In June 2008, Karim Meherban left Hunza in a baby-blue Jeep Scrambler and jostled down the Karakorum Highway. He passed miners scraping rubies from the hillsides, children panning for gold along the river, and guards flaunting Kalashnikovs at military checkpoints. Near the town of Skardu, he passed an airfield and military compound best known as the home of the Fearless Five. Its hangar was emblazoned with a snarling snow leopard and a pentagram, signifying the squadron’s five tenets: sacrifice, courage, devotion, pride, and honor. The Fearless Five command a fleet of helicopters used to defend Pakistan’s borders and to airlift injured soldiers and avalanche survivors. Karim hoped he’d never need them.
Splashing through the milky-green water of the Shigar River basin, his Jeep then moved onto a rutted track, joining vehicles from other expeditions. Eight hours after leaving Skardu, Karim stopped at a dirt patch in Askole, the village at the end of the road. As the driver switched off the engine, local men mobbed the vehicle. Shouting welcomes and stirring a dust storm with their feet, they pulled supplies to the ground, unloading the cargo into snaking rows of stoves, tables, lawn chairs, blue plastic barrels, and duffels crammed with mountaineering gear.
These laborers are called low-altitude porters, or LAPs. Less expensive than mules, they ferry supplies across terrain too treacherous for jeeps. Pakistan’s Ministry of Tourism estimated that, in 2008, low-altitude porters were hired to carry 5,600 loads from Askole to peaks such as K2, Broad Peak, Trango Towers, and Gasherbrums I and II. A seven-member expedition to K2 might hire 120 LAPs a season, spending $10,000. Low-altitude porters “are your umbilical cord during a climb,” said Rehmat Ali, a porter coordinator for Nazir Sabir Expeditions. “Mountaineers don’t have a shot at the summit without them.”
In 2008, the low-altitude porters carried all kinds of things to K2: ropes, tents, orthopedic pillows, Cajun popcorn, chickens, skin mags, hand warmers, raspberry liqueur—whatever their clients paid for. The Flying Jump had its porters bring in a jug of pickled seaweed; Nick Rice, a climber from California, had porters shoulder a seventy-pound generator so he could power his laptop and access his blog—which, by the end of the climb, would receive two million hits. The porters weighed the loads on a hand scale and, when possible, divided them into fifty-four-pound piles, the limit established by their union. With strips of fabric, they bound the loads onto wooden frames and hoisted them onto their backs, beginning the sixty-mile slog to K2.
As the low-altitude porters weighed in and left, the climbers exchanged satellite-phone numbers and audited each other, counting the peaks they’d bagged and the friends they’d lost. They told each other to quit climbing, but not yet. Some Serbians who had been soldiers compared leaving Askole with marching off to war. Beyond this outpost, there would be no more orchards, no more children, no more laws.
The hundreds of porters, trudging one behind the other, formed human trains stretching for miles. At noon, nearly everyone stopped while the Muslims dropped their packs to perform salat. Turning southwest toward Mecca, they pressed their foreheads to cloth laid on the scree, bowing to praise Allah. Then the work continued.
Thrashing through an undergrowth of scrub and wild rose, the porters brushed against spines as long as sewing needles. When temperatures scorched to 115 degrees, the men doused their heads in the side creeks and balanced along tracks cut in the cliffs. After two days, the poplars vanished, then the grass. The Baltoro Glacier, a thirty-five-mile tongue of ancient ice, rippled ahead. To the north stood the earth’s tallest rock walls, the Trango Towers. Beneath the ice, a rush of subglacial melt could be heard, feeding the Braldu River. Sometimes the sun punched through the clouds, and from a single point in the sky, amber beams radiated downward in columns.
Within a week, the climbers had reached Concordia, where the Baltoro Glacier collides with the smaller Godwin-Austen Glacier. As the buckling ice cracked like rifle shots, K2 stood before them, a dusty carpet of ice and scree rolling off its slopes. Framed by lesser peaks, the pyramid seemed to prop up the weight of the sky.
The Approach to K2: The week-long trek from Askole to K2 runs up the icy tongue of the Baltoro Glacier. Near Base Camp, 18,000 feet above sea level, a makeshift cairn known as the Gilkey Memorial commemorates those claimed by the mountain.
On this, his third attempt of the mountain, Karim must have admired K2’s symmetry and dreamed of the summit. At Concordia, still a day and a half’s walk from K2, he pitched his tent next to the Sherpas’. Buddhist chanting was audible. As an Ismaili Muslim who believed in no god but Allah, Karim would never have prayed to a vacant mountaintop. To him, K2 wasn’t a goddess—just a vicious piece of rock.
