Most of the others in camp ignored the goddess. They scarfed down Nadir’s cheeseburgers, played poker, hoarded porn, licked Nutella from the jar, debated the Bonatti Bivouac, updated their blogs, complained about the weather. Chhiring saw that the young man hired by the Flying Jump, Pasang Lama, wasn’t praying much, either. He was too busy leveling tent platforms and digging holes for the Flying Jump’s latrine. Concerned, Chhiring watched him closely. Pasang worked hard and lacked fancy gear. That meant he needed this job and was ready to do whatever the Flying Jump asked of him, no matter the danger. Pasang reminded Chhiring of himself when he started out: eager but oblivious.
Chhiring hoped Pasang would acknowledge Takar Dolsangma soon. If Pasang was going to be on K2 with the Flying Jump, he would need her. Chhiring also recognized something Pasang didn’t: Pasang and his cousins hadn’t landed their jobs because of superior luck, strength, or skill. The Bhotes were climbing K2 because ethnic Sherpas did not want to work for the Flying Jump.
One evening, just before the weather cleared and the teams began their assault on the mountain, Chhiring saw Pasang kneeling next to the chorten. Chhiring hadn’t spoken with him yet but decided to join him in prayer. He bent his knees, pressed his hands together, and leaned forward. Instead of directing his prayer toward the goddess or his wife and children, he prayed for Pasang, asking the mountain to protect him.
When he opened his eyes, Chhiring looked up and scanned the horizon. Hidden behind storms for weeks, K2’s summit materialized and seemed to swallow the sky.
7
Weather Gods
Rawalpindi, Pakistan
On June 2, 2008, the day Shaheen’s clients arrived in Pakistan, a white Corolla packed with sixty-five pounds of fertilizer, diesel, and TNT rolled through a security checkpoint in Sector F-6/1, near Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave. The driver, an eighteen-year-old jihadi named Kamal Saleem, turned left at Street 21 and parked in front of the Danish Embassy. At 12:10 p.m., Kamal’s car exploded.
The bomb blasted a four-foot crater into the road, incinerated Kamal, flipped the Corolla, caved in the embassy’s metal gates, pulverized most of the embassy’s front wall, blew out the windows, and punched through a quarter of the building next door. Dozens of cars shot off the road and rubble blanketed Sector F-6. “Bodies are littered all over the place,” Al Jazeera reported. “The blast could be heard all over the city, and it has literally taken the leaves off the trees.” Eight people died, including an unidentified child, and twenty-seven were wounded.
Al-Qaeda called the attack retaliation. Danish newspapers had published a series of cartoons satirizing Islam. One ridiculed the Prophet by depicting a bomb concealed in his turban. After the explosion, journalists made it sound as though jihadis were on the verge of taking over Pakistan, seizing its nuclear arsenal, and annihilating civilization. But foreigners heading to K2 considered it a routine delay. As Serbian climber Hoselito Bite put it: “In Islamabad, Armageddon is nothing special.”
Shaheen Baig, however, took the bombing personally. Waiting for his clients’ cargo, he questioned the sanity of the world outside Shimshal. Al-Qaeda was slaughtering children over a cartoon. He instructed the Serbian team to stay inside the hotel. “I will show you the real Pakistan,” he told them. The country Shaheen knew was peaceful, most of the time, and he wanted foreigners to see past the threat of terrorism and behold Pakistan’s beauty.
So did the mountaineering industry. To persuade skittish tourists, the Alpine Club of Pakistan had successfully lobbied for climber-friendly incentives. By 2008, the Ministry of Tourism, using a sliding scale based on altitude and season, had slashed fees for 8,000-meter peaks to half their pre-9/11 rates. Some lesser peaks were on sale at 95 percent off. A K2 permit was $12,000, while Everest cost seven times more. At the same time, the ministry stopped enforcing caps on the number of expeditions to K2 and other peaks. In practice, anyone with ready cash could attempt any Pakistani mountain, at any time, by any route.
