No Way Down_ Life And Death On K2 Part 16

It was not going to be easy for the two exhausted climbers to climb down the Cesen. The rocky slope was steep at any time of day; in the dark, it was deadly.

"We go down," said Pemba.

It took the two men about an hour to hastily grab some food, zip on their suits, and gather Chhiring Dorje's extra oxygen bottle. Then Klinke watched two headlamps set out from the tents up on the Shoulder and begin to move lower.

"Cas and Pemba will descend from C4 toward C3 to try to locate the lone climber," Van Eck reported on the website. "More news to follow as soon as we hear something."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

7 p.m.

When Wilco van Rooijen woke up on the ledge of rock, he was alive but he was trapped at 25,300 feet.

Although it was still light, he realized some hours had pa.s.sed. He felt stiff and cold.

He called his wife again, and the battery worked. He left the phone on so that Maarten van Eck could get through to him. This was the first time that Van Eck had managed to speak directly to his friend. Van Rooijen told Van Eck he was stuck at the top of a large ravine. His eyes were in such a bad state that he could see almost nothing now. He was so thirsty he could hardly speak. All he wanted to do, he said, was fall asleep again.

"You must not sleep," said Van Eck. Van Rooijen heard the words leach into his brain over the satellite phone and he knew his friend was right.

By now, since he had the phone coordinates, Van Eck believed he knew where Van Rooijen was. He told him he had to continue climbing to his left.

"That's the only way back to the Cesen." It was imperative, he said.

Once Van Rooijen had gotten off the phone, he sat for a few minutes. Then, when the clouds thinned, he spotted a narrow snow gully a few hundred yards to his left as he faced out from the mountain. If he could reach that gully, he could drop down six hundred feet.

He stood up and climbed around the ledge. Then he slid lower, letting himself go, taking a chance, and he made it. After that, the going was easier.

Soon, however, he saw that there were huge creva.s.ses that split the snow along the bottom of the gully. They were like toothless mouths, and he was terrified he was going to fall into one.

The only other way down was to turn to the east onto a big ridge of brown rocks. But the rocks were steep and Van Rooijen had no idea where they would lead him.

By now, the sun had set. A bright line cut across the horizon. He was desperate to continue but he discovered that his headlamp had slipped from his pocket. He searched his coat but it was gone, as was his camera.

He raised his eyes to the sky and cursed. He couldn't go on. If he stumbled in the dark, he risked falling forever into one of the creva.s.ses.

There was nothing to do, he soon realized, but to stop and bivouac for a second night.

The prospect appalled him. At least on the first night's bivouac, he had Marco Confortola and Gerard McDonnell for company. And that bivouac had started past midnight and lasted for only a few hours. Now it was 7:30 p.m.; he had hours ahead of him alone in the freezing dark.

The bivouac was a terrible thing, he felt, but necessary. Before he stopped, he climbed a few more feet toward the rocks. There in the twilight he made another grim discovery. A few yards away, a dead climber dressed in a yellow jacket lay on a shallow incline. He was tied by rope to a second dead climber, who was sprawled a little farther up. Van Rooijen didn't know who it was, though he thought it was somebody from this year's groups.

He sat down beside the corpse in the yellow jacket. By now Van Rooijen was desensitized to the terrible things he had seen on the mountain and the corpse didn't register with him. There was also the fact that his mind was no longer functioning properly after the days at high alt.i.tude. He didn't focus on the body. Kneeling down beside the corpse, he reached up with his ice axe and climbed onto a higher part of the slope. He climbed on and found a place to spend the night. Sitting down, he crossed his long legs. He stabbed his ice axe into the steep slope behind him so he could attach a rope.

Wind gusted across the face. Now it was really cold. Van Rooijen tried to keep his back to it and, now and then, he stood up and turned around to stretch his limbs and keep the blood circulating, especially in his feet, which were feeling numb. That was how he was going to survive. The numbness of his feet was a bad sign, but Van Rooijen had no energy to rip off his boots and ma.s.sage his toes.