The low-altitude porters and the foreign climbers spent a week together but kept their lives segregated. “I don’t remember any of their names,” said Marco Confortola, a climber from Italy. It was a challenge even to discuss practical issues with them, such as work he wanted done. Most porters spoke uncommon languages, such as Balti, Khowar, Wakhi, Shina, and Burushaski. Marco spoke Italian. Cultural barriers, such as Marco’s appreciation of salami, made matters worse. Keeping halal according to Quranic dietary rules, the porters avoided pork and its by-products. As Muslims, some considered it immodest when Western women wore shorts and were disconcerted when the climbers showed a gay romance on DVD. “Brokeback Mountain shocked me,” said Yaqub, a twenty-seven-year-old porter from Gulapur. He watched it anyway.
Like most of his peers, Yaqub ate and socialized away from his clients and slept out in the open. The porters even had their own latrines. “It felt a lot like separate but equal,” recalled Nick Rice, “but I preferred the porter toilets. The white guys got sick and made a mess in theirs.”
Low- and high-altitude porters found the cultural exchange educational and downplayed their employers’ transgressions. “I was amused,” said Shah Jehan, a fifty-three-year-old from the village of Kuardo. He had overheard a couple from the Flying Jump having noisy sex in their tent. “We don’t encounter that kind of thing in Pakistan, but why should I mind? That’s how they do it in Korea.”
The expedition was also paying him good money. The average Pakistani worker earns $2.81 a day; Shah Jehan and other low-altitude porters made $9 a day, or about 90 cents an hour, assuming that every day they crossed two camps and worked ten hours. The porters could earn even more by pocketing a cash allowance for boots, socks, and shades. Expedition companies used to provide their porters with this crucial equipment, but many porters resold it the same day. “If you don’t scratch the sunglasses, you can get 100 rupees [$1.20] for them at the bazaar in Skardu,” said Shujaat Shigri, a thirty-six-year-old low-altitude porter from Gulapur. “That’s a lot of money.”
Now all porters receive the equivalent of a signing bonus intended for gear. Some buy adequate equipment. Some buy the minimum. Some buy nothing at all. Porters often walk barefoot or use cheap flip-flops to preserve the soles of their better shoes. Others wear mismatched sneakers discarded by former clients. When snowstorms hit, expeditions hand out charity supplies on a last-minute, as-needed basis, but there’s never enough, and some porters would rather suffer and resell the gear than actually use it. Toes freeze and eyeballs, seared by ultraviolet rays bouncing off the snow, flush to the color of pomegranates.
Low-altitude porters can earn more by moving quickly. If they’re fast and the weather cooperates, they can manage five or six round trips to K2 in a season. “If I carry three loads, I can earn enough to last the whole year,” said Zaman Ali, a nineteen-year-old low-altitude porter from Tisar village, where he farms barley, peas, and wheat. Some loads, he explained, are better than others. “Tents and pots are the most prestigious” because they are needed throughout the trek in, he said. He carried the mess tent for the Serbian team in 2008. If he had carried rice, it might have been consumed en route, and he would have been sent back early and earned less.
Although porter strikes used to be routine, they were rare in 2008, because “all the expeditions agreed to our pay scale a
nd standards,” said Jaffer Wazir, president of the porters’ union, Khurpa Care. To discourage expeditions from renegotiating these terms, porters carried laminated Khurpa Care ID cards and brochures that explained their civil rights.
Nonetheless, two-thirds of the porters heading to K2 were uninsured, despite Pakistani regulations that say expedition outfitters must insure them all, said Syed Amir Raza, general manager of Islamabad’s Alpha Insurance, the only company that insures Pakistan’s porters. The policy costs the equivalent of $1.75 per month and pays out $1,200 for deaths due to “visible accidents.” If no one witnesses the death—as commonly happens when porters are spread out or lost in a crevasse—the policy is void. On average, two insured porters die a qualifying death every year. Nobody tracks the deaths of the uninsured.
The foreign climbers also had to take their chances: Their lives were uninsurable. Even specialized insurers, such as Patriot Extreme, decline to extend coverage to climbers for accidents and deaths above 14,760 feet. That’s lower than K2 Base Camp.
