Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day

by Zuckerman, Peter

  Climbing an 8,000-meter peak resembles a siege, and over the years, two campaign strategies have emerged: expedition style and alpine style.

  Expedition-style climbing is akin to trench warfare. High-altitude workers scout the route, break trail, fix lines, and establish fixed camps, each higher than the last. Returning to Base Camp, they scoop up supplies and climb the mountain again, stocking the tents with food and fuel. Then, on the summit push, they climb to the camps again, escorting the clients through crevasse fields and up the slopes. With expedition-style climbs, clients frequently use oxygen during the long and expensive assault on the mountain, and many have no compunction about taking drugs to aid acclimatization.

  Alpine-style climbing is like a blitz. Elite teams with as few as two people sprint up and down the mountain as fast as their bodies allow; speed is safety. They pack light, only the bare essentials, and carry their tent between camps. They also adhere to a protocol called “fair means,” which rejects acclimatization drugs, high-altitude porters, and bottled oxygen. Alpine-style climbers who adhere to fair means are the real rock stars of mountaineering. They generally are highly skilled and experienced, and they attract considerably more attention and respect than expedition-style climbers.

  True alpine style forgoes fixed lines, but hardly anyone attempts the purest form on K2. Mountaineers on K2, regardless of style, need to fix ropes. To do this, a lead climber, with a rope attached to his harness, starts up a pitch and creates a protection by driving in a snow picket, twisting in an ice screw, hammering in a piton, or looping a sling over a solid rock. Then the climber clips the rope through the protection, continues up, and adds more hardware as required by the terrain.

  A well-placed anchor should hold on rock, but snow and ice are harder to predict. If the lead slips and the anchor holds, the belayer can quickly brake the rope, and his partner will only fall twice as far as the last anchor. To absorb some of the shock of a fall, ropes are designed to stretch, but that’s not always enough to avoid pulling out an anchor. The astute belayer knows whether to stop a fall instantly or to slow it more gradually, thus reducing the yank on the line.

  With alpine-style climbing, the leader climbs to a suitable spot, puts in a solid anchor or two, and prepares to stand nearby to belay. The second climber then ascends. With expedition-style climbing, the ropes stay in place. The followers clip onto the fixed ropes with a jumar—a D-shaped device that bites the rope like a ratchet, sliding up but not down—and winch their way along the lines. If a climber slips, the jumar, leashed to the harness, stops the fall immediately. On descent, fixed ropes serve as a convenient hand line, and, on steep terrain, they provide an easy way to rappel down.

  Expedition-style climbing might appear safer, but it isn’t necessarily. Hanging from knots that strangers have tied, many commercial expeditions’ clients don’t have lead-climbing experience or a clear understanding of climbing mechanics. Faster clients get caught behind slower ones, or climbers set out in groups, placing the weight of several bodies on a single anchor, which “increases the chance that somebody is going to blow up the whole thing,” as Wilco put it. Overloaded anchors pull out and then everyone goes down, initiating a death train. In 2008, all the climbers approached K2 in expedition style, but each team imposed its own ethos. The Flying Jump relied heavily on fixed lines, support staff, and bottled oxygen; the Dutch team abstemiously followed the fair-means rules of engagement.

  Early on the morning of July 28, Chhiring, Pasang, and Shaheen left Base Camp as part of the lead team on the Abruzzi route. The snow was pitted and pocked, Chhiring recalled, “as though the goddess had swung a hammer” along the route. Ice screws had melted out or vanished. Fresh snow slides covered the bamboo stakes that marked supply caches, and sections of fixed lines, now buried, had become useless. Pulling them out could trigger avalanches. The climbers strung new ropes.

  Pasang, breaking trail, stomped out bucket steps for the climbers to follow, testing for hidden crevasses and marking weak snow bridges with purple flags. When he reached camp, he realized that the jet stream had sent some tents sailing, leaving lonely platforms. So he pitched new tents.

  Once the lines were reset, the rest of the climbers followed, using jumars attached by a line to each climber’s harness. The followers stepped in the lead climbers’ tracks to reduce the chance of setting off an avalanche or dropping down a crevasse. “You take a step. You breathe. You take another step. You breathe again,” explained Wilco. “Your whole mind is occupied with taking each individual step.” Using just an ice axe or a ski pole to balance, they climbed a distance roughly the equivalent of three Empire State Buildings on the first day.

