No Way Down_ Life And Death On K2 Part 1

No Way Down.

Life and Death on K2.

by Graham Bowley.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The story of how a multinational group of climbers became trapped by a falling glacier at the top of K2 flashed across my screen at the New York Times New York Times on August 5, 2008. Once it was confirmed that eleven climbers had died indulging a private pa.s.sion for their expensive sport and three had finally come down frostbitten but alive after surviving several nights in the open, my immediate reaction was, Why should we care? on August 5, 2008. Once it was confirmed that eleven climbers had died indulging a private pa.s.sion for their expensive sport and three had finally come down frostbitten but alive after surviving several nights in the open, my immediate reaction was, Why should we care?

When my editor suggested I write about their ordeal for the newspaper, I balked at the idea-mountaineering had never interested me-although the next morning my story appeared on page one of the paper.

It was only after the Times Times's website was deluged with comments from fascinated readers and after I took a trip abroad a week and a half later to the memorial service of one of the climbers that I began to entertain the possibility that there was more to the story. I interviewed some of the still-haggard survivors of the accident, saw their injuries, and, I must admit, was inspired by the charisma of the adventurers who had stepped into a world I could not understand and had faced down death.

I set about interviewing as many climbers as I could from the expeditions, as well as their families, and the mountaineering experts who had spent time on K2. As I talked to the survivors, I found their stories were often disturbing, painful, and occasionally incomprehensible. On the face of it, a thirty-nine-year-old reporter who had never been to the Karakoram range was an unsuitable candidate to comprehend the fascination and dangers of modern mountaineering. However, some of the considerations that might seem to have disqualified me actually played to my advantage. Already, by this point, the accounts were contradicting one another and it was clear that memory had been affected by the pulverizing experience of high alt.i.tude, the violence of the climbers' ordeals and, in a few instances, possibly by self-serving claims of glory, blame, and guilt. I realized one of the advantages I had in making sense of the story was my objectivity and distance from the events. And some of the climbers seemed to agree. In Stavanger, Norway, after I had strolled for three hours around the city with Lars Nessa, a remarkable young Norwegian climber, he turned to me to say, "We think you are the one to tell our story."

Anyway, by then I was hooked. I had stepped with these men and women into a foreign world somewhere above the Baltoro glacier and I could not turn back.

When I began working on this book, I wanted to write a story that read dramatically, like fiction only real. I would bring K2 alive through the eyes of the courageous climbers who were pursuing their dreams on this incomparable peak in the Himalayas. Re-creating the final days of eleven people who would never return from K2 posed some challenges. The book I have written is based on hundreds of interviews with the many dozens of people involved directly or indirectly with the tragedy. If I couldn't determine exactly what happened on the slopes, I interviewed the climbers who had been close at pivotal moments, or experts who had been through similar situations, or families or friends who knew the climbers well. Never did I rely on conjecture; in cases where firsthand accounts were not available, I drew on my knowledge of the characters of the climbers and on as much evidence as I could gather over a year.

As my goal was to write a book re-creating the experiences of the climbers caught up in this tragedy, I needed to report dialogue. With only a few exceptions, the dialogue was quoted to me directly by the speakers involved. In many of the important scenes I checked back to ensure accuracy and this often jogged memories or caused people to rethink. Right from the start I knew it was essential to interview the climbers early on, before memories faded, but in a very few cases, primarily those in which climbers did not survive, I have re-created the dialogue based on my impressions of the people involved as gleaned from my interviews.

I conducted the majority of the interviews in person, with follow-up conversations by telephone or email. Drawing on these resources, I have written as complete an account as possible of a narrative that involves multiple points of view. In the end, though, there are certain questions that I found impossible to resolve. My approach has been to set out as accurately as possible each climber's account, even where the accounts conflict. Some of the most crucial aspects of the tragedy turn on those points of conflict. The full truth of what actually took place in those August snows at 28,000 feet may never be known.