Medical evacuations for the critically injured aren’t automatic, either. Pakistan used to provide emergency airlifts for the injured whenever Fearless Five pilots could land, but nobody reimbursed the army for these trips. It cost Pakistani taxpayers an arm and a leg so foreigners might save a toe, said Brigadier M. Bashir Baz, chief executive of Askari Aviation, which dispatches the choppers. Now the government requires every mountaineering expedition to register with Askari and to deposit a $6,000 refundable bond, but only three-quarters of the 2008 expeditions did this, he said. “And if you don’t pay the deposit in advance,” he said, “we won’t pick you up.”
In his office in Islamabad, Brigadier Baz displays a bumper sticker beneath the glass on his desk and directs climbers to read it: “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.” When climbers refuse to pay, he shakes his head in disgust, visualizing the quixotic legions, unbonded and uninsured, marching toward the Savage Mountain.
The 2008 expeditions pitched Base Camp on a rocky glacier two miles from the foot of K2, a safe distance from avalanches. Green and yellow domes sprouted from the ice like mushrooms, sponsorship banners flanking their sides. By late June, Base Camp had swelled into a multicultural tent city, population 120. Laughter and rock music piped out of the tent flaps. Generators whirred amid snarls of power cables. Damp socks steamed in the sun. Solar panels baked.
Many found it a cheerful place, but Chhiring Dorje’s first impression was the stench. It wafted over from a communal grave to the south, on a rise between the Savoia and Godwin-Austen Glaciers. The Gilkey Memorial, a cairn of rocks piled eight feet high, is K2’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Family photos and unread letters feather the monument. Threadbare scarves wrap around its base like the bindings of a mummy. These scarves, Buddhist offerings called katas, beat in the wind, petitioning the gods. On hot days, the cairn stews with the scent of defrosting flesh, and the odor clings to mourners’ hair and clothing. Tin plates, fastened to the rocks, glint in the sunlight. Engraved with names of K2’s victims, they display dates from 1939 onward, June to August, the climbing season.
The Gilkey Memorial is a grisly necessity because corpses rarely make it down the mountain in one piece. For Everest losses, families sometimes send a recovery team. This doesn’t happen on K2. The Savage Mountain devours its victims during the long winter between climbing seasons. It encases the torsos in ice and grates them against the rocks, only to spit out the digested remains decades later, scattering limbs among avalanche debris.
When Art Gilkey’s team gathered stones to honor their friend in 1953, they started a morbid tradition. To keep their campsites sanitary, climbers began using the memorial as a place to dispose of the fingers, pelvic bones, arms, heads, and legs found in the glacial melt. Burying these scraps under the Gilkey Memorial felt more respectful than leaving them to the ravens. For more than half a century, the memorial has been a place to caution the living and consecrate the dead. Mountaineers attempting K2 visit the site to remind themselves of what they are getting into.
Chhiring considered the memorial a travesty. In 2008, he was among the first to arrive at Base Camp for the season, and he felt sick sleeping and eating so close to corpses. Why, he wondered, would anyone pin these people under rocks? All they do is freeze at night, defrost in the morning, simmer in the day, then freeze all over again. Such mistreatment, he worried, trapped the souls inside the bodies when they were suffering for release. He assumed that the mountain goddess suffered along with them. “I would not go near the memorial,” he said. He urged his friend Eric Meyer to stay away from it, too.
Chhiring believed the bodies deserved better. Sherpas and many other Buddhists prefer to cremate the dead. The smoke carries the spirit to the sacred realm above, as it did with Chhiring’s mother. When someone dies above the timberline and it’s hard to find firewood, a sky burial substitutes for cremation. Although outsiders consider sky burials barbaric—China outlawed the practice in Tibet from the 1960s to the 1980s—to Chhiring this was the sacred way to free the soul. During a sky burial, Buddhist lamas or others with religious authority carry the body to a platform on a hill. While burning incense and reciting mantras, they hack the corpse into chunks and slices. They pound the bones with a rock or hammer, beating the flesh into a pulp and mixing in tea, butter, and milk. The preparation attracts vultures, and the birds consume the carcass, carrying the spirit aloft and burying it in the sky, where it belongs. Souls inside the Gilkey Memorial receive neither cremation nor sky burial, and this troubled Chhiring.