  To overcome the exertion, mountaineers use several tricks to stay strong at altitude. One method is to inhale deeply, pursing one’s lips and exhaling forcefully, as if blowing up a balloon. This is known as pressure breathing; physicians call it positive end expiratory pressure, or PEEP. Patients with emphysema or other breathing difficulties use this technique reflexively, and research shows that it improves gas exchange and prevents fluid buildup in the lungs. The pursed lips and forceful exhalation increase air pressure, which resuscitates the lungs’ air sacs, or alveoli, so they can expand, absorb more oxygen, and expel more carbon dioxide.

  Many climbers also take rest steps, a gait with a momentary pause and knee lock. Greater weight rests on the leg when locked, not bent, and spares the calf and thigh muscles. The gait looks stiff, as though the climber were wearing stilts, but it postpones “Elvis leg,” or uncontrollable muscle twitching.

  Some members of the teams were professional guides who knew the safest and most efficient ways to climb; others floundered, wasting energy. Based on how they moved, “it became clear that not everyone was as skilled at mountaineering as they had made out,” recalled Marco, who had been a mountain guide for eighteen years. This worried him and many others. “Some of them were ignorant of basic safety,” recalled Fredrik Sträng, a Swedish mountaineer on the American team. “Kicking off rocks [that could hit climbers below], stepping on ropes with crampons, yanking fixed lines, clipping six people to a rope that should only hold two. When I saw the crowd climbing, I thought, ‘What the hell? They’re going to get us killed.’ ” Fredrik was so frustrated he started climbing at night to avoid the crowds. He hoped that by the time the two major routes converged at Camp 4, exhaustion and altitude would have culled the weak, forcing many to turn back.

  Alberto Zerain sometimes avoided fixed lines altogether. He took the advice a friend had given him after attending an organizational meeting at Base Camp. “K2 is set for tragedy,” Jorge Egocheaga had told Alberto, suggesting he avoid “the circus” and climb the mountain independently. With this in mind, Alberto broke a trail of his own, hauling everything he needed on his own back. He pulled ahead of the crowds, caught up with Shaheen, and helped him break trail to Camp 2.

  For safety, if not comfort, mountain camps are often wedged underneath rock outcroppings, away from avalanche trajectories. These few protected spots are usually cramped and crowded, as was the case with Camp 2. “Tents were on top of each other,” recalled Eric. By the evening, “more than 30 people were there, and it was just too dangerous to go far to take a crap, so the space between the tents turned into a sewage canal.” When melting snow for dinner, the mountaineers scooped up the whitest stuff they could find in the darkness, dropping iodine tablets into the pot. Many smeared their fingers with Purell before handling food. But it takes just a speck of stool to infect climbers with campylobacteriosis, or some other digestive illness.

  In Camp 2, Shaheen drank two cups of Balti milk tea and fell asleep. A few hours later, he doubled over at the threshold of his tent, vomiting uncontrollably. “It was clearly bacterial gastroenteritus from contaminated water,” recalled Eric, who treated Shaheen. “He could have gotten it from the tea”—as Shaheen suspected—“but might have picked it up even earlier than Camp 2.” Eric gave Shaheen six gray-green tablets of Compazine, wh
ich reduces vomiting and nausea, and six chalky pills of Cipro, an antibiotic. He advised Shaheen to descend in the morning.

  Shaheen had no intention of going down. He’d never left his team midclimb and wasn’t going to start on K2. He willed himself to feel better by daybreak and retreated into his tent. Tossing, he tried to sleep but spent the night heaving, trying to vomit out his empty stomach.

  In the morning, something else was wrong: his lungs gurgled. As other climbers prepared to leave, Shaheen managed to yank on his boots. He weaved 10 feet across camp to where Alberto was about to strike his tent. “Leave your tent up and use mine in Camp 3,” Shaheen said. He handed Alberto dried apricots, about 40 yards of lightweight rope, three ice screws, and a Ziploc bag of oatmeal.

  “Can you get down?” Alberto asked him.

  Shaheen waved off discussion. He needed Alberto to forget about him. Describing the precise location of his tent in the two highest camps of the Abruzzi, he instructed Alberto to take his place on summit day and supervise placing ropes through the Bottleneck.