Most mountaineers appreciated the reduced fees and climber-friendly deregulation. “ ‘Pay to play’ is how we want it,” said the Alpine Club president, Nazir Sabir. “The government has no business deciding who can or can’t climb.” Nepal has policies similar to those of Pakistan. The United States is more restrictive. Although the summit of North America’s highest peak barely reaches the altitude of K2’s first mountain camp, climbers heading to Denali in Alaska must submit a climbing résumé before securing a permit. If prospective mountaineers don’t appear to have enough experience, “I’ll call them and say, ‘I see you’ve been on Grasshopper Glacier for a few days, but Denali is different,” said Joe Reichert, a National Park Service ranger. “We’ll try to talk them out of it, tell them it’s too dangerous.”
The Park Service can’t turn away mountaineers from public lands, but it reviews applications sixty days in advance and requires climbers to attend a PowerPoint presentation about avalanche risk, crevasse rescue, environmental impact, fixed-line etiquette, and sanitation. The Park Service installs and maintains fixed lines on Denali, and U.S. taxpayers pay for helicopter rescues. Injured climbers are airlifted to hospitals regardless of whether they can pay.
In the Karakorum, the bargain price for climbing has had the intended effect. After the September 11 attacks, tourists and mountaineers avoided Pakistan; in 2008, more than seventy foreign mountaineers arrived to climb K2, although half would be culled by illness before a summit bid. Hundreds more were attempting nearby peaks. Instead of cancellations, K2 had a crowd.
Shaheen wanted to give the climbers a good impression of his religion and his country, and when he arrived at Base Camp with the Serbian team, he tried to be an ambassador. “Part of my job is to keep harmony,” he said. Still, diplomacy was tough when expeditions made unreasonable demands. The Singaporean team, for instance, ordered Jehan Baig, their Shimshali high-altitude porter, to carry loads through what Jehan believed to be an avalanche zone. Jehan balked. The team fired him.
Afterward, Shaheen found Jehan another job. Jehan’s new employer, Hugues d’Aubarède, the sixty-one-year-old French insurance salesman, paid well, and he had already hired another Shimshali, Karim. But Shaheen soon had misgivings about Hugues. Hiking along the moraine near Base Camp, he and Karim had spotted Hugues crouched down as though tying a shoelace. On the rocks in front of him lay a gray forearm, chopped at the elbow, fingernails intact enough for a manicure. The empty shoulder socket was fringed in tendon. Hugues snapped several photos, aiming his lens at the man’s desiccated lips.
Shaheen and Karim were sickened. Muslims consider the mouth, which recites the Qur’an, to be the holiest part of the body. Upon death, as Allah sends an angel to coax the soul from its body, Muslims traditionally close a corpse’s mouth, shut its eyelids, and comb its hair. The body is bathed in scented water, shrouded in clean sheets, and lowered into the earth on the right side, facing Mecca—all before night falls on the day of death.
Shaheen gestured toward the dead man. “That could be any of us,” he told Karim.
Karim asked what they should do.
“Let me handle this,” Shaheen replied.
Several hours later in Base Camp, Shaheen intercepted Hugues. “What do you plan to do with those pictures?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Hugues replied. Plenty of climbers photograph human remains along the glacier, he said. When Hugues climbed Everest, he had nearly tripped over a frozen cadaver. Death is part of this sport, Hugues noted, and he was simply “documenting it, as usual.”
Shaheen knew what that meant: “Are you going to post those photos on the Internet?”
No, absolutely not, Hugues said. He vowed to keep the images to himself. “Exposing a body like that would be obscene. The dead man’s family might even recognize him online.”
Shaheen left satisfied. On July 11, he invited the Frenchman to a party. The celebration was in honor of the fifty-first anniversary of the Aga Khan’s coronation, a day of solidarity for Ismaili Muslims who ac
cept this direct descendant of Muhammad as their spiritual leader. Nadir, the Serbian team’s cook, slaughtered a goat, set up a line of tables in the sunlight, and spread out a buffet of almond cakes and meat skewers. Shaheen, meanwhile, corralled guests into a circle, clapping his hands as Karim and Jehan sang in Wakhi. A dance pit formed and Hugues boogied into the center. Dressed in slacks, a button-down shirt, a sportsman’s cap, and a cashmere sweater, he hopped and flopped his arms to the music like an injured seagull. The crowd adored him. Amid catcalls, Hugues ceded the dance floor to Karim. “I’ve got rheumatism,” Hugues announced. Laughing, Shaheen decided he’d misjudged the good-natured Frenchman. He hadn’t. Shortly after their conversation on the glacier, Hugues had downloaded the images onto a laptop. He composed an entry for his blog, speculating about the identity of the pieces. Then he tapped SEND.
