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

by Zuckerman, Peter

  This rope stopped short too, delivering Pasang to a landing no wider than a shoebox. Once again, his intuition rebelled against the reality. Where was the rest of the rope? Why did the lines keep vanishing?

  As he sifted through his thoughts, the rope above him whipped to the side. Another headlamp was making its way down, smoothly and quickly. The glow approached. Beneath a halo of light Pasang could see the silhouette of Pemba Gyalje, the Sherpa on the Dutch team. Pemba stopped beside Pasang on the shelf.

  Above, stars dappled the sky but offered only faint light. Shining their headlamps in wide sweeps, Pasang and Pemba hunted for the next section of line. To Pasang, the channel below seemed to extend infinitely. Ice cubes rained down on him, dinging his head harmlessly. Like the plucks of a rubber band, the seracs above chirped and zoinged. Soon they would calve blocks the size of Buicks.

  Pemba seemed calm, but fear gripped Pasang’s chest and gummed inside his throat. He looked below. Mist glided off like fingers goading him to jump. Pasang would have to free-climb the Bottleneck without an axe, which he knew was nearly impossible.

  Nonetheless, Pasang tried, clawing and pounding the ice to create holds. He hooked his fingers in and shifted his weight, kicking his front points into the slope. He could barely grip the wall, and as he started to step down, his hands skittered across the wall’s surface, searching for soft spots. The ice was as hard as a skating rink.

  Shaking, he shuffled back to the ledge and grabbed hold of the rope’s end. Pasang was stranded. He tried to say something to Pemba, but his throat, like a corroded pipe, only sputtered. The glacier responded in a cacophony of creaks and zoings.

  Pasang had no hope. An avalanche or falling ice would certainly kill him before sunrise. Neither Pemba nor anyone else could help him unless that savior carried extra rope. Pasang thought this unlikely—he was certain that all available rope had been located and requisitioned for the fixed lines in the Bottleneck.

  “It’s over,” Pasang told himself. His time to die had come. Trying not to move, he swore and prayed that his next life would be better.

  Following the freshly excavated line along the Traverse, Chhiring recognized his wife’s face. The visitation came on gradually and intensified as he approached the Bottleneck. Dawa appeared to him as he’d first seen her, a teenager driving yaks toward a stream in the Khumbu. Clucking and prodding her animals to drink, she paced the bank.

  Suspended between dream and memory, Chhiring felt this stream swell into the river that flows below Beding, the village where he was born. Chhiring’s father, Ngawang Thundu, flickered on. With fingers gnarled from years of gripping a plow, he pointed to a boulder, smoothed by millennia in the rapids. He pressed a bony shoulder against its side and rolled the stone homeward to shore up a collapsed wall.

  Chhiring’s visions continued like a series of celluloid clips: his older daughter, Tshering Namdu, at the family altar, filling copper bowls to the rim with water; his younger daughter, Tensing Futi, emptying them into a flowerpot; his brother, Ngawang, singeing juniper branches at a rooftop puja; Ngawang Oser, his lama, blessing the charms on his bhuti.

  Of all the faces he needed, his mother’s was the one Chhiring couldn’t summon. All he could see were her ashes, billowing in the sky. Chhiring imagined that Lakpa Futi was speaking, but he couldn’t make out her words. He squatted, nodding off in the snow, but woke when he understood her. “She was telling me I had to live.”

  Chhiring focused his attention on the mountain. Studying the plowed ice, he realized what Pasang had not: The seracs had calved, transforming the icescape. “The goddess had timed it for maximum impact,” Chhiring recalled.

  He slid down the rope in small hops, and, when the first line ended, he quickly spotted the auxiliary rope that Lars had secured to the slope. Chhiring peered down the Bottleneck, wondering how far this slender line would go. Clipping on, he heard a weak cry. A headlamp switched on. Someone was below him. Chhiring rappelled down 50 yards and maneuvered himself next to two men, one of whom clung to the line’s end like fish bait. Chhiring shone his headlamp into their faces.

  Pemba looked worried. Pasang, his cheeks raw from cold and tears, looked defeated. “No axe,” he said.

  Chhiring had no idea how to respond. As the three climbers huddled together to speak, their breaths sent puffs of condensation into the air, giving the impression of a smoky backroom. Discussion was stilted. Pemba shaded his headlamp with a finger so it wouldn’t shine in the others’ faces. After a pause, he excused himself. “I’m going to look for some rope,” he said. Old lines might still be strung to the slope. Pemba hacked his axe into the ice, and his headlamp dropped into the murk.

