No Way Down, Life and Death On K2 (2010) (9 page)

The sight made them suddenly realize the size of the mountain.
The second-tallest mountain on earth.
And they were at its very pinnacle. They waited for a moment and Nessa took a picture.

 

At nearly 8 p.m., the Dutch team quit the summit. Everyone else had already left and it was empty.

They began what everyone knew would be one of the most dangerous parts of the climb—the descent. This was true on any mountain—the climbers were exhausted and the light was failing. On K2, this fact was illustrated by a telling statistic: of the sixty-six people killed on K2 in the past seven decades, twenty-four died on the way down after having successfully reached the summit.

Now, it was late and the sun was already sinking fast below the horizon. Just as the Dutch team was leaving, however, they met Marco Confortola, the Italian, who was still on his way up. Confortola said he needed someone to take a few photographs of him on the top and he asked Cas van de Gevel to wait.

“You take my camera?” he said.

Urging Confortola to be quick, the Dutchman agreed to stay behind. Confortola removed his hat and goggles and knelt in the twilight in his black and green suit. He held his ski pole aloft above his head with two flags tied to it, the Italian and Pakistani. The evening was so dark that Van de Gevel had to use a flash to take the picture.

They took five photographs, and then Confortola switched on his satellite phone to call his main sponsor, Miro Fiordi, the president of Credito Valtellinese, a local Italian bank.

“I am at the top,” he said. He couldn't say much more. “I have to go,” he said. “It's late.”

Putting the phone away inside his jacket, he followed Van de Gevel down onto the dark summit snowfield.

Friday, August 1–Saturday, August 2

8 p.m.

T
here are several types of major snow avalanches but two are probably the most common—the loose snow avalanche and the slab avalanche.

Both are caused by weaknesses in the layers of snow in the snowpack. Both are triggered by an energy disturbance such as heat, or movement.

In the loose snow avalanche, the fault point lies close below or at the surface. Loose, powdery snow sloughs away in an inverted V shape down the slope, like grains of salt cascading down a huge salt mound.

The slab avalanche is more dangerous for mountaineers. The weakness is deeper in the snowpack; a large, cohesive snow plate sometimes hundreds of yards wide and several yards deep fractures with a distinctive whumph and shears away.

If an avalanche accelerates over an abrupt change in slope, it becomes a powder snow avalanche. This type of avalanche has a small mass but can travel at 150 miles per hour, moving far along a valley bottom and even up the base of an opposite mountainside. Some of these avalanches are followed by an air blast that sucks up snow and has been known to blow people to their deaths.

Then there is another type of avalanche altogether, which can be more lethal still. Involving not snow but glacial ice, it can be caused when the leading edge of a glacier breaks off, and blocks shear away
like children's bricks toppling from a tower. The technical term is “calving,” a term that does not do justice to the violence of the event.

Some of the blocks can be as big as footballs, some as big as refrigerators or cars or houses. The blocks drop fast, bouncing, grinding, colliding down the cliff or slope like rocks in a rockfall. (Glacial ice is a type of metamorphic rock.)

The icefall is pursued by a turbulent dust cloud hundreds of feet high. The cloud can have a runout miles past where the icefall stops.

The most prominent hanging glacier on K2 is the one that sits brooding over the Bottleneck. It is a serac—defined, in the dictionary, as an irregular-shaped pinnacle of ice on a glacier, formed by the intersection of crevasses, or deep-running fissures. The name derives from the nineteenth-century French word for a compact, crumbly white cheese.

Through the years the serac above the Bottleneck had come to be called the Balcony Glacier or Balcony Serac. It was always an ominous sight. In 1993 a Canadian disappeared below the Bottleneck; his fellow climbers turned around and he was gone, and they believed he could have been hit by falling ice.

No one knows when a serac will collapse. It could depend on the heat, snowfall, or earthquakes but mostly on the speed of movement of the glacier, which can vary between many inches each year to yards.

In recent years, the Balcony Serac on K2 had been stable.

 

“Rolf! Rolf!”

As she had climbed down from the summit behind Lars Flato Nessa, Cecilie Skog had called out for her husband.
Where was he?
The snowfields were quiet and still. Her voice carried a long way over the waves of crusted snow.

After less than an hour, Skog saw him at last. He was sitting on
one of the small hills of snow, and she sped up to reach him. They hugged and then she gazed into his face, feeling proud. His decision to stop after the Traverse proved he was more interested in the climbing, the teamwork, the
just being there
in this wilderness, than in reaching the summit. Not many mountaineers would have turned back after getting so close.