He closed his eyes, but after a while he opened them again and concentrated on the line of the horizon, the dark shadows of the tops of mountains and the huge blankness of the sky. What with the wind and the cold and the cramps, sleep was impossible. He waited. He took out a tube of energy gel he remembered he had in a pocket and ate it with some snow. That he had only remembered it now was another sign of his deteriorating faculties. He avoided looking at his watch. He didn't want to be disappointed by how slowly the minutes pa.s.sed.

Once during the dark night, Van Rooijen thought he saw a bright light flash less than nine hundred feet away. He followed its progress with his eyes for a while but it abruptly shut off. He remembered his Thuraya and pulled it out. He tried it twice but either the battery was too cold to work or the charge had seeped away. Hoping his body warmth would revive it, he slipped the phone back in his coat, closer to his skin.

He may have slept after all. He wasn't sure. He wasn't certain of anything anymore. Finally, the sky over K2 grew light. It was Sunday morning, August 3, 2008. He was still alive.

At last, he allowed himself to check his watch. Five a.m. More than two days since he had set out from the tents at Camp Four leading the Dutch expedition gloriously toward the Bottleneck. And it was more than thirty-six hours since his lips had touched any water.

I am going down, he told himself.

He decided he could cut a path down the side of the rocks, thus avoiding both the hump of the ridge and the creva.s.ses that frightened him. He stood up from the bivouac and climbed uncertainly downward.

On Sat.u.r.day night, when they received the joyful radio call from Klinke and Van Oss at Base Camp, Cas van de Gevel and Pemba Gyalje had set out as quickly as they could from Camp Four.

The idea was to descend rapidly to Camp Three on the Cesen route. Van Oss and Klinke had given them directions about where they should be able to see the climber in orange. They knew they were risking their own lives and they wanted to get off the Cesen route before dark, although it was already nearly black outside.

The Sherpa climbed ahead down the rocky fissures. Van de Gevel was moving more slowly and he watched his friend gradually moving away from him down the steep route.

Snowflakes blew across the Cesen but from time to time Van de Gevel could see a little distance ahead. He hollered out Van Rooijen's name, but his voice was sucked away by the gray emptiness of the snow and rocks. All he could see in the sweep of his headlamp were dark empty slopes freckled with rocks and silent stone ledges.

"Wilco! Wilco!"

Van de Gevel had only climbed down a few hundred yards when his headlamp lost power and flickered out. The batteries were dead. He was carrying a radio, which also had batteries. Crouching on the slope, he radioed down to Gyalje to say that he was switching his radio batteries to the headlamp and would be off air for a while. He opened the back of the radio, but when he lifted out the batteries they were encased in plastic and he couldn't pull them apart. He picked at them with his axe but fumbled and dropped the batteries. They slid away down the mountain. It was a bad mistake. Alone without communication or light, Van de Gevel realized that he was stuck.

He wasn't going to give in, however. He grabbed one of the ropes that led down the slope, following it for several yards, but it came to a dead end and he stopped himself abruptly. Not that way. Not that way.

The rock and snow beneath him were cold as he slumped down in the snow to wait until dawn. Taking off his gloves, he unfolded a lightweight sleeping bag. He lay back on the snow and spread the sleeping bag over his head like a cover. There was a little warmth at least for his body.

An hour or so later he blinked open his eyes and realized he had fallen asleep without putting his gloves back on. A sharp pain ate into his hands and he realized it was frostbite. Hastily, he grabbed for his gloves, pulling them over his stiff fingers, but it felt like he was too late. It was still dark, and all he could do was sit tight and wait.

He had set out to rescue his friend but he himself was lost in the night. Below him, Pemba had probably made it down to Camp Three by this time. Van de Gevel wondered how many hours were left until the sun came up, what had happened to Wilco van Rooijen, and what now would become of him. He pondered his fate. No one knows where I am. No one knows where I am. It was a terrifying thought. It was a terrifying thought.

When night enveloped the mountain, like a hand closing its grip, the climbers in front of the cl.u.s.ter of tents at Base Camp watched the lone figure in the orange suit being swallowed up by the darkness.

Van de Gevel and Gyalje had not reached him before nightfall.

