No Way Down.Pdf
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1 of 173 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… 2 of 173 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… 3 of 173 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 4 of 173 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. 5 of 173 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. 6 of 173 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 7 of 173 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 8 of 173 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 9 of 173 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 10 of 173 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.