One June day, I followed the trail of the climbers to K2 and stood for a few hours in the cold suns.h.i.+ne on the G.o.dwin-Austen glacier. I stared up more than two miles at the South Face, then climbed two hundred feet to the Gilkey Memorial, K2's monument to the dead. Seeing up close the peak, the Great Serac, and the Bottleneck, contemplating their beauty and their challenge, I could start to understand why this brave group of men and women would risk their lives to climb it.

PROLOGUE.

Friday, August 1, 2008, 2 a.m.

Eric Meyer uncurled his tired body from the Americans' tent into the jolt of the minus-20-degrees morning.

He was decked out in a red down suit and his mouth and nose were covered by his sponsor's cold weather alt.i.tude mask. A few yards in front of him stood the Swede, Fredrik Strang, Meyer's colleague in the American team, his six-foot, two-inch frame bulbous in a purple climbing suit, and his backpack weighed down by his thirteen-pound Sony video camera.

It was pitch black. There was no moon. Meyer put on his crampons and whispered a prayer. Keep me safe. Keep me safe. "Let's do our best," he said out loud to Strang. "Let's do our best," he said out loud to Strang.

The two men nodded to each other, then kicked their boots into the tracks in the firm snow. The tracks led up the mountain, where they could see the headlamps of the twenty-nine climbers from the eight teams, bright spots on the steadily rising Shoulder.

"Don't let your guard down," said Strang. He tossed his ice axe in the air and caught it, just to make sure he was awake.

For nearly two months, they had waited for this moment. Now they were ready.

More than two thousand feet above them, the summit was still hidden in the night, which was probably a good thing. Soon the sun would rise over China. As the two men filed out onto the line above Camp Four, at about 26,000 feet the final camp before the summit, their breath rasping in the low-pressure air, the winds of the past days had vanished, just as their forecasters had promised. It was going to be a perfect morning on K2, and Meyer, a forty-four-year-old anesthesiologist from Steamboat Springs, Colorado, possessed confident hope that his skills in high-alt.i.tude sickness and injury would not be needed.

Meyer's team was one of eight international expeditions that were setting off on the final day of their ascent of K2, at 28,251 feet the second-tallest mountain on earth. K2 was nearly 800 feet shorter than Everest, the world's highest peak, but it was considered much more difficult, and more deadly.

It was steeper, its faces and ridges tumbling precipitously on all sides to glaciers miles below. It was eight degrees lat.i.tude or 552 miles farther north than Everest, its bulk straddling the border between Pakistan to the southwest and China to the northeast, and, far from the ocean's warming air, its weather was colder and notoriously more unpredictable. Over the decades, it had led dozens of mystified climbers astray into creva.s.ses or simply swept them without warning off its flanks during sudden storms.

Yet K2's deadliness was part of the attraction. For a serious climber with ambition, K2 was the ultimate prize. Everest had been overrun by a circus of commercial expeditions, by people who paid to be hoisted up the slopes, but K2 had retained an aura of mystery and danger and remained the mountaineer's mountain. The statistics bore this out. Only 278 people had ever stood on K2's summit, in contrast to the thousands who had made it to the top of Everest. For every ten climbers who made it up, one did not survive the ordeal. In total, K2 had killed at least sixty-six climbers who were trying to scale its flanks, a much higher death rate than for Everest. And of those who had presumed to touch the snows of its summit, only 254 had made it back down with their lives.

Waiting in his tent at Camp Four the previous night, Meyer had experienced a few dark hours of disquiet when the Sherpas cried out that the other teams had forgotten equipment they had promised to bring; he could hear them hunting through backpacks for extra ropes, ice screws, and carabiners. Although ropes had been laid on the mountain from the base to Camp Four, the expeditions still had to fix the lines up through the most important section, a gully of snow, ice, and rock called the Bottleneck. The Sherpas had only just discovered that one of the best Pakistani high-alt.i.tude porters (HAPs), who was to lead the advance rope-fixing team, had coughed up blood at Camp Two and had already gone back down.

