—though they gave these away to their Serbian clients.

Now, as Zerain waded through the thick snow on the summit snowfields, he discovered that despite his hope the summit wasn't close and the going was tough, intense, far harder than he had anticipated. His boots packed fresh snow at every step. He went from side to side, looking for ice or harder snow to walk on. His aching legs strained forward only to slip back. Sometimes he found nothing at all
beneath him and was suddenly swallowed to his waist in cold snow. He scrambled quickly to his feet.

Only once had he witnessed death on a mountain. It was 2000, he was making a film for Spanish television, and he was on his way down from the top of Everest when he was told someone had fallen. He could see a body six hundred feet below, and when he rushed down, the climber was lying on the snow, unable to speak, and there was blood everywhere. Zerain did not know who he was. He tried to put some gloves over his hands but they were rigid. Then he tried to take his rucksack off because the straps were suffocating him, but the climber stood up and then fell and began to slide. The backpack came away in Zerain's hands and the climber fell nine hundred feet toward the Rongbuk glacier.