  “What do you see?” Chhiring yelled after him.

  Pemba kept descending.

  “Any rope?” Pasang called down.

  If Pemba responded, Chhiring and Pasang couldn’t hear him.

  “He went fast, and I couldn’t blame him,” Chhiring recalled. Pemba had a wife and a three-year-old daughter waiting for him, and he’d been climbing for twenty-four hours. Pemba’s headlamp disappeared.

  Pasang turned to Chhiring and spoke without emotion. “You can go, too,” he said.

  Chhiring considered it. Taking responsibility for Pasang—stranded without an axe, on the deadliest pitch of K2, on a moonless night, without a rope, beneath crumbling seracs—wasn’t rational. But Chhiring never doubted that it was the right thing to do. Sonam, the Buddhist concept of virtue, is nonnegotiable, particularly on K2, so near a goddess who could influence his next reincarnation. She was watching and expected him to show compassion. He expected it of himself.

  The seracs creaked.

  “It’s better if the mountain only takes one of us,” Pasang continued. “Go.”

  Chhiring clipped his safety tether onto Pasang’s harness and sank his axe into the ice. “If we die,” he said, “we die together.”

  11

  Sonam

  Chhiring felt the weight of the life attached to him. His limbs operated on their own.

  Chuck. His axe sunk into the ice.

  Shink. Shink. His crampons pierced the slope.

  He descended five feet and then braced himself, poised against the wall like a gecko.

  Pasang, to his right, mimicked Chhiring’s movements as best he could. He clenched his fist and punched it into rotten ice, but his hands didn’t sink in like the pick of an axe. So he grasped Chhiring’s outstretched arm and leaned against him. Intent on maintaining balance, Pasang stepped down, kicking in with his front points: shink.

  They relied on instinct to read each other as the dance repeated—one man still as the other stepped, partners communicating with nods and grunts. The tether connecting them provided enough slack to maneuver, but they were all too aware that one false move could plunge both of them into the abyss.

  Their headlamps formed a cocoon of light, and a hail of icy golf balls pierced through it, bouncing off their helmets. As the night wore on, the hailstones became bowling balls too heavy to ignore. Pelted by ice, Chhiring dodged the larger pieces, knowing he had to hurry. Soon the mountain might release something so big it would flatten them both.

  Fortunately, “K2 sounds a warning before she tries to kill you,” Chhiring later said. He listened for the telltale sound, and, midway down the Bottleneck, heard it: a prehistoric groan. Above, hurling at him, bashing and cartwheeling, was an ice boulder.

  Chhiring tried to determine the mass’s trajectory. “But I didn’t know which way it was coming or the direction I should go,” Chhiring recalled. “It was fifty-fifty,” whether to duck left or duck right.

  He guessed left. With barely time to shout, he plunged his ice axe to the side and lunged.

  Simultaneously, Pasang let go, sliding on his stomach. He shuffled left, dangling off Chhiring’s harness, which bore almost his entire weight.

  Swooooof.

  The block swished past and tumbled into black space. As it slammed into the slope, a gust of powder
shot up from below.

  The men drew deep breaths. “You OK?” Chhiring hollered.

  Pasang, staring at the column of powder, didn’t respond. “I thought I was already dead,” he recalled.

  After a pause, they resumed inching downward over alternating bands of hard blue ice and frost. To navigate these lips, holes, and bulges, they climbed side by side, holding hands. Sometimes Pasang clung to the tether between them as Chhiring supported the weight of his body.

  Pasang wasn’t sure what went wrong midway down the Bottleneck. Ice hit his helmet, and he could no longer hold on. All of a sudden he was falling—and so was Chhiring. Their bodies whisked down the Bottleneck. Their noses and chins raked the ice.

  Chhiring hacked at the channel.

  The blade sank in but did not catch.

  Chhiring tried again, plunging in his axe. This time, granite repelled it, nearly flicking the tool from his hand.

  Gaining speed, falling faster, they dropped another story. Another two. Another four.

  Pasang clawed the mountain and banged it with his knee. Nothing slowed them.

  “We were going too fast to survive,” Chhiring recalled. “If I had seen someone survive this in a movie, I would have laughed.”