Eventually the Sherpas quieted down, and Meyer a.s.sumed they must have found what they needed. By now, everyone was waking up. In the surrounding tents, alarms were beeping, there was the sound of coughing, stretching, zipping of suits, ice screws jingling, headlamps snapping on. The panic was over.

Yet when the advance team eventually left, it seemed to Meyer, listening to the swish of boots over snow outside his tent, that they were already late, and time was the last thing they wanted to waste on the mountain.

It was past 5 a.m. as Meyer and Strang pushed ahead together up the Shoulder, a steadily rising ridge of thick snow about a mile long. They prodded the snow with their ice axes to test the way. The snow, hard-packed, didn't crack. They skirted the creva.s.ses spotlighted in the arcs cast by their headlamps, some of the creva.s.ses a few feet wide. Several yards off in the dark was a row of bamboo wands topped with ribbons of red cloth. The poles had been set out to guide climbers back to Camp Four later that night. But there was only a handful.

The two men didn't say much, but every few minutes Meyer made a point of calling out to Strang, checking for warning signs of high-alt.i.tude effects: a trip, or a mumbled answer.

"How you doing?"

"I'm fine!" said Strang loudly.

After half an hour, they came to the start of the ropes laid by the advance team. The two men were surprised to find them placed so low in the route. Weird Weird. The Bottleneck was still a long way off and these slopes were not dangerous for an experienced climber. The ropes had obviously been put there to guide the climbers on the way back down. The lead group must have calculated they would still have enough rope to reach where it was truly needed.

Meyer was carrying his own quiver of bamboo wands, which he had intended to plant at intervals for the return journey. Strang had brought three thousand feet of fluorescent Spectra fish line to attach between the poles. But now they left the equipment in their backpacks. Not required. Not required.

Exchanging shrugs, Meyer and Strang walked on. At 6:30 a.m., the sun rose, revealing the Bottleneck. It was the first time either of them had seen the gully up close. It was awesome, more frightening than they could have antic.i.p.ated. About nine hundred feet ahead of them, its base reared up from the Shoulder, rising another few hundred feet later to an angle of 40 or 50 degrees and narrowing between stairs of dirty, broken brown rocks on both the right and left sides.

It was, Meyer could see, an unreliable mix of rock, ice, and snow. Another five hundred feet on, it turned up to the left toward a horizontal section called the Traverse, a steep ice face stretching a couple of hundred feet around the mountain, and exposed to a drop of thousands of feet below.

Directly above the Bottleneck was the serac-the blunt overhanging end of a hanging glacier-a s.h.i.+mmering, tottering wave frozen as it crashed over the mountainside, a suspended ice mountain six hundred feet tall, as high as a Manhattan apartment building and about half a mile long. It was smooth in places but large parts of it were pitted with cracks and creva.s.ses.

This was the way to the summit, and for the whole of the Bottleneck and most of the Traverse, the mountaineers had to climb beneath the serac. There were other ways to the summit of K2-via the north side from China, for example, or on a legendary, nearly impossible route on the south face called the Magic Line-but the path up the Bottleneck and beneath the serac was the most established route, the easiest, and possibly the safest, as long as the serac remained stable.

The glacier moved forward slowly year by year. When it reached a critical point, parts of the ice face collapsed, hurling chunks down the Bottleneck. No climber liked to imagine what would happen if they got in the way. In past decades, there had been many reports of icefalls from the glacier, but in recent years the Great Serac on K2 had been quiet.

The strengthening daylight revealed the changing shapes and textures of the glacier, transforming its colors from gray to blue to white as the cold shadows receded. It revealed to Meyer and Strang the serac's true nature, something the earlier climbers would have missed because they had entered the Bottleneck in darkness. It looked to Meyer like giant ice cubes stacked on top of each other, and the ice had p.r.o.nounced fissures running down it.