Some of the other climbers in Base Camp had felt slightly in awe of Bae before he had arrived on the mountain. He had an impressive track record. They knew about his reputation as a proficient rock climber, and they feared he would be aloof. But he had joined in and encouraged the others, which climbers like the Americans appreciated. He told them they just had to try their best. Be safe, but enjoy yourself.

Now, Bae congratulated his wife warmly. “Nice that it was a success,” he said. His voice became more serious. “But now we have to get down safely.”

Bae said he felt better than he had a couple of hours earlier. But his oxygen cylinder was nearly empty again. Skog had been breathing Lars Nessa's supply of oxygen since the summit, and she passed the tank to Bae. He was a cautious expedition leader; he did everything he could to reduce the risks his team faced, insisting they use oxygen even when the other teams criticized it as cheating.

Now, as always, the Norwegians marched in single file, watching for crevasses and drifts of snow.

Skog knew she was lucky in having the life she had always yearned for. On an expedition with Bae, she could be outside under the open sky with the simple goal of reaching camp and getting warm, and when she was warm, she was happy. That was all she wanted. All she needed. She and Bae had none of the tensions other climbers experienced with spouses who resented the months apart and the risks they took with their lives. When they were in the mountains or other wild places, they were home.

During the weeks on K2, when Bae had been away climbing Great
Trango Tower, Skog had missed her husband. She had worked the slopes beside the other teams, but despite the crowds the mountain still felt empty. After Trango, Bae had first returned to Norway for a guiding course in the north of the country, which meant they were apart for even longer.

Occasionally, around Base Camp, Marco Confortola blew her a kiss and greeted her across the rock fields. “Cecilie! The most beautiful woman in Base Camp!” Other times, the three Serbs called to her, though she didn't care to remember what they said to her.

She was lonely.

Then one evening in July, she had come down from one of the higher camps, sweaty and tired, and someone across Base Camp had called out, “Cecilie, there is someone here for you!” It was Rolf, and she had run to him.

They had gone into their big Bergen tent, amid the bags and mats on the floor, and he had told her about Trango. He and his friends had climbed a route called the Norwegian Pillar to the top, and had become the first people to return alive. It was an infamous route in Norway; two Norwegians died on it in 1984.

When they had spoken on the phone while he was in Norway, Skog had joked that he might want to bring some furniture from Stavanger to brighten the tent at Base Camp. Now, she saw, he had kept his promise. He had brought a plastic inflatable Ikea couch, sky blue with pink spots. She hugged him. It was a lovely gesture and so typical of Bae.

In the warmth from a fifteen-pound gas heater, they had sat on the couch and over the next weeks, when the rest of Base Camp turned in after nightfall they entertained friends from other expeditions. McDonnell came over. Eric Meyer, too. They sat watching cheap DVDs on Bae's Mac, movies like
Basic Instinct
and
Legally Blonde,
which Skog had bought in Kathmandu. The whole team was happier once Bae had arrived.

 

After walking for another hour down the summit snowfields, the three Norwegian climbers approached a stump of ice where on the way up Skog and Nessa had stashed a spare 120-foot coil of rope. Nessa had been given it by one of the Sherpas when they were cutting the lines at the base of the Bottleneck in the morning. After the Traverse, they had calculated they wouldn't need it on the summit snowfields.

Skog had to remind Nessa that it was behind the stump of ice. “Sure we'll need it?” he said, skeptically.

“Who knows if an ice screw will fail or something,” Skog said, and they walked over to retrieve it.

Then they went on quickly, aware that Bae's oxygen was gradually running out and that the air around them was getting darker.

At 8 p.m., they came to the start of the fixed ropes that led down into the Traverse. They had made Bae's deadline of arriving at the ropes before dark, but only by a few minutes. The western sky over the Karakorum was blooming pink.

The three climbers had to clip on and rappel diagonally down about one 120-foot rope length to the first belay stance before they could duck along the Traverse under the serac. Soon, they thought, they would be back in Base Camp.

Nessa dropped down the rope first, followed by Skog and then Bae. Skog couldn't help thinking how well they were working together as a team.

They paused for a moment on a ledge where they could stand quite comfortably. The air around them was growing dark and shadowy. The two men switched on their lamps, which were secured around their helmets with elastic headbands and clips. Skog and Nessa waited for Bae to tell them what to do next.

Skog wanted to make sure her headlamp was functioning at full strength, so she unscrewed the back of the lamp to change its batteries.