In many ways, the climbing community is like high school. The number of high-altitude mountaineers is small enough that almost everyone knows one another. With the added stress of death and dismemberment, cliques form and peer pressure builds. Mountaineers swap allies, trash-talk, tussle, hook up, and show off. In the weeks before the tragedy, some even squabbled like tweens.
Dutch expedition leader Wilco van Rooijen, for example, “did this, like, 13-year-old-girl thing to me,” recalled Nick Rice, the climber from California. “Cold shoulder, completely bitchy, he wouldn’t say ‘hi’ if I said ‘hi.’ ”
“Because I couldn’t believe what he was wearing!” Wilco explained. Nick wore only a lightweight Petzl Meteor helmet, too flimsy for K2. “A plastic bicycle helmet.”
“Wilco just hates me,” Nick said. “I don’t know why.”
“And he didn’t bring his own rope,” Wilco continued.
“The American team brought my rope.”
“He surfed the ’net all day and mostly brought petrol so he could run his generator.”
“Wilco had generator envy.”
Such spats ranged from essential to existential, and when Chhiring overheard them, he drew into himself. Compared with those who climbed Everest, the K2 mountaineers more blatantly blurred the line between crazy and courageous. Many were hoping to bag all the 8000ers—the fourteen peaks taller than 8,000 meters—and their swagger sometimes overshot their skill. The strong resented the weak, the weak resented being discounted, and the arrogance unsettled Chhiring. Anticipating that they’d all have to work together, he sized up the most ambitious of the group.
Chhiring found the Basque climber Alberto Zerain astonishing; he had never seen a European who could climb like a Sherpa. Alberto had struck a deal with Shaheen, agreeing to work as a high-altitude porter in exchange for a tent spot.
In addition to Alberto and Shaheen, Chhiring considered Wilco among the most capable mountaineers at Base Camp. A knight of the chivalric Order of Orange-Nassau, Wilco was on his third crusade. He had attempted the Savage Mountain twice before and failed. In 1995, a rock smashed his arm “so the bone was jutting out through the skin.” During the 2006 season, bad weather had beaten him back.
This time, Wilco was the first to arrive at K2, setting 3,000 meters of rope along the Cesen route. But when the knight abandoned chivalry and tried to charge the customary toll for use of these lines, his popularity tanked. On most days, he wanted to go home and see his wife and seven-month-old son. “I wanted to feel love,” he recalled. “I was crying inside my tent, thinking, ‘I’m done with this mountain.’ ”
Chhiring recognized Wilco’s homesickness, but he rarely spoke to him. He preferred the company of Wilco’s Irish teammate, Gerard McDonnell, who got along with everyone. A musician and engineer, Ger had acquired the nickname “Jesus” because of his messianic beard and his role as the camp peacemaker. He had also experienced a resurrection of sorts and had a dent in his head to prove it.
In 2006, climbing K2 with Wilco, Ger was at about 23,000 feet when a rock slide hissed down the slope. As Ger ducked behind a boulder to shield himself, a gneiss hockey puck spun at him and smashed into the left side of his Kevlar helmet. Climbers use Kevlar because it is tough—it’s a common component of bullet-blocking body armor. Nevertheless, the helmet dented, and the impact chipped off a shard of Ger’s skull, exposing his brain.
Ger’s climbing partner, Banjo Bannon, tore a wool sock from his pack and wadded it over the peephole. Delirious and losing blood, Ger stumbled down the mountain. After several desperate hours, he staggered into Base Camp and passed out. Storms kept the helicopter from landing that afternoon. The next day, Ger was airlifted to Skardu’s Combined Military Hospital.
Chhiring would have retired if he had a hole in his head, but this was a minority view. Base Camp was crawling with adrenaline junkies. Extreme skier Marco Confortola was in the vanguard, amusing his friends with videos of himself zipping down vertical drops in an aerodynamic catsuit. A tattoo of gothic script scrawled across the back of his neck cautioning, Selvadek (Wild Thing). His right bicep sprouted a row of edelweiss tattoos, each one signifying an 8000er that he had climbed. A Buddhist mantra was etched into the flesh of his wrist: Om mani padme um, a meditation for benevolent attention. The thirty-seven-year-old Italian lived with his mother. When anyone asked about his long-term plans, Marco said he refused to be tied down: “I am married to the mountains.” K2, however, wasn’t his type. “She is not a lady like Everest,” he said. “K2 is a surly and disagreeable man.” Marco was positive about the mountain’s gender because women coddled him, and no female, not even a goddess, could reject him the way the Savage Mountain had. In 2004, a windstorm on K2 had slapped Marco’s tent off the slope, taking his gear with it. Determined to succeed this time, Marco paraded around Base Camp wearing a patchwork of corporate logos and pumping hands with anyone he came across.
