K2 (5 page)

It was as if mountaineering itself were considered by the public—or at least by a significant sector of the public—to be nothing more than a selfish, idiotic form of Russian roulette. It was also assumed that the climbers on K2 were fat-cat millionaires. Wrote another
Times
respondent, “Because someone is rich enough to travel to the end of the Earth to play chicken with suicide does not make him a hero.”

Call this the Krakauer effect, though you can’t blame it on Jon Krakauer. Since I was involved in the ‘96 Everest catastrophe, when our IMAX team temporarily gave up our own summit plans to try to rescue climbers in trouble, I had a front-row seat as the tragedy unfolded. At the time, I was critical of some of the decisions made by both clients and guides that May, and I still feel they made fatal mistakes. But I can’t imagine sitting in some armchair back home and rejoicing that these “clueless dilettantes” got what they were asking for. Sadly, a major vein in the public response to
Into Thin Air
ran along just those lines.

But there’s no viable analogy between Everest in 1996 and K2 in 2008. Not a single one of the eleven climbers who died that August on the world’s second-highest mountain was a true client in the sense that Scott Fischer’s Mountain Madness or Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants customers were. None of them were paying big bucks to have a commercial guiding company get them up the mountain. They were almost uniformly experienced climbers in their own right. The Pakistani porters may have helped the Europeans carry loads and establish camps, but they were not acting as true guides. And the Sherpa on K2 were not hired hands but climbers going for the top themselves, on an equal footing with their Western counterparts.

Yet in one respect, 2008’s mountaineers allowed themselves to slip closer to the status of clients than nearly anyone had on previous K2
campaigns. This had to do with their dependence on fixed ropes. In the aftermath of the tragedy, too much focus has been put on the collapse of the serac, too little on the whole business of the fixed ropes.

In general in the mountains, it’s harder to climb down a pitch than to climb up it. And if you’ve relied on fixed ropes to get yourself up the Bottleneck and across the traverse—just “jugging” along, with your ascender clipped to the line—it can be terrifying to face having to descend those same passages without fixed ropes. Especially in the dark, after you’re really strung out from taking so long to get to the summit.

In 1992, Scott, Charley, and I had no fixed ropes to help us get up and down the Bottleneck. We climbed the couloir; then, on the descent, despite the dangerous accumulation of new snow, we simply faced in, kicked in our crampons, planted our ice tools, and climbed down that steep, 600-foot slope. Even Jim Wickwire in 1978, though near death after his bivouac, summoned the nerve and the technique to climb down the traverse and the Bottleneck unaided by fixed ropes or partners.

No one even thought of fixing ropes all the way through the Bottleneck until about two years ago. How quickly, though, the comfort of fixed ropes gets taken for granted. It even starts to seem to some climbers like a privilege that ought to come with the K2 package, as reflected in Wilco van Rooijen’s petulant complaint that some of the designated fixers didn’t “show up” and that other climbers placed the ropes in “the wrong places.”

If you’re counting on fixed ropes to get you over all the hard places, you’re much less likely to carry your own rope, much less any pitons or ice screws. Cecilie Skog and Lars Nessa may have survived because Skog carried her own thin rope, with which the two of them improvised a rappel over the most difficult passage. It doesn’t seem as though any of the other “stranded” climbers even thought about rappelling—probably because they didn’t carry their own ropes and hardware. It’s easy to imagine this scenario, since carrying extra gear for those “just in case” situations is not a priority anymore, while trimming weight and traveling light is. The three Koreans were found tangled up in their climbing rope. Why didn’t they untie and try to rappel with it? Perhaps they were simply too
exhausted, too befuddled by hypoxia, their fingers too stiff with cold to manage the operation. We’ll never know.

After the tragedy, a member of the Dutch Norit team, Cas van de Gevel, who reached the summit and downclimbed successfully, was quoted in
Outside
magazine as saying, “On the mountain there were no heroes.”

Instead, there was full-blown chaos, the every-man-for-himself panic that van Rooijen later so vividly described. The chief reason for that, I believe, is that there was nothing like a unified band of mountaineers on K2. Instead, there were ten different teams with climbers from fifteen different countries. Most of them didn’t know each other beforehand, and at base camp they didn’t form lasting friendships beyond the boundaries of their own teams.