  But somehow their skulls missed the rocks that should have knocked them out. Their bodies missed the ice ramps that should have launched them into space. The tether between them held.

  They’d fallen at least nine stories when Chhiring skimmed over the perfect patch of ice. The pick of his axe dug in, and, despite their speed, Chhiring held on. He gripped the shaft of the axe with his right hand, clamping it diagonally across his chest. At the same time, he angled the adze of his axe with his other hand, grinding the pick into the ice, squeezing in his elbows, and splaying out his knees. The axe dragged down the slope and his body slowed. Choking on ice chips, Chhiring flutter-kicked with both crampons. He stopped.

  Chhiring was leaning hard against the ice axe, unable to see below. Shaking, he took a moment to listen to his heart beating. His calves and forearms burned, but he liked this pain. It reminded him that he was still alive.

  Below, Pasang was panting and hacking. So we’re both still here, Chhiring realized. They hadn’t even dislocated their shoulders or broken their wrists.

  “Keep going,” came Pasang’s rasp. The seracs were growling again, and fragments rained down. They needed to move. Fast.

  Chhiring followed Pasang’s bidding. It was miraculous that they’d survived the fall, and it saved them a tremendous amount of effort by depositing them near the Shoulder. With a chuck, a shink, and a shink, Chhiring stabbed his axe and his crampons into the slope and turned, grateful to see that the gradient had become less sheer. Pasang could move largely on his own now. Still, their progress seemed too slow. “I didn’t know how long our luck would hold,” Pasang recalled. As he continued downward, he counted the seconds like a mantra.

  When they neared the end of the Bottleneck, climbing with barely any slack in the tether between them, Chhiring sensed something drop from above. It flew softly, without a rumble, an errant slab of granite aiming for their skulls. Chhiring and Pasang were exposed, in a channel with no room to maneuver.

  Chhiring could do nothing. He exhaled, flattening his torso into a depression in the ice.

  Pasang hunched, expecting his helmet to crumple like a can of Coke.

  The block hit.

  Chhiring tensed.

  Pasang shrieked.

  The blow never came.

  The slab touched Chhiring’s helmet and pulverized into crystalline dust. In the darkness, the layer had looked like rock, but it was only a sheet of sticky powder. Chhiring’s bhuti was working.

  He and Pasang continued downward until the slope merged into the Shoulder. Mist was thickening the air, and, in the distance, around a bend, a strobe light flashed.

  When Pasang staggered into Camp 4 at midnight, mist clung to the tents like cobwebs, too dense for him to see his boots. All around him, nervous climbers clutched radios and shone headlamps into the murk. Pasang avoided them. He couldn’t bear to hear the death toll and hadn’t the will to announce, “I’m alive.”

  His crampons crunched on the ice as he reached the ledge where he’d pitched his tent. Crouching down, he doubled over and vomited. Then he rose slowly to steady himself and wandered a few steps, bumping into a fabric dome. Groping for the tent’s flap, he tore open the zipper, unstrapped his crampons, and flopped inside. Wrapping himself in a sleeping bag, he tried to switch off his mind and go to sleep, but his eyelids wouldn’t stay closed. His thoughts raced, replaying the descent. Questions flooded in. Where was Jumik? Why was he late? Who would be dead in the morning?

  Cold air suddenly gripped him, squeezing his chest. Pasang had visions of a tidal wave of snow sweeping over him and interring his body. His head pounded and his lungs constricted. He was suffocating.

  Frantic and gasping for air, he thrashed, kicking off his sleeping bag. The tent spun. He rolled over and patted the ground, feeling for Jumik. Stop, he told himself. You’re hyperventilating. Get back in the bag and calm down.

  He sucked in a lungful of air and reassured himself. Jumik was a strong climber, and he’d be back before dawn. Now Pasang needed to stay warm and recover. He closed his eyes.

  Whumpt.

  A gloved fist slammed into the top of the tent. Pasang bolted upright as the fist continued to hammer. His hypoxic brain told him that less than a minute had passed since he’d entered the tent, but the light filtering through the fabric meant he’d been there for hours. The whumpts came faster.

  Woozy, Pasang turned on his side and let darkness envelop him. He felt Jumik roll in the sleeping bag beside him and heard his cousin’s steady breathing. Pasang paced his breathing to match.