Then one of the two headlamps s.h.i.+mmering down the Cesen route from the Shoulder suddenly blinked off. The remaining lamp moved lower for an hour or so before it disappeared into a tent at Camp Three. Shortly afterward, Chris Klinke received an alarmed radio call from Pemba Gyalje, who said Cas van de Gevel had not come in.

"I have lost him," Gyalje said, sounding both frightened and exhausted. "Cas is not here!"

Gyalje hadn't been able to see the climber in the orange suit, either, he said, although he had shouted for more than an hour.

The Sherpa said that while he had been outside, he had heard a satellite phone ringing. He thought it had to be Van Rooijen's. But it had stopped. The ringing was coming from an area that was p.r.o.ne to avalanches and Gyalje was wary of searching further, though he offered to go.

"I don't want you to go out," said Klinke, who was getting worried about the latest turn of events. "We don't know where Wilco is. Cas's light has disappeared. This is getting scary!"

He told Gyalje to stay where he was and sleep.

As the night closed in, the failure to locate the climber in orange depressed the spirits of the climbers in Base Camp. Roeland van Oss, who had only had about three hours of sleep during the last two days, ducked into his tent to get some rest. Wilco van Rooijen was spending a third night on K2 above or close to 26,000 feet. Van Rooijen was tough, Van Oss thought, but few people could survive that.

After Van Oss had gone, Chris Klinke stayed outside to keep vigil, sitting on a big rock and gazing up at the darkened south face. The rock was the size of a dinner table and flat on top. The thirty-eight-year-old Klinke had given up his job as a vice president at the financial advisory firm Ameriprise to follow the mountaineering life. Now he had the sheet of paper, the "death list," folded in his pocket. He looked for the distant dots of headlamps but he saw none. He listened for any voices on the radio but there was an eerie silence. He s.h.i.+vered. d.a.m.n d.a.m.n, it was cold. it was cold. He was wearing a down coat, down booties, and insulated pants. But the rock and the stones beneath his feet seemed to rip the warmth out of him. He was wearing a down coat, down booties, and insulated pants. But the rock and the stones beneath his feet seemed to rip the warmth out of him.

Now and then, the American expedition's cook, Deedar Ali, or his a.s.sistant brought him warm tea or biscuits and stopped to watch with him. Just after 9 p.m., Klinke received the news on the radio that the remainder of his own American expedition, including Eric Meyer, Fredrik Strang, and Chhiring Dorje, were descending the last few hundred feet of the Abruzzi and were at Advance Base Camp.

At about 1 a.m., Deedar walked up to them with hot tea and more biscuits. They would be glad to get them. Klinke walked out a few hundred yards from Base Camp to meet them and was relieved when at last he saw headlamps, and Meyer and the team walked wearily across the boulders toward the tents. The descent had been a tough one. Meyer's fall down the 60-degree ice slope had been a reminder of how close anyone was to losing their life on this mountain.

Other members of the team, Paul Walters and Mike Farris, joined them and the whole team went inside the mess tent to sit and decompress. They drank whisky from tin cups. The mood was grim because people were still missing. Klinke told them the news that Van Rooijen was alive. If the Dutchman survived to the morning, he was going to need medical treatment.

Klinke went back out onto the rocks. It was past 2 a.m. Now and then he touched the list of the missing and the dead in his pocket. He had made contact with the Pakistani military to arrange for a plane to fly over K2 to locate any survivors. But the plane that would conduct the "low-and-slow" was being kept on the runway at Skardu by the bad weather. The conditions had to be perfect for a low-and-slow.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

Sunday, August 3, 5 a.m.

As the morning light started to brighten the vast white and gray snows above Chris Klinke, clouds were still gusting across K2's ma.s.sive promontories but most of the mountain was visible. And that is when he saw the orange figure again.

At 5:15 a.m., he woke Roeland van Oss, who was in his warm sleeping bag in his tent.

"Roeland, he is moving!" he shouted urgently. "Wake up! He is moving!"

The climber in orange was now about nine hundred feet to the left of the Cesen route and about three hundred feet above Camp Three, which itself was at about 24,000 feet, and he was traversing to the right.