"Man, that's broken up!" Meyer said in awe.

They had studied photographs in Base Camp taken a month earlier, which had shown cracking, but this was far worse.

As the outline of the mountain emerged from the dawn, Meyer could also make out clearly for the first time the snaking line of climbers up ahead. He had expected to find an orderly procession of bodies moving up the gully and already crossing the Traverse. Instead he was met with a sight that stopped him short: an ugly traffic jam of people still in the lower sections of the Bottleneck.

Only one climber seemed to have made good progress. He was sitting near the top of the Bottleneck in a red jacket, waiting for the muddle to resolve itself below.

What had caused the delay? As Meyer and Strang approached, there were distant calls from above for more rope.

"The rope is finished!"

Eventually it became clear: The advanced group had not yet managed to fix rope to the top of the gully, and the climbers following behind had already caught up to them.

During the previous two weeks, the expeditions had convened cooperation meetings down in the tents at Base Camp. They had made an agreement detailing the sequence of who would climb when. The crack lead group of about half a dozen of the best Sherpas, HAPs, and climbers from each team would fix ropes up through the Bottleneck and the rest of the expeditions would follow rapidly through the gully without delay. The arrangement was meant to avoid overcrowding in the Bottleneck. They knew it was critical to get out from under the serac as fast as possible.

Well, thought Meyer, so much for that. so much for that.

Everyone seemed to be staring at one another and wondering what to do next. After a few minutes some of the climbers at the bottom began bending to cut the ropes and pa.s.s them higher. Soon the wait was over and the line was edging on up again, though still slowly.

Until that moment, Meyer had not appreciated the sheer number of people trying to climb the mountain: one of the highest concentrations of climbers to attempt a summit of K2 together on a single day. A few were already turning back, because they were feeling cold or sick or today was not to be their lucky day. Probably about twenty-seven or so were still heading for the summit. It looked like being another busy day, like the ones in the 2004 or 2007 seasons when dozens reached the top. Meyer imagined the conditions up there. Everyone getting in the way. Koreans, Dutch, French, Serbs, and a string of other nationalities. Few speaking the same language. And they were probably so intent on avoiding one another that they were not focusing on how late it was nor were they looking up at the glacier to study it properly. d.a.m.n. d.a.m.n. They were not seeing how dangerous it looked. They were not seeing how dangerous it looked.

Meyer watched the line of climbers struggling higher and had an uneasy feeling in his stomach. Beside him Strang said it out loud.

"s.h.i.+t, it's late."

They took off their backpacks and sat in the snow, staring up at the serac and, below it, the Bottleneck.

"There's no way around that crowd," said Meyer. "We're going to get stuck behind them."

They made a calculation. At the expeditions' current speeds, they would reach the summit in the afternoon, perhaps early evening. Sunset. The climbers would be coming back down through the Bottleneck in the dark.

As far as Meyer was concerned, that multiplied the risk a thousand-fold. It was already the most dangerous climb in the world. Descending in darkness through the Bottleneck was a no-no. He knew that everyone up there had a deadline for reaching the summit no later than three or four o'clock in the afternoon. What were they thinking?

He felt his courage drain away.

Yet turning back was hard, so bitter after the weeks of toil on the mountain. Like everyone else, he had invested thousands of dollars and nearly a year of his life preparing to come to Pakistan.

He might be able to return to Camp Four and try again the following day. But in reality, climbing up to these alt.i.tudes sucked so much out of a person, exposed a body to such pain, that they would have to descend to lower camps to recover before trying again. But the climbing season was ending. They had already pushed back this summit attempt because of bad weather. There was no time left. It was probably going to be the only shot Meyer had. If they failed today, they would have to wait another year. And who knew if he could ever return?

Together, he and Strang went through all the scenarios. They had made it to the Shoulder of K2. Were they throwing away a lifetime's chance to climb the mountain of their dreams?

Strang unpacked his camera and started to film the serac and the climbers beneath it. Meyer took some snapshots. The climbers in the Bottleneck were still barely moving.