  Alberto stuffed Shaheen’s vital gear into his pack and left to face the Black Pyramid.

  “We shook hands, said good luck,” Alberto recalled. “He said goodbye to his friends, and that was it.”

  As Camp 2 began to empty, Shaheen heard Iso Planic of the Serbian team radio Base Camp. “Shaheen Baig needs an evac on the Abruzzi,” Iso said. Shaheen interrupted on the same frequency. “I am fine,” he insisted. Iso left camp, and soon Shaheen was alone.

  Furious with himself, Shaheen decided to rest for an hour and catch up to the others once his health improved. As the hours passed, his stomach burned and kept trying to empty itself. He spat pink froth into his glove. His wheezing became shallower, and he coughed so hard he expected to crack a rib. Shaheen could ignore the nausea, but not the telltale gurgle in his lungs. Pulmonary edema had set in, and he’d drown in his own fluids if he didn’t drop altitude fast.

  He sat there thinking about it for the rest of the day. As the sun sank behind Broad Peak, Shaheen realized it was too late. Getting down on his own felt impossible. He could barely move. He refused to radio the climbers higher up the mountain, which would jeopardize their summit bids, and he couldn’t imagine that anyone left in Base Camp could reach Camp 2 in time to save him.

  Sullenly, he picked up the radio and called Nadir Ali Shah, the Base Camp cook for the Serbian team. “Shaheen asked to be left on the mountain,” Nadir recalled. “He didn’t want anyone to risk dragging down a dead body.”

  Around the same time, Wilco sat inside a tent anchored to a pinnacle at 23,600 feet. Unaware that Shaheen had fallen ill, the leader of the Dutch team was on a different part of the mountain, the Cesen route.

  Wilco was having a bad day. Most of his frustrations came from things he couldn’t control. For example, he had just missed a $500 shipment of Mars candy bars, ferried by nationalistic Dutch trekkers. The sixty pounds of chocolate, intended to power him to the summit, sat melting in Base Camp. His main gripe, however, was Serbian climber Hoselito Bite. Wilco couldn’t shake him. “I was telling him straight,” recalled Wilco. “I said, ‘Hoselito, we want to be friends with you, but you can’t climb with us. You’re too slow. . . . You are not going with us to the summit because you are not capable of it.’ ”

  Wilco disliked being K2’s bouncer, but someone had to do it. The altitude had debilitated Hoselito, who had spilled a can of sardines in one of the tents, saturating the fabric with fish oil. The close quarters of the tent now carried the stench of low tide. What would happen if Hoselito failed to buckle his harness or crampon correctly? Wilco wanted him to turn back before he hurt himself and needed an evac, endangering his rescuers and costing them the summit.

  But Hoselito pushed himself to keep going. He told Wilco he was feeling fine and would soon be climbing faster. He had oxygen cylinders in his pack, and he’d start using gas at Camp 4. “I have my daughter to return to,” Hoselito told him. “I’m not going to get killed.”

  When the radio crackled at Base Camp, Nadir Ali was in the Serbian mess tent, scrubbing dishes in a tub of glacial melt. The static made it hard to hear the details, but Nadir understood enough.

  “It had something to do with Shaheen’s lungs, and he was in Camp 2,” along the Abruzzi route, Nadir recalled. “He didn’t want a rescue, but he needed one, and I knew he was too proud to ask. I figured he’d be conscious if I got there fast enough.”

  Nadir, a thirty-three-year-old with a pompadour of black hair, usually fried cheeseburgers at the Chancery Guest House in Islamabad, chatting with tourists. He had little formal training as a mountaineer but aspired to be a climbing guide, and Shaheen had helped him break into the business, finding him work as a cook and, occasionally, as a high-altitude porter on mountains lower than K2. A devout Muslim, Nadir believed that he had an obligation to help those in need and that Allah had meant him to hear the radio call. “We couldn’t let Shaheen stay at that altitude with a lung problem,” he said. “You can die overnight.”

  Others in Base Camp apparently didn’t see it that way. Nadir sought help, but no one would take the risk. Mountaineers higher up the mountain said they never heard a call come through, and those remaining in Base Camp told Nadir he was overreacting. With the wind picking up, a late-night rescue two camps up the mountain began looking more and more irrational.