Several more climbers joined them on the rocks and one of them, an independent Serbian climber, could also see another figure above Camp Three struggling down the fixed lines of the Cesen, and they realized that this had to be Cas van de Gevel. They were relieved he had survived though they didn't know what injuries he had sustained after being outside all night.

They called up on the radio to Pemba Gyalje, who was in one of the tents at Camp Three, but there was no answer. Perhaps he was sleeping or his radio was off. A few minutes later, however, the Sherpa's voice abruptly broke the silence. He sounded fl.u.s.tered.

Here is Pemba, over. over.

A rock had been dislodged from above, probably by Van de Gevel as he descended, and it had smashed into Gyalje's tent, waking him with a fright. But he had stuck his head outside and he could see his Dutch colleague making his way toward him.

"I see Cas!" he told them. "He is twenty to thirty meters above me."

Within a few minutes, Van de Gevel arrived at the tent and both men spoke on the radio again to Base Camp. Klinke and Van Oss suggested that the two men step outside their tent and begin shouting to attract the attention of the climber in orange.

"He must be two hundred and fifty to three hundred feet away from where you are," Van Oss said.

They wouldn't be able to see him yet because of the large ice fins and promontories that crossed the southern face. Van Rooijen was on the western side of one of these. No one looking from Camp Three could spot him yet, and they were invisible to him.

"You will see him soon," said Van Oss. "He has to cross around the ice corner."

Gyalje put on his down suit and boots. He melted water on the burner. Then he and Van de Gevel went out. As soon as they started calling, the climbers at Base Camp, gazing through the Serbs' telescope and the binoculars, saw the orange figure respond. He stood up and began moving faster.

Klinke and Van Oss saw that Van de Gevel and Gyalje were so close to reaching the climber in orange. They prayed that they weren't going to miss this chance to save him.

Cecilie Skog, Lars Nessa, and Oystein Stangeland were met at Advance Base Camp by their cook, who helped them carry their equipment the final three miles back to the tents at Base Camp, where three or four mountaineers from other expeditions greeted them. Just outside the camp one of the other climbers tried to take Skog's backpack but she insisted on holding on to it because it was Bae's.

After wanting to stay up on the mountain, Skog was now intent on leaving K2 as soon as possible. It was a place of so much pain and death.

Then at Base Camp she climbed inside her tent, the tent she had shared with Rolf.

Inside, Skog looked around at their belongings, lay down on her sleeping bag, and felt again suddenly that she couldn't leave him behind. It was too hard to think that he was still up there, his body left alone in the snow.

Over the next few days, she would appear outside the tents on the glacial moraine for a few hours but would become inconsolable. At night, the others in the expedition heard her crying.

Skog felt paralyzed. She couldn't go back to Norway, to the little apartment she and Bae had shared in Stavanger, back to their life, back to their friends and their families, back to Fram Expeditions, back to all the questions-not without Rolf.

She sat alone inside the tent, but soon she realized Bae was in truth no longer on K2. He had gone. She had known it all along. Then she wanted to pack up and leave before the Norwegian media descended on her.

Nessa and Stangeland said they would stay for a few more days to get the team's gear together, call porters, and help with the rescue, but Skog started to prepare to leave quickly.

High on the southern face, Wilco van Rooijen picked his way down the rocks at the bottom of the gully. The world stretched out before him in the morning light-hundreds of miles of beautiful, startling peaks, though he cared nothing for that now, only his survival.

Amazingly, he felt better after his rest and it seemed the energy gel had worked.

He pa.s.sed some of the big creva.s.ses, cutting between them and some of the huge rumps of brown rock that lay farther over to the left.

The sun must have warmed up Van Rooijen's phone in his jacket because it started to ring. He realized he had left it on after trying it during the night. It was Heleen. She had waited for his call but had finally given up waiting and in the darkness in Utrecht at 2:30 a.m. had tried the number. She hadn't expected him to answer.

She screamed, "Wilco!"

He said he was feeling confident. The terrain was easing off. He was nearly down.

"I think I can see Camp One," he said.

"Keep on going!" Heleen was overjoyed by how positive he sounded. "I am here on the couch with Teun," his wife said. "Do it for us," she said, speaking so loudly that she woke her son. "You have to keep on going. Keep on going!"