He decided to find out more about the temperament of K2’s goddess, so he approached another Sherpa to discuss it—Pemba Gyalje, a devout Buddhist on the Dutch team. Pemba belonged to the Paldorje, an ancient Sherpa clan of the Solukhumbu. At the top of the ethnic pecking order, Pemba had also summited Everest six times and trained at the prestigious Ecole Nationale de Ski et d’Alpinisme in Chamonix, France. Like Chhiring, he was a Sherpa climbing as an equal member of a Western team. They were natural allies but had opposite personalities. Pemba usually observed discussions in silence, offered some austere logic, then withdrew into silence again. That style put Chhiring on edge, so he ended up consulting someone else. He called his lama on speed dial from his $2-per-minute Thuraya satellite phone.
Ngawang Oser Sherpa picked up on the eighth or ninth ring. The lama told Chhiring he was praying at the Boudhanath stupa in Kathmandu. “I can’t gauge Takar Dolsangma’s mood long distance,” he said. He advised Chhiring to perform a puja ceremony and pay attention to the mountain’s reaction. “And don’t climb on Tuesday,” he added. “It’s an inauspicious day for you.”
Chhiring switched off the phone and began hauling rocks to the center of camp, building a chorten, a sacred mound to honor the goddess. He attached a string of Buddhist prayer flags to it. The red, blue, white, and yellow squares of calico, stamped with sacred verses and strung along a line, were his Lung Ta, Tibetan for “wind horse.” Eric and other mountaineers joined him at the puja ceremony as the breeze picked up. The flags whipped, purifying the air and spreading blessings around camp. Chhiring knew Takar Dolsangma was present. Mindful, he recited mantras, asking the goddess for counsel and forgiveness. He leaned his ice axe and crampons against the chorten, balancing a plate of rice beside it and hoping she would accept the offering, bless his equipment, and forgive the injury they were about to cause her. Burning incense, Chhiring dusted the faces of his friends with flour to signify that he wished them to live until they were old and gray. Finally, he asked the goddess for permission to climb.
The ceremony failed. The goddess was still restive. Avalanches roared down her slopes that night, and the jet stream scoured the summit. For a week, she hid behind the clouds. When the Flying Jump arrived in Base Camp on June 15, Chhiring recognized the problem: Pasang Lama’s boss.
Others saw Mr. Kim as an omen, too. “I was also praying the mountain wouldn’t recognize Mr. Kim,” said Ng
awang Bhote, the Korean team’s cook.
Although Kim had made sure the Flying Jump was one of the best equipped teams at Base Camp, he hadn’t been welcome among the Sherpas since a scuffle at Everest in 2007. That year, a member of Mr. Kim’s team discovered a quartz rock with the Korean symbol for Everest naturally ingrained in the crystal. According to the expedition organizer, Mr. Kim had declared the stone holy, and his team erected an altar in the kitchen tent. They believed the quartz would protect them as they climbed Everest’s Tibetan flank.
But the stone disappeared and the Flying Jump panicked. For four days, the Koreans suspended climbing operations, combing Base Camp for their talisman. On the fifth day, the Chinese liaison officer—Base Camp’s equivalent of a sheriff—arrived to investigate allegations that a Korean climber had assaulted a Sherpa for misplacing the rock. Jamie McGuinness, a New Zealander who had organized Kim’s expedition, got into a shouting match with his client.
“I told Kim I’d pull his entire Sherpa staff if they were going to clobber someone over a missing rock,” recalled Jamie, who consulted with the liaison officer about revoking the Korean team’s permit.
Mr. Kim apologized and successfully climbed Everest with his teammates and Pasang’s cousin Jumik Bhote. After Everest, Jumik joked privately that working for the Flying Jump was like jumping off a cliff and expecting to fly. On K2, the Koreans boasted to Chhiring and Eric that the Flying Jump “had sponsors to impress and would reach the summit, whatever the cost.”
Chhiring stayed away from the Flying Jump just as he kept away from the Gilkey Memorial. Still, Mr. Kim’s presence weighed on him. A few months earlier, Chhiring had been consumed with K2, but now he was beginning to think his wife may have been right; maybe K2 wasn’t worth the risk. He spoke with Eric about going home. He asked Pemba for his opinion. He called his lama again by satellite phone and asked him to perform another puja ceremony at Boudhanath. For a week, Chhiring kept hauling rocks to his chorten, which grew seven feet tall, becoming the largest in camp. Climbing the mountain still felt wrong. Ngawang Bhote also sensed it. “I could feel the weather change every time Nadir Ali”—the Pakistani cook for the Serbs—“butchered an animal and served its ground flesh,” he said. Chhiring agreed and stuck to rice and noodles.
Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day Page 10