Nessa asked Bae whether he wanted him to go first.

Bae's reply came from the dark. “No, I'll lead, and I want Cecilie to be between us,” he said.

Skog watched her husband shift his clip across the rope and he shuffled quickly down into the darkening well of the Traverse, disappearing from sight.

Soon Skog had finished screwing on the back of her headlamp. She rappelled down another rope length but had to stop again when the rope became badly twisted by the force of her descent just before the next ice screw and she spent a minute getting past it. Then she continued her climb down, staring forward into the darkness with the cone of her lamp. It was another ten or fifteen minutes before she saw Bae's light. He was probably about eighty feet ahead of her.

They kept that distance between them for close to an hour. Lars Nessa followed somewhere behind Skog. Then Bae reached a spot, Skog calculated, that was somewhere in the middle of the Traverse.

Until that moment, there had been no movement or sound above them. But at that point, the mountain began to shake. There was a precise crack and roar. Cecilie lurched off balance against the ice wall. She felt the rope pull taut, then it snapped back again. In the convulsion, her headlamp went out and she blindly gripped the ice in terror until the shaking stopped.

She stared ahead of her along the Traverse but Bae's light had disappeared, too.

“Rolf?”

She called out, tentatively at first but more loudly as her alarm grew.

 

Lars Flato Nessa was climbing carefully down the Traverse, checking the rope as he pulled himself along, when he heard the rushing sound of ice falling.

He stopped, wondering what it could be. He had no sense for how
far away the sound was. It could have been miles below him, lower down the mountain, or just a few feet away.

An instant later he heard Cecilie yelling for Rolf. Then he knew that whatever had happened was close by. From the sound in her voice it was serious.

He rappelled down and found Skog leaning in the darkness against the ice wall.

“Cecilie, are you all right?”

“Where is he?” Skog said. “Where is he, Lars? Where did he go? What just happened? I want to see him. Where is he?”

“Wait here,” he said.

Nessa had no idea what he would find as he climbed out fearfully into the darkness. He followed the rope for ninety feet until he reached the ice screw where the South Koreans had abandoned their cluster of empty oxygen bottles on the way up. But there the rope ended abruptly, as if cut off by a knife.

“You there, Rolf?” he said, peering forward with his lamp.

He could see clearly that there had been a big ice fall on this part of the Traverse. The violence of it was obvious, as if there had been a battle. The snow had been packed down afresh; ice had battered down from above, obliterating any trace of bootprints from earlier in the day.

Nessa knew that his friend Bae was dead. He looked over the precipice and knew that his body was down there somewhere. They could try to find him but they would probably die trying.

When he got back to Skog, she looked at him imploringly.

“Tror du det er haap?” she said.
Do you think there's hope?

No, Cecile, no hope
, he thought. They were on the side of a mountain at more than 26,000 feet, surrounded by a cone of unforgiving darkness. Bae had been their leader, but he wasn't there for them now. Nessa wanted to make sure Skog realized there was no chance they would get her husband back.

“Nei,” he said.
No hope.

“We have to find him, Lars.”

Nessa was not a full-time climber like Skog and Bae. The twenty-eight-year-old nurse was the junior member of the expedition. The two stars, Skog and Bae, had offered him a place on the team at the last minute. He had agreed to come to Pakistan almost on a whim to see how high he could climb, to see what this great marvel, K2, was like. He had never thought he would get so far. But he had done better than he had anticipated and now he surprised himself again. He expected to feel overwhelmed and instead he felt calm and rational. He looked at Skog, who was still clinging to the side of ice, and knew she needed his help if she was going to get down alive.

He told her they couldn't afford to mourn for Bae. “Something terrible has happened,” he said. “We have to stay focused. There's no time for mourning.”

But what were they going to do? They could wait for daylight. But in the Death Zone? On the other hand, they had no rope. Any fumble or misstep meant death.

Nessa reminded himself that it was not unusual to be on an expedition in Norway and discover they had forgotten some of the ropes or belays or screws. They just had to be creative and find some other way out of this problem. And then he remembered the coil of rope that they had stashed and collected again on the summit snowfield and which was in his backpack.

He brought it out and ran it through his hands. In fact, it was two lengths knotted together, one white length and one colored. He also realized he had a reliable ice screw to attach it to—the one that was still screwed into the ice of the Traverse. It had been tested by an avalanche and had held.

He climbed down again and tied the rope and when he came back he told Skog he was going to rappel down to look for a way out. She was in shock, but she nodded and seemed to understand what he told her.