No Way Down_ Life And Death On K2 Part 3

"Let's go down," Meyer said. His voice was tired and resigned.

But he first had a duty as a doctor, and he examined each of the Serbs in turn, peering into their eyes as he asked questions about how they felt. They had been through a lot and he wanted to make sure they were not showing signs of cerebral edema. They nodded. They were barely coherent. He rifled through his backpack and handed everyone a vitamin energy bar, then he lined them up and gave each of the Serbs a four-milligram tablet of dexamethasone, a quick-acting, anti-inflammatory steroid. It would reduce any swelling in the brain and be enough to to get them down.

The Pakistani porter, Hussein, walked out toward the edge of the slope to collect the gloves, rucksack, and other equipment that Baig had dropped. It was dangerous, and if he had slipped he would have disappeared over the edge before the others could have stopped him, but Hussein wanted to collect his friend's belongings and the others let him go.

There seemed no question now that they would leave Mandic's body where it was. Strang tied the rope attached to Mandic's harness to an axe and stabbed the axe securely into the ice. Mandic would stay there forever at 26,000 feet, or until the storms swept him away.

Meyer got on the radio to Base Camp and announced somberly that Baig had died. Then they followed each other in a line down toward Camp Four. The Americans wanted to tie a rope between themselves and the two Serbs but the latter said they could manage on their own. Hussein, however, was uncertain on his feet and so for a while Strang strung a rope between his own harness and that of the HAP.

They reached the tents near the bottom of the Shoulder at about 4 p.m. A number of people were milling around. The South Korean B team and their two Sherpas had climbed up the Abruzzi and were waiting for evening and their chance to leave for the summit after midnight. There was the Australian climber from the Dutch team and Paul Walters, the Australian from Meyer and Strang's expedition. They wanted to hear what had happened.

Strang was overcome. He threw his rucksack on the ice, knelt in the snow, and cried.

"It's meaningless!" he said.

But then he saw the Serbs sitting down just a few feet away, silent and stony-faced, and he felt ashamed. They had more reason than he did to be upset. When one of the HAPs brought him a cup of warm tea, he waved him away guiltily.

The Serbs trooped off to their tent to make calls on their satellite phone and radio, to talk to Erdeljan in Base Camp; he would telephone Mandic's girlfriend in Subotica. Strang and Meyer debriefed the other teams.

It was still a warm afternoon, warm enough that they could stand outside in their Windbreakers. Up on the mountain, the line of climbers still heading for the summit had moved on and was stretched across the Traverse and up into the diagonal ascent to the summit snowfields. The mountaineers were a line of black dots against the white snow.

Even after the deaths, Strang and Meyer felt a pang of envy and wondered whether they had done the right thing by turning back after all.

Their teammate, Walters, pointed to the distant line of climbers and remarked on what good time they had made.

Meyer shook his head. "They are still going up," he said.

Walters couldn't believe it. He was surprised and disappointed. After fourteen hours of climbing, they were still hours from the top.

In their tent, the two Serbs, Pedja Zagorac and Iso Planic, sat alone. They couldn't rest, couldn't help staring at Zagorac's jacket, stained with Mandic's blood. Their friend was dead. Never again, Zagorac resolved, would he go on such a long expedition, so far from home.

CHAPTER FOUR.

At dusk on July 19, 1939, Fritz Wiessner, a thirty-nine-year-old German-born American and a superstar climber of his era, put one hobnailed boot in front of the other to reach 27,500 feet, within three or four hours of K2's summit.

Wiessner was seemingly close to the end of a single-minded quest to become the first mountaineer to conquer the world's second-highest peak and the first to scale any mountain above 26,000 feet.

It would have been a stupefying feat for an American, and a German-American at that, just as most of the world spiraled toward war. It was not to be-it would take another sixteen years before Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli climbed to the summit. Instead, Wiessner's benighted expedition would come to ill.u.s.trate the folly of relying too heavily on complicated logistics, including teams of unsupervised porters and Sherpas. It would have echoes in the 2008 expedition, in which, among other things, too many climbers relied on a seemingly foolproof cooperation agreement only to see it fail. Wiessner's expedition ended with four deaths, the first known casualties on K2.

Though night was falling, Wiessner wanted to continue to the summit. He believed he could get to the top, wait for dawn, and return in the morning light. But his climbing partner, a Sherpa called Pasang Lama, was already tense and warned Wiessner that going on at such a late hour risked waking the fury of the mountain G.o.ds that he believed inhabited the summit snows.

When Wiessner began a traverse that would have taken him up onto the summit snowfields, the Sherpa refused to play out his rope.

