No Way Down

  No Way Down

  Life and Death on K2

  Graham Bowley

  To my mother and father,

  and to Chrystia

  Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.

  —George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

  Take care to fly a middle course.

  —Daedalus’ advice to Icarus, Ovid, Metamorphoses

  I long for scenes where Man has never trod.

  —John Clare

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Climbers

  Prologue

  Eric Meyer uncurled his tired body from the Americans’ tent…

  Part I Summit

  Chapter One

  Walk east along dusty tracks from the village of Askole…

  Chapter Two

  It was so crowded near the top of the Bottleneck…

  Chapter Three

  Since the record for climbing the tallest mountain on each…

  Chapter Four

  At dusk on July 19, 1939, Fritz Wiessner, a thirty-nine-year-old…

  Chapter Five

  The nineteen climbers in the tightly pressed line beneath the…

  Chapter Six

  From where they were standing, the climbers still could not…

  Chapter Seven

  A head of Cecilie Skog, one of the South Koreans’…

  Part II Descent

  Chapter Eight

  There are several types of major snow avalanches but two…

  Chapter Nine

  The violent, shape-shifting nature of K2 was dramatically revealed during…

  Chapter Ten

  In their tent on the Shoulder, where they lay in…

  Chapter Eleven

  One moment everyone had been together in a line coming…

  Part III Serac

  Chapter Twelve

  Jumik Bhote had led the seven-man South Korean Flying Jump…

  Chapter Thirteen

  Marco Confortola had waded alone along the sloping snowfield from…

  Photographic Insert

  Chapter Fourteen

  Wilco van Rooijen took a direct line down from the…

  Chapter Fifteen

  Up at the end of the summit snowfield, Marco Confortola…

  Chapter Sixteen

  Eric Meyer and Fred Strang were surprised by Pemba Gyalje’s…

  Part IV Rescue

  Chapter Seventeen

  In the huddle of tents on the Godwin-Austen glacier at…

  Chapter Eighteen

  When Wilco van Rooijen woke up on the ledge of…

  Chapter Nineteen

  As the morning light started to brighten the vast white…

  Chapter Twenty

  Helicopter transportation for injured climbers is being organized for tomorrow…

  The Dead

  Epilogue

  My own journey to K2 began in Kilcornan in western…

  Notes

  Searchable Terms

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  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 on August 5, 2008. Once it was confirmed that eleven climbers had died indulging a private passion 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’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 altitude, 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 sunshine on the Godwin-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.

  CLIMBERS

  Those names marked in bold denote climbers who made a serious summit bid on August 1, 2008.

  NORWEGIAN K2 EXPEDITION 2008

  Rolf Bae

  Cecilie Skog (leader)

  Lars Flato Nessa

  Oystein Stangeland

  NORIT K2 DUTCH INTERNATIONAL EXPEDITION 2008

  Wilco van Rooijen (leader)

  Cas van de Gevel

  Gerard McDonnell

  Roeland van Oss

  Pemba Gyalje

  Jelle Staleman

  Mark Sheen

  Court Haegens

  ITALIAN K2 EXPEDITION 2008

  Marco Confortola (leader)

  Roberto Manni

  SERBIAN K2 VOJVODINA EXPEDITION 2008

  Milivoj Erdeljan (leader)

  Dren Mandic

  Predrag Zagorac Iso Planic

  Shaheen Baig

  Mohammed Hussein

  Mohammed Khan

  Miodrag Jovovic

  2008 AMERICAN K2 INTERNATIONAL EXPEDITION

  Eric Meyer

  Chris Klinke

  Fredrik Strang

  Chhiring Dorje

  Paul Walters

  Michael Farris (leader)

  Chris Warner

  Timothy Horvath

  SOUTH KOREAN K2 ABRUZZI SPUR FLYING JUMP EXPEDITION

  Kim Jae-soo (leader)

  Go Mi-sun

  Kim Hyo-gyeong

  Park Kyeong-hyo

  Hwang Dong-jin

  Jumik Bhote

  Chhiring Bhote

  “Big” Pasang Bhote

  “Little” Pasang Lama

  Lee Sung-rok

  Kim Seong-sang

  Son Byung-woo

  Kim Tae-gyu

  Lee Won-sub

  Song Gui-hwa

  BASQUE INDEPENDENT CLIMBER

  Alberto Zerain

  FRENCH-LED INDEPENDENT K2 EXPEDITION

  Hugues d’Aubarède (leader)

  Karim Meherban

  Qudrat Ali

  Jahan Baig

  Nicholas Rice

  Peter Guggemos

  SERBIAN INDEPENDENT CLIMBER

  Joselito Bite

  OTHER INDEPENDENT CLIMBERS

  Nick Nielsen

  Christian Stangl

  George Egocheago

  FRENCH “TGW” 2008 K2 EXPEDITION

  Yannick Graziani

  Christian Trommsdorff

  Patrick Wagnon

  SUNNY MOUNTAIN CHOGORI EXPEDITION

  George Dijmarescu (leader)

  Rinjing Sherpa

  Mingma Tunduk Sherpa

  Mircea Leustean

  Teodora Vid

  K2 TALL MOUNTAIN EXPEDITION

  Dave Watson

  Chuck Boyd

  Andy Selters

  SINGAPORE K2 EXPEDITION 2008

  Robert Goh Ee Kiat (leader)

  Edwin Siew Cheok Wai

  Ang Chhiring Sherpa

  Jamling Bhote

  ITALIAN BROAD PEAK & NANGA PARBAT EXPEDITION

  Mario Panzeri

  Daniele Nardi

  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 altitude 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. “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-altitude 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 latitude 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 crevasses 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-altitude 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 assumed 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 crevasses spotlighted in the arcs cast by their headlamps, some of the crevasses 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-altitude 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. 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.

  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 anticipated. 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.