They remembered the rain that had fallen in their first week in Base Camp, an odd event for K2 in June. Then there had been the weeks of winds and the overcast sky and snow piling up. And today the sun had risen into a clear blue heaven. It would be baking hot up there soon. If the serac was going to crack, it was because gravity was pulling it lower. The ice was also susceptible to the differences between the heat of day and the cold of night, which could cause the ice to expand and then contract, making an avalanche more likely. They didn't trust the serac.

They packed up and slogged one and a half hours back down through the snows of the Shoulder to their tent at Camp Four. It was around 10 a.m. The day was perfect. Around them, hundreds of mountains stretched away in all directions, white and s.h.i.+ning in the sun.

The camp was still and quiet. It perched on a flat part of the Shoulder and, relatively speaking, there was enough room for all the tents here, more than in some of the lower camps, where s.p.a.ce was rationed and tents hung on ledges or were reinforced against the winds by ropes and poles.

They had expected to find a dozen or so climbers milling around the colored domes of nylon tents, taking in the rays, sharpening crampons, waiting around. Down at Base Camp, some mountaineers had said they thought the good weather was going to hold and so they had planned to climb up to Camp Four a day later than everyone else to avoid the main crowd and try for the summit on August 2. The second Korean team would be coming up soon, along with two Australians: one of Meyer's colleagues, and another from the Dutch expedition who had been left out of the first summit ascent by his expedition's leader.

But the other climbers were either inside their tents or still grappling with the slopes up from Camp Three. Meyer and Strang saw only one other person, an Italian. He had turned back earlier because of alt.i.tude sickness. Now he stuck his head out of his tent, next to theirs. His climbing jacket was plastered with "Fila" and other sponsors' logos. He waved and then closed his tent.

Meyer could not help but peer back at the Bottleneck over his shoulder. Nearly a mile away, the climbers were distant dots, filing upward. They were higher on the gully now, about two-thirds of the way up. They were still crowded together dangerously. From this distance, they seemed to be not moving at all. Surely they would turn around soon. Did they have a death wish?

The two men ducked inside their tent. It was only four feet high, with no room to stand. They peeled off their down suits, the linings damp from sweat. They took out the radio, as big as a large cup of coffee, and crashed on top of the two sleeping bags that were spread parallel on the floor. They gulped at a bottle of melted water. It was hot in the tent. They didn't feel like talking much. Soon they would have to start thinking about descending. It would take them a full day to get down.

About twenty minutes later, they were resting when they heard a faint cry outside. It came from far away. Strang thought he heard it again.

They went out of the tent to check the mountain but nothing had changed from when they had last looked. The line of climbers was still stuck in the Bottleneck. The radio was quiet.

Then the Italian stumbled over. His name was Roberto Manni.

"I see!" he said, pointing at the mountain, his face red. "I see!"

Half a mile away, at the base of the Bottleneck, about six hundred feet below the main chain of climbers, a body was tumbling down the ice. A climber had fallen.

The small black figure slowed down and came to a stop just beneath some rocks.

Meyer and Strang ran a few yards and stared up intently at the Bottleneck.

The figure lay with its head pointing down the slope.

Immediately, excited chatter started up on the radio.

"Very bad fall!" Meyer heard someone say. "He is alive. He is still moving. It is one of the Serbs."

Part I

SUMMIT.

Friday, August 1.

"I wish everyone could contemplate this ocean of mountains and glaciers. The night will be long but beautiful."

-Hugues d'Aubarede, K2, July 31, 2008.

"K2 is not to be climbed."

-Filippo de Filippi, from the authorized account of the Italian 1909 expedition

CHAPTER ONE.

Walk east along dusty tracks from the village of Askole and within three days you will glimpse in the distance a wonder of the world, the rock-strewn Baltoro glacier and a giant's parade of ocher and black granite mountains, topped with snow and wreathed in clouds.