by Ed Viesturs
It’s at this point that it’s hard to figure out just what happened on K2 late on August 1. The various accounts that filtered back from the survivors are so mutually contradictory, you can’t stitch them together into a coherent narrative. It seems that the strongest climbers hoped to down-climb in the night all the way to Camp IV. But others, upon realizing how late they would arrive on the summit, apparently planned to bivouac well above the crux traverse and the Bottleneck.
By “planned to bivouac,” I don’t mean to suggest that this was part of their preconceived agenda. As far as I can tell, none of them carried a bivouac sack, or a half sleeping bag, or even a stove, and by now nearly all of them were without food and water. It may be that they had become so wasted that there seemed no alternative to bivouacking. But one thing is clear: whether that night or the next morning, they were counting on the fixed ropes to get down through the Bottleneck to Camp IV.
The weather was still perfect. But to survive a night in the open above 27,000 feet without shelter, food, or water, you have to hang your life out on a limb. Yet it’s amazing how many climbers on K2 seem to take for granted the option of bivouacking on the way down as the price to pay for bagging the summit. On our own 1992 expedtion, the ostensible leader of our team, Vladimir Balyberdin, bivouacked above 27,000 feet. Vlad was a tough dude, he had a mild night, and he got away with it. The next night, Chantal Mauduit thought she had no choice but to bivouac at 27,500 feet, but Aleksei Nikiforov, coming down from the top three hours later, roused her out of her apathy and cajoled her into descending with him—probably saving her life.
In 1978, my friend Jim Wickwire was one of the four climbers who became the first Americans to climb K2. Jim and his partner, Lou Reichardt, got to the top at 5:15 P.M. Lou realized the importance of heading down at once, and took off after only a few minutes. But Jim lingered, almost in a trance, taking photographs, changing the film in his camera, and savoring that indescribable achievement, until he had spent close to an hour on the summit. It’s uncannily similar to what happened on Annapurna on the first ascent in 1950: Louis Lachenal was obsessed with getting back to camp, while Maurice Herzog, the team leader, stayed and stayed, caught up in a euphoric vision that would ultimately cost him his toes and fingers.
On K2, Lou made it down to high camp that night, but Jim had to bivouac just below 28,000 feet. He barely survived; by the time he reached base camp, he was suffering from both pneumonia and pleurisy, his vocal cords were paralyzed, and he had incurred some frostbite. He was absolutely wrecked. Porters had to carry him in a litter back to Concordia, and he was eventually helicoptered off the Baltoro.
There’s an old joke: “bivouac” is a French word for “mistake.” I’m proud of the fact that on all thirty of my expeditions to 8,000-meter peaks, I never once had to