  Still resolute, Nadir didn’t have much climbing gear of his own, so he scrounged for a parka, an axe, and whatever else other climbers would donate. It took two hours to gather the equipment. Most climbers refused to part with their gear and discouraged Nadir from going up. There was nothing he could do, they said, especially with what looked like an incoming storm. Nadir managed to get through on the radio to Eric, who was near Camp 3. Eric offered his extra gear and told Nadir which drugs and shots to grab from his medical kit.

  Around midnight, wearing mismatched socks, Nadir left Base Camp alone to rescue Shaheen. Before starting, he radioed up to inform Shaheen he was coming. The only response was static.

  “I figured he had passed out,” Nadir recalled. He knew this meant he had to climb fast with the drugs. A few minutes could make the difference between life and death.

  With no stops for meals, Nadir chewed tea leaves and chocolate, pulling himself up the fixed lines. He passed three Western climbers who politely declined to assist. Nadir justified their refusal by assuming that these climbers probably lacked the energy to help and were descending with ailments of their own.

  Would they have helped if Shaheen were, say, Australian, not Pakistani? “I don’t want to answer that out loud,” Nadir said later. “They don’t work for us. We work for them, and I want to keep working for them. They pay good salaries. Most of them are good people, and we need them to keep coming back to Pakistan, so please don’t make them look bad in your book.” It’s unfair to judge people when they’re oxygen-deprived and exhausted, he said.

  When Nadir got to Camp 1, he tried to contact Shaheen again on the radio. No answer. Was he alive? Nadir knew that if he sat down to rest and think about it, he might quit. He kept heading up, praying to Allah for strength as he slid his jumar up the ropes, ignoring the quiver and burn in his calves and the pain in his throat from the dry air. Around noon, after twelve hours of frantic climbing, Nadir arrived at Camp 2.

  It was deserted. Sun soaked the scrim like bleach, blazing the landscape ultrawhite and blistering his face. He called out for Shaheen. Nothing.

  Where was he? Nadir shook one of the tents, unzipped a flap, and leaned inside. All he saw were empty sleeping bags. He eyed one of them and considered collapsing into the soft down. Even if he found Shaheen now, how would they descend? Nadir couldn’t carry him—Shaheen was almost a foot taller and forty pounds heavier—and, in his condition, the sick man wouldn’t be able to do more than slither.

  Nadir sat down to collect himself. About to shut his eyes, he spotted a lump between the tents. It was Shaheen, curled up in a fetal position on the
snow and surrounded by “something that looked like Pepsi.”

  At Camp 2 along the Cesen route, Wilco and Hoselito waited out a blustery day in their tents. Hugues, with his high-altitude porters, Karim and Jehan, kept moving up. Hugues’s weather god in Chamonix had predicted windless days ahead, and the Frenchman wanted to position himself for the summit.

  Yan’s forecast was right—at first. The weather stayed calm on July 29, and the men arrived at Camp 3 that evening. At sunrise, they continued up, enjoying the fine weather, but by late afternoon, winds began shrieking down K2’s Shoulder. Karim and Jehan worked fast, stomping out a platform and staking the tent. Cramming inside with Hugues and Nick Rice, they heard the rising growl of the wind. As gusts buffeted the tent, they supported the poles by pressing their shoulders against the fabric dome.

  The Shimshalis, who had less faith in Yan’s statistical model, tried to rest as Hugues grabbed a sat phone and punched in the thirteen numerals for Yan’s home in Chamonix. Shouting above the wind, he kept asking the voice at the other end of the line to repeat the message.

  “The winds don’t exist,” Yan said.

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘They don’t exist.’ ”

  “What do you mean they don’t exist?”

  Yan explained that he was at his desk, studying two monitors that undulated with waves and darts. They showed a gentle breeze blowing across K2’s Shoulder. That meant the seventy-mile-an-hour wind blasts pummeling Hugues, Karim, and Jehan were katabatic, ghost winds that the supercomputers of Météo-France could not see. Katabatic windstorms form when air at higher altitude cools, becoming more dense, Yan explained. Pulled by gravity and a lower pressure gradient, the air pours down the mountain like water.

  These ghost winds were dangerous, but they materialize and vanish so suddenly that they only terrorize climbers for brief periods. Yan told Hugues that if the three of them would sit tight, the gusts should stop within an hour or two.