"No, sahib," he said. "Tomorrow."

Reluctantly, Wiessner climbed back down to their tent, which was pitched on the top of a rock pillar at 26,050 feet. He was confident he could make a second try the following morning or at some point over the next few days. Over the course of the previous month and a half, he had established a series of nine well-stocked camps below him. The camps were tended by a team of nine Sherpas and stretched the entire way to Base Camp. This elaborate network, he believed, would ensure he would continue to be well supplied and sheltered. He took the next day off, and as he rested in the sunshine, naked on his sleeping bag in the open tent, he expected a porter to appear at any hour carrying fresh food and supplies.

That did not happen.

Wiessner, a chemist, was born in Dresden and left for the United States in 1929. He was an inspirational climber but also domineering, autocratic, and single-minded-traits common to many of the world's most successful climbers and perhaps especially mountaineers who have been attracted to K2.

His difficult character was one reason why he struggled to gather the best of America's climbing talent, though he was also trying to put together an expedition during years when America was suffering the economic effects of the Depression and few mountaineers were willing to invest money to join. In the end, his indifferent K2 team was selected mainly for having the private wealth to finance the adventure. It included two twenty-year-old Dartmouth undergraduates, along with an independently wealthy, middle-aged New Yorker named Tony Cromwell, and, most curiously, a large, clumsy, but rich playboy called Dudley Wolfe. At the last minute, the American Alpine Club also added Jack Durrance, a twenty-seven-year-old Dartmouth medical student, who was also a powerful and competent climber.

Wolfe was a man who frequently required the help of guides to push or pull him up easy ascents. But despite his apparent lack of ability he was determined and strong and devoted to Wiessner, and he had doggedly managed to follow his leader and Pasang Lama near to the top of K2, until he was stopped by the deep snows covering a bergschrund, or creva.s.se, at around 25,300 feet. He waited at Camp Eight, below the Shoulder, while the two other men had gone on to Camp Nine for the summit attempt. (The early K2 expeditions had as many as eight or nine camps, but modern attempts have tended to employ an established system of four camps up the main routes as knowledge of the mountain has grown.) Although Wiessner did not know it, his expedition had begun to fragment and communications between the lower and upper mountain had more or less broken down. Even while Wiessner, Pasang Lama, and Wolfe were waiting up near the summit, some of their disaffected colleagues in Base Camp were preparing to depart for the United States (and the fall semester at Dartmouth). Cromwell, the second in command, was giving orders for the lowest three camps to be dismantled. Ostensibly this was so that the climbers up above would have less to carry when they descended, but the prevailing sense was that they wanted no more part of Wiessner's personal summit quest. They were already thinking of home.

Although the lower camps were being put out of action, the Sherpas were still manning the higher tents. As the days dragged by, however, they heard nothing from Wiessner. When a Sherpa ventured up a few hundred feet past Camp Seven, he called out but received no reply, even though Dudley Wolfe lay asleep inside one of the tents at the camp above him. Seeing no trace of footprints in the storm-blasted snow, the Sherpa concluded that Wiessner, Wolfe, and Pasang Lama had been lost under an avalanche. He retreated down the mountain with the remaining Sherpas, and they gathered up everything they could carry-mattresses and sleeping bags, food, anything worth salvaging-or threw equipment away in order to avoid carrying it down. The elaborate supply chain Wiessner believed stretched below him was in fact a tenuous line of abandoned or broken tents blowing emptily in the wind.

In their first summit attempt, Wiessner and Pasang Lama had avoided the couloir-the gully that would later become known as the Bottleneck-thinking that it looked too dangerous, and had instead climbed an amazingly difficult route up the broken rocks to the left of the gully, a route that no one would dare try again. For his second attempt, Wiessner was thinking of climbing directly up the Bottleneck. But after waiting two days and with no new supplies having shown up, Wiessner and Pasang Lama descended to Camp Eight. They expected to find either porters or bountiful supplies. Instead they discovered Wolfe, still alone, and with only a few days of rations remaining.

"Those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," Wolfe told them. "They never came up here."

He had no matches to light his stove and had been forced to melt snow in the folds of his tent.

The three men roped up together and started down, but Wolfe tripped on the rope, pulling Wiessner off his feet, and the three men began sliding. They were only saved when Wiessner slammed the pick of his axe in the ice just sixty feet short of a 6,000-foot drop onto the G.o.dwin-Austen glacier. It was an amazing rescue. They had, however, lost Wolfe's sleeping bag, and Wiessner had left his at the higher camp. They spent the night beneath a single bag, thinking unkind thoughts of their teammates farther down the mountain.