In contrast to the voluble Italian, Serbian mountaineer Dren Mandic spent his free time away from the crowd. Chhiring often watched him pacing the moraine, photographing birds or stooping to admire a clump of moss. At home in Serbia, Dren volunteered at an orphanage, and over the years he’d cared for a menagerie of strays and pets, including dogs, fish, geese, a goat, hamsters, parrots, pigeons, a squirrel, snakes, spiders, and turtles. As a child, Dren even refused to step on the grass. “How would you feel if someone stomped on your neck?” he had told grown-ups. Named after a medicinal tree whose sharpened sticks are used to lance boils, Dren was now thirty-two and in love with a woman who worked at the zoo.
Chhiring sometimes wandered the moraine as Dren did, but when he needed a retreat, Chhiring usually sought out the happiest people around, the newlyweds Cecilie Skog and Rolf Bae. They invited Chhiring to lounge on their inflatable IKEA couch and watch the comedy Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. The lack of oxygen made the film’s antihero more hysterical than he might normally have been, and they played and replayed it.
Cecilie, who had once called climbing a “male-dominated affair,” was the first woman to complete the Explorer’s Grand Slam, reaching the top of the tallest mountain on every continent—the Seven Summits—and the North and South Poles. K2 was a kind of honeymoon for her and Rolf. They had been married only a year. After K2, they were planning a more conventional adventure: They wanted to have a baby.
Chhiring admired the newlyweds, and seeing them made him miss Dawa. He sometimes felt alone in a swarm of strangers. His friend Eric helped him practice reading English, and Chhiring helped Eric dispense medicine to the sick. They treated everything from bronchitis to appendicitis, stocked camps, and waited for the weather to improve.
For twenty-seven days, storms prevented anyone from going far. Shaheen flexed his diplomacy, Nick stoked his generator, Wilco cried in his tent, Ger told cautionary tales, Marco flashed his tats, Dren studied moss and birds, Rolf and Cecilie watched Borat, and Pasang set ropes for the Flying Jump. The jet stream battered the mountain, and snow flurries buried the camps. Until the weather cleared, the climbers could only wait.
Around the planet churns an invis
ible sea of waves, swells, and currents. Alfred Russel Wallace, codiscoverer of evolution by natural selection, called it “The Great Aerial Ocean.” Gas expands and contracts, rises and falls, warms and cools. Solar rays zip through atmospheric layers and strike the land, transforming into heat. Jet streams, cyclones, and ocean currents traffic the earth’s energy.
Stuck in Base Camp, the teams monitored a raucous layer of atmosphere called the troposphere. The stakes were sky-high: Windless days deliver the summit; unpredicted storms kill. As Buddhists perform pujas and Muslims kneel in salat, all denominations worship the meteorologist. Well-funded expeditions engage one for the entire season at $500 per day.
Nothing predicts weather with absolute precision, but infrared photos, satellite images, weather-station data, and an ensemble of statistical models run through supercomputers can foretell the future up to ten days in advance. For most of the year, the models predict the same thing for K2. Week after week, the jet stream blasts the summit. Yet, in summer, for a few hallowed days every few years, the winds die. This weather window is brief and precious. Until it opens, climbers acclimatize so they can bolt up the mountain when the forecaster calls.
Acclimatization hinges on genetics. Some mountaineers can adjust to altitude in two weeks; others will never get used to it. No matter how much they train, they can’t climb high mountains without bottled oxygen. These different physical responses help explain why climbing is rife with theories about how best to acclimatize. Climbers will tell you to eat bananas, meditate, practice yoga, sleep on your left side, swallow Diamox, or avoid it and instead chew yarsagumba, a mummified caterpillar with a mushroom spore shooting from its brain.
Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day Page 11