But there was also something relatively new going on that summer, something that has already played itself out with a vengeance on Everest in recent years. It’s a kind of dehumanization, and if it’s inevitably the wave of the future, as I think it may be, well, that says something sad about mountaineering. It involves a scenario in which one climber comes across another climber who’s in a truly desperate situation. And it’s as if the climber who’s not in trouble says to himself,
I don’t know you. You’re not my problem
. And so he leaves the victim to die—or at least to get himself out of his own predicament.

I just don’t understand that way of thinking. Six times on 8,000ers, I’ve given up my own plans to try to help save the lives of others. Sometimes they were partners and good friends, such as Dave Carter on Everest, J.-C. Lafaille on Broad Peak, and Jimmy Chin on Cho Oyu. But others—like Beck Weathers on Everest and Gary Ball and Chantal Mauduit on K2—were strangers to me before we met at base camp. I can’t really say what other people should have done in comparable predicaments; I just know what seemed instinctively to me to be the right thing to do. I couldn’t live with myself if I’d just walked past someone in bad trouble and left him to save himself.

Van de Gevel was wrong, however. Last summer, there
were
heroes on K2. As seems increasingly to be the case on the world’s tallest mountains, they happened to be Sherpa.

From Camp IV, on the afternoon of August 2, several climbers could see the three Koreans at about 27,000 feet, above the traverse and the Bottleneck. They were still moving feebly, though making no downward progress. With them was a Sherpa, Jumic Bhote, who had also summited, and who may have been effectively guiding the Koreans. In Camp IV were Tsering Bhote and Pasang Bhote, Jumic’s brother and cousin, respectively.

These two Sherpa performed an incredible feat. They climbed the Bottleneck and the traverse—without fixed ropes, of course. In the lead, Pasang reached the three Koreans, who were almost unconscious, and Jumic. Pasang managed to revive two of the Koreans and his cousin and get them started down the mountain again.

Just as the four climbers reached the top of the Bottleneck, according to Freddie Wilkinson, who reconstructed what happened for
Rock and Ice
, another huge chunk of the Motivator cut loose. It scoured the Bottleneck, sweeping the two Koreans and the two Sherpa with it. As Tsering Bhote watched in horror, all four men plunged to their deaths. Deeply shaken, Tsering managed to descend safely to Camp IV.

Meanwhile, the media were focused on the survival stories of Marco Confortola and Wilco van Rooijen, reporters hanging on every word the Italian and the Dutchman uttered from their hospital beds in Islamabad. Thus this last and most deadly episode of the tragedy, which concealed the genuine heroism of Pasang Bhote and Tsering Bhote, nearly passed beneath the radar.

Sherpa heroism did not end there. Along with Alberto Zerain, the two most competent and experienced climbers on K2 that summer were thirty-four-year-old Chhiring Dorje and thirty-four-year-old Pemba Gyalje. Chhiring had climbed Everest ten times, Pemba six. In the early morning hours of August 1, Pemba had been one of the lead climbers fixing rope up the Bottleneck. Far stronger than the Europeans, he could have left them behind and gone for the top on his own. But on the summit,
he waited until the last European topped out, just to make sure everyone was all right, and only then descended with the stragglers.

Pemba did this not because he was a “hired gun,” which he was not, but just, I suspect, because he was a Sherpa. The best Sherpa have far more endurance at the end of a long summit day. Westerners tend to think,
Boy, that was hard. I’m exhausted
. Sherpa think,
Well, yes, it’s hard, but that’s what it is
.

They’ve worked hard every day since they were kids. They’re used to carrying heavy loads from village to village. Their whole lives are about hardship and struggle.

When climbers such as McDonnell, van Rooijen, and Confortola chose to bivouac, both Chhiring and Pemba decided to climb down toward Camp IV in the dark. Near the top of the Bottleneck, Chhiring ran into another Sherpa, Pasang Lama, who had also reached the summit, but who by now had dropped his ax. If anyone was truly stranded on the mountain, it was Pasang.

“Pasang Lama was worried, but I said don’t worry,” Chhiring later e-mailed Freddie Wilkinson. “We have only two options—one is staying here, which is very dangerous under the serac. The other option is to descend down with one ice ax, which may lead us to Camp IV …if we don’t slip.”

So Chhiring cut off a short hank of broken fixed rope, tied Pasang to him in a tight tether, then, facing in, used his ax and his crampons to descend the Bottleneck, with his fellow Sherpa almost dangling from his harness like a haul bag. The two eventually reached Camp IV without mishap.