The next day, Wiessner and Pasang Lama left Wolfe in a tent at Camp Seven and descended rapidly to get help. They found camp after camp deserted until a day later they finally lurched half dead into Base Camp.

A rescue mission was decided upon for Dudley Wolfe. Wiessner was too exhausted to go up himself, and the first rescue attempt involving Jack Durrance was aborted when one of the Sherpas fell sick. Five days later, three brave Sherpas-Pasang Kikuli, Pasang Kitar, and Phinsoo-reached Wolfe at Camp Seven. They found him barely sensible and lying in his own excrement. He had been above 21,500 feet for forty days. They managed to get him outside his tent and gave him tea but he refused to descend with them and they felt they could not challenge him.

The three Sherpas retreated to a lower camp, vowing to return the following day. Delayed by a storm, they climbed back but neither they nor Wolfe were ever seen again.

Fourteen years later, after the interruption of World War II and the part.i.tion of India, another American team would become the first expedition to venture up the slopes since Wiessner's fateful quest. At the site of Wiessner's camps, they discovered torn tents, three neatly rolled sleeping bags, and Ovaltine, along with a stove, fuel, and a bundle of Darjeeling tea wrapped in a blue handkerchief, some of them the poignant remains of the Sherpas' last effort to save Wolfe.

CHAPTER FIVE.

1 p.m.

The nineteen climbers in the tightly pressed line beneath the serac had spent an uneasy few minutes considering whether they should go on in the wake of Dren Mandic's fall.

Below them, the Serbs were distant specks dragging Mandic back toward the Shoulder. The Americans were climbing out from Camp Four. What more could they they be expected to do? If they descended, they were only going to get in the way of the rescue operation. be expected to do? If they descended, they were only going to get in the way of the rescue operation.

Some thought Mandic was still alive. And if he was dead-well, they were used to death. Every one of them had good friends who had been killed in the mountains.

Among them, an Italian climber named Marco Confortola was determined to continue on. The determination seemed to shine in the thirty-seven-year-old professional mountain guide's sharp triangular face, in his brown eyes.

Confortola had grown up in Santa Caterina Valfurva, a ski resort town three and a half hours north of Milan in Lombardy, on the Swiss border; he came from the same valley as his hero Achille Compagnoni, and naturally Confortola had chosen to climb up on the Abruzzi route. Strong as an ox and flamboyant, he had come to K2 to burnish his professional curriculum vitae, but he also wanted to conquer the peak again for Italy. He said he wanted to "bring it back" to his valley.

Before coming to K2, Confortola had worked at a meteorological station on Mount Everest for fifty days. He had flown back to Milan and spent a week in Valfurva before hopping on another flight to Islamabad. From Askole, he had trekked to Base Camp with a team of eighty porters and their chickens and other supplies.

The ascent from Base Camp had been tougher than he had antic.i.p.ated. His boots had gotten wet. His HAP had forgotten some of the rope Confortola was expected to supply as part of the cooperation agreement. But still, now, in the group on the ropes beneath the serac, he was determined to go on.

Some of the other climbers shifted uneasily on the lines. The Sherpa in the Dutch team, Pemba Gyalje, said Mandic's fall was bad karma. For him, as for Dorje, the American team's Sherpa, reaching the summit of K2 was going to be a significant marketing coup for his business-these two commercial rivals wanted to beat the other to the top. But the teams were late and Gyalje said he was prepared to turn back if anyone else wanted to.

When he saw the others still looking pensive, Confortola said they had to decide quickly whether to continue higher or go down, but they couldn't simply stand waiting beneath the serac.

As the line turned away up into the Traverse, those who heard him felt a little bit stupid to have harbored any doubts in the first place.

They arrived now at what in some ways was the most challenging part of the day's ascent. The Traverse was a band of steep ice and snow at a slope of between 50 and 70 degrees. It cut directly and horizontally to the left for 200 feet and then, after it, the route rose diagonally for a further 400 feet on a less steep slope of between 35 and 50 degrees covered with deeper snow. As the climbers stared up at the Traverse, they could see that the ice itself was hard and shiny, and when they touched it, it seemed almost alive under their gloves.

The serac hung above, while down to their left were humps of brown rocks, past which was nothing but thin air and, nearly two miles away, the lower gullies and b.u.t.tresses of K2.

To go across the Traverse, the teams clipped on to the rope with the carabiners on their belts and heaved themselves along the face. The looping rope was secured into the ice at intervals by ice screws. There was the occasional place to rest, a jutting rock or ice lip to lean against. But when the line of climbers was moving, the mountaineers chopped in their ice axes, kicked in the front points of their crampons, and stepped-axe, crampons, step-their breathing coming hard. As they shuffled along, they avoided staring up at the serac directly above or the tiny lines of the G.o.dwin-Austen glacier 10,500 feet below.