  Deep sleep at this altitude was impossible, but this time, when Pasang closed his eyes, they stayed shut. Shrouded in a sleeping bag, he felt better—not safe, but contained.

  Some mountaineers consider a stove a crucial piece of safety equipment. A burner and a canister of propane can weigh less than a beer bottle, but if you find yourself without shelter in the Death Zone, that weight can save your life. A stove melts snow, and the drinking water prevents dehydration, which aggravates hypothermia and frostbite.

  Those trapped above the Bottleneck on August 1, 2008, took a different approach. Although they had space in their packs for banners, cameras, camcorders, and flags, not one of them had carried a stove. They didn’t even have emergency bivy sacks—wind-breaking, heat-reflecting shells that weigh less than a pound.

  “No alpinist goes for the summit of an 8,000-meter peak with useless weight like a stove,” explained Marco Confortola. “You don’t go for the summit thinking you’re going to bivouac.” He had planned to make it to the top and back all in one day and wasn’t going to be weighed down by safety equipment he’d never use.

  But in the early hours of August 2, the Italian was wishing he had carried one. After posing for pictures and calling his sponsor from the summit, Marco had spent half the night pacing the slope above the Snow Dome—searching for the fixed line, the route to the Traverse, or anything at all that looked familiar. He backtracked, gesticulated, reviewed where he had gone, scouted, and returned to where he’d started. The icescape had changed, and Marco was lost.

  As the temperature hovered at minus four degrees Fahrenheit, the Italian dug out a perch to rest on, planning to get up at dawn. Ger McDonnell, his messianic beard dripping icicles, joined him. Shivering, they slumped down within shouting distance of Wilco, who was pacing in the darkness.

  Marco had enough juice in his sat phone to make a call, and he knew whom he wanted to reach: Agostino da Polenza. His mentor, who affectionately calls Marco “Stupido” behind his back, had also spent a night near K2’s summit without a stove. Agostino had made it down despite losing the insoles of his boots, which blew away while he was rubbing his feet. Marco wanted to know how Agostino had survived.

  A
fter a few rings, Agostino picked up. He got right to the point: “Fall asleep and you’ll die,” Marco heard him say matter-of-factly. And when you get up in the morning, rub and extend your legs before you stand. “If you don’t warm up your muscles, you’ll fall.”

  Saving battery life, Marco ended the call. Without betraying emotion, he stood up again and paced alongside Wilco, searching futilely for the fixed lines. Ger rose and stared into the dome of the sky. “The stars were so dense,” Marco recalled. “They pressed down on us like a blanket, trying to keep us warm.” Nonetheless, he was shaking like a windup toy.

  Around 1:30 a.m., they finally quit the search for a route and returned to their perches. Ger and Marco stayed together, and Wilco sat 15 yards away. To keep each other awake, Marco and Ger got creative. They clapped. They rubbed each other’s legs. They beat their arms. They forced themselves to shiver even harder for heat. They sang a folk song that Marco’s papà, Fonzi, had taught him for passing the time while herding goats. “La Montanara,” a hymn of the Alps, describes the mountains as “sweet little dwelling-place of Soreghina, daughter of the sun.” Ger must have appreciated the irony, Marco recalls, because the Irishman substituted Gaelic lyrics from the Irish band Kila: “Don’t fail, don’t fall, don’t slip, don’t wreck . . . do what you want, but be sure that’s what you want to do.”

  This was not what they wanted to be doing. Marco fixated on a better place. He concentrated on the spores of light below—Camp 4 at 25,800 feet—a Shangri-la of stoves, tents, and the promise of survival.

  On the crown of the seracs, another man was crouched in the snow, trying to survive. It’s hard to know how cold Karim Meherban became after taking a wrong turn, but he certainly suffered.

  Hypothermia was unavoidable. As he shivered, Karim’s blood would have shunted away from his fingers, toes, and skin, gathering around his vital organs. If his body temperature fell to 96 degrees Fahrenheit, amnesia and disorientation would have dulled his pain and fear. At 86 degrees, he would have passed out. At 79 degrees, Karim’s heart and lungs would have stopped, but this is a reversible death. If rewarmed slowly at a hospital, a hypothermia victim can be resurrected hours after breathing stops, because the heart and brain require less oxygen when chilled. They don’t usually degrade much, despite the loss of circulation, and they can start up again once body temperature rises.