That’s a pretty astounding deed. But I can just imagine how you might pull it off: kick each foot in solid, plant the ax, then tell the other guy to kick with his own feet and even punch holds with his hands. Don’t move until he’s secure. Still, if Pasang had come off, he probably would have taken Chhiring with him. Talk about selfless!

It’s a Sherpa thing. They’re loyal. It’s their ethos, instilled in them on Everest. They just feel it’s the right thing to do.

But if Chhiring and Pasang could make it down with one ice ax between them, one guy short-roped like a dead weight to the other, why couldn’t those Europeans have downclimbed the Bottleneck unencumbered?

Pemba Gyalje reached Camp IV by 1:00
A.M.
on August 2. In the morning, on learning that a bunch of climbers were still unaccounted for, he simply headed back up the mountain. To do that, after an exhausting summit day of your own—and both Chhiring and Pemba had summited without supplemental oxygen, the first Sherpa to do so on K2—takes incredible fortitude. And, once again, incredible selflessness.

Pemba reached Marco Confortola halfway up the Bottleneck. The Italian was unconscious and probably suffering from severe altitude sickness. With bottled oxygen, Pemba got Confortola going again. But almost as soon as the two men had started down, the third serac collapse—the one that carried the two Koreans and Pasang Bhote and Jumic Bhote to their deaths—nearly took out Confortola and Pemba. The Italian was struck in the back of the head by a chunk of falling ice. He started to fall, but Pemba grabbed him from behind and held him. The Sherpa then shepherded the Italian the rest of the way down to Camp IV. There is no doubt that Confortola would have died had Pemba not rescued him.

This time, as he collapsed in his tent, Pemba was truly worn out. But the next morning, when he learned that Wilco van Rooijen was still missing, he went out again.

Van Rooijen had gotten wildly off route as he made his impulsive and desperate descent. He had wandered to the west not only of the Abruzzi Ridge but of its western variant, the Cesen route, by which the Dutch team had ascended. He may have glancingly intersected the prominent snow ridge called “the Shoulder,” but he missed Camp IV altogether. After a second night out, van Rooijen was truly lost—and near death.

Bizarrely enough, the ring of the Dutchman’s sat phone in the darkness gave his team the first inkling of his whereabouts. On August 3, Pemba and Cas van de Gevel found van Rooijen. They led him slowly back to Camp III, which the three men reached only well after dark.

In his interviews with reporters, van Rooijen made scant mention of Pemba’s rescue. Recounting his epic to
National Geographic Adventure
, the Dutchman credited instead his own skills: “My mountaineering experience let me be quiet and patient enough to wait for better weather…. I took a risk climbing some difficult technical parts to traverse to easier slopes and to easier glaciers. I finally survived.”

This is a sad trend in recent mountaineering on the 8,000ers. When something screws up, the Sherpa are the first ones to be blamed. But when a Sherpa performs heroically, as Pemba did in saving the only two climbers who bivouacked above the Motivator and then got off the mountain alive, they barely get credited, and often they are not even named.

I was very gratified, then, when Pemba Gyalje was hailed by
National Geographic Adventure
in December 2008 as its Adventurer of the Year, an award I had won in 2005. The National Geographic Society, or NGS, flew Pemba to Washington, D.C., for the ceremony, and I heard that he really enjoyed it, as he stood beaming and holding aloft his trophy, while the audience in the posh society headquarters gave him a wild standing ovation.

Topping off the encomiums, the American Alpine Club bestowed its most prestigious honor, the David A. Sowles Memorial Award (for heroism in saving the lives of other climbers), on Pemba at its annual meeting in Golden, Colorado, in February 2009.

People often ask me if a disaster like last summer’s is bound to happen again on K2. And my answer, sadly, is yes. Too many of the climbers who survive such a fiasco tell themselves,
Well, I got away with it
. And too many others, planning their own future expeditions, think,
Oh, it’s not going to happen to me
.

The most those of us who have climbed the world’s highest mountains can hope to do is educate others. I also tried to educate myself every step of the way on all of my climbs, realizing I could never learn
enough. But sometimes I wonder if even trying to educate others is a lost cause. Little that we say or do seems to sink in. The appeal of risk seems to outweigh the rewards of discipline on hazardous peaks. To cite an oft-quoted statistic, after the 1996 season, when so many inexperienced clients came to grief on Everest, in 1997 the numbers of applicants willing to pay as much as $75,000 apiece to get guided up the highest mountain significantly increased.