By this point, some of them had been climbing nonstop for nearly twenty-four hours, except for the few hours' rest at Camp Four. The midday sun was high in the sky. The Traverse was exposed, and though they had gauged their clothing carefully to avoid overheating and dehydrating-dehydration meant they would need water, and they had left their burners behind at Camp Four-they were dripping with perspiration inside their jackets.

Yet though they were hot and tired, they couldn't dwell on their problems for long. The view was just too beautiful. It made everything right. To their left were the heads of mountains, shining in the sun or wreathed in little trains of cloud. The world was on a gigantic scale. They could see the curving line of the earth's horizon. They were on K2. They were on K2.

This view, this feeling, this achievement is what they had come for. Despite the nagging anxiety about how long things were taking and the frustrations caused by the crowd, the climbers felt a sort of inner transcendence, an inner peace. When s.p.a.ce opened up on the rope and they could start marching up and across the ice wall, they felt truly alive. The summit was a few hours above them. Now at last, after weeks, months, years of preparation and toil, they were closing in.

About one hundred feet across the Traverse, the line stopped again. Up at the front, four climbers from the South Korean team converged in pairs to change their oxygen tanks. Helping one another to unbuckle the empty cylinders, they started to refix full ones.

With fifteen members, the South Korean expedition was the largest on the mountain this year. Its proper t.i.tle was the "Korean Flying Jump" team and its tents, national flag, and sponsor flags had dominated Base Camp.

It was divided into two teams-an A and a B team-and they were in the process of trying to bag all fourteen of the world's 26,000-foot peaks. The expedition was led by a p.r.i.c.kly, ambitious mountaineer named Kim Jae-soo and his star woman climber, Go Mi-sun. The forty-eight-year-old Kim was president of a company called Power Heat, which manufactured heated mattresses and insoles for shoes.

There was no doubt a distinction between the Korean and the Western-American and European-teams. In the modern mountaineering age, the Western expeditions no longer climbed for their country-that belonged to a different, old-fashioned era. Their teams were sometimes organized along national lines but more than ever they were a loose multinational collection of friends.

But for the South Koreans the idea of bearing a national responsibility in these mountains resonated. They recognized a broader cultural mandate, and success was essential. Failure was to be avoided as humiliating.

They generally climbed in bigger groups than the Europeans and Americans and, certainly in the eyes of the other expeditions, they were more aggressive and took greater risks. Mr. Kim had told some of the other climbers his departure date for leaving K2 was whenever he climbed it.

He was a man who believed in protocol and the superiority of his climbers. Go had earlier moved swiftly and easily up the rocks beside the Bottleneck, shadowed by Kim like a bodyguard. But some of the other Flying Jump climbers were struggling in the Traverse.

The painstaking maneuver with the oxygen bottles caused another backup down the rope. The climbers waiting behind found places to perch and catch their breath. They expected the Koreans would resume climbing any moment, but it was as if they were moving in slow motion. The minutes dragged.

Eventually the South Koreans hung the empty orange oxygen bottles on an ice screw and moved on up. The other teams climbed past the bottles, which dangled delicately and precariously on the side of the mountain.

They were climbing once more but it was still slow going, and the delay allowed resentments to simmer, repeating the frictions that had arisen during the months at Base Camp. The truth was that climbing attracted strong characters, egos, oddb.a.l.l.s, and they rubbed up against one another. Some of the climbers cursed the tardiness of other foreign expeditions. Outwardly they had respect for each other but in truth each considered the others slightly ridiculous-inferior, unprofessional, ignorant of the kind of monster K2 could be.

Now, they cursed the state of the ice screws, or the condition of the rope or the way it had been tied. Some in the big groups resented the small teams for parachuting in at the last moment on their weeks of preparations, while some in the smaller independent teams resented the s.p.a.ce the larger expeditions occupied on the mountain and the way they had tried to dominate the slopes.

Some had brought only one ice axe, rather than the usual two, because they knew the fixed ropes would be in place to help them descend. This practice earned the scorn of other climbers, who believed two axes were essential, not least because you might drop one.

Those climbing without the help of supplementary oxygen quietly looked down on those who were relying on it; and the teams that climbed alone without Sherpas or HAPs believed they were purer climbers than those who were paying thousands of dollars for help. The HAPs could have a bad day. The oxygen could run out. A person who relied on aides like that, some thought, should not be tackling K2.

As they continued to wait, most of the climbers on the Traverse realized that the cooperation agreement, which had filled everyone with hope about teamwork and sharing, had in reality reduced them to the lowest common denominator. The ones waiting behind could pa.s.s the slower climbers but the ice made it dangerous. If one person stopped for a drink, or to adjust a backpack, they all stopped. Yet despite these misgivings, a kind of groupthink had set in. They continued anyway-because everyone else was still going on. They resented the other teams and at the same time felt protection in numbers. There was a manifest lack of leadership, no one to tell them to go back.

Rolf Bae had been more shaken than Cecilie Skog by her collision with Dren Mandic when the Serb fell.

The fair-skinned, red-bearded Bae was a good rock climber and experienced polar explorer. Yet, today on the Traverse, for all of his prowess, he was having a difficult time. Sweat glistened on his red beard and he looked pained.

"Not a good day for me," he said to the others around him on the line, wincing. "I am having problems."

Like his wife, he was breathing supplementary oxygen. The thin pipes from a new British-made system-it released oxygen on demand rather than piping it constantly-curled like transparent straws around the side of his face to his nose.

He had spent the early summer rock climbing on Great Trango Tower, a 20,500-foot spire of rock about twenty miles down the Baltoro glacier from K2, and so he had arrived at Base Camp a few weeks after Skog. Maybe Trango had taken it out of him or maybe he hadn't given himself enough time to get used to the height on K2, though Skog knew he was never really comfortable at extreme alt.i.tudes.

He and Skog had tried to summit K2 once before, in 2005 on the Cesen route, but they had turned back, and they were eager this time to reach the top. Still, Bae said he was thinking of turning around, although he would try to go as far as he could with Skog.

The two climbers had been husband and wife for little over a year. They had met in Russia in 2003 after an expedition to Mount Elberus. She had trained as a nurse and guide and Bae was working as a professional guide. He was a well-traveled man. He had lived in the United States; when he was seventeen, he had spent a year in Amherst, Ma.s.sachusetts, living with a local family and studying. Between 1999 and 2001, he had spent seventeen months in the Antarctic in a naval base on Queen Maud Land.

Skog had soon learned that this was the sort of thing Rolf Bae did. He was also a serious bird-watcher; he knew the Latin names and most springs took the train to northern Norway on special bird-watching trips. When they were on an expedition, he loved to sing Bob Dylan songs as he walked along the trail. In the camp at night, he sat and played his guitar or his harmonica.

A week after they had got to know each other, Skog and Bae flew to the Himalayas and spent three months climbing in Tibet and Nepal. When they returned to Norway, they moved in together and started their own travel company, Fram Expeditions, named after the ship that took Norwegian explorers to the Arctic and Antarctic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They began a life of guiding, writing books, and giving talks about their expeditions in the wilderness. It was a wonderful way of making a living, doing what they loved. They had a little apartment in Stavanger but they were rarely at home. In 2005, they traveled together to the South Pole. In 2006, they reached the North Pole.

Skog, dubbed the Polar Princess in the European media, had become the first woman to stand at both poles and on the tallest peaks of every continent, including Everest. She had wanted the achievement of climbing Everest; Rolf hated the crowds on Everest these days and had chosen not to go with her. Their fame at home in Norway was just taking off, Cecilie's especially.

Ahead of Bae and Skog on the line, the dark-haired Frenchman Hugues d'Aubarede crouched on an ice ledge beside his Pakistani HAP, Karim Meherban. Both men were concerned about d'Aubarede's condition.

D'Aubarede, who was wearing a dark yellow climbing suit, was getting tired. The sixty-one-year-old was a stubborn, proud, n.o.ble man, neat and cultured, and he had invested a lot in his expedition to get to K2. He had left behind his partner, two daughters, and a grandchild in France to pursue his dream in the Himalayas. It was his third attempt to reach the summit of K2, and he thought it would probably be his last try. He was not the oldest to climb on K2, but he was close-a sixty-five-year-old Spaniard had summitted in 2004.

It had been a long climb up from Base Camp. When the storm hit around the night of July 29, some of the other expeditions had waited at an intermediate camp, forcing d'Aubarede to wait, too. He had used up valuable energy, food, and also gas for melting snow for water. The wind had whistled up inside his gla.s.ses, the slopes too steep even to stop to put on his goggles. He had had to wade through snow that drifted around his knees, by carving a corridor with his hands.

But then finally, at Camp Four, after the long ascent up the Cesen, he had climbed onto a flat s.p.a.ce 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'Aubarede was feeling the effects of the alt.i.tude and heat. He told the climbers who pa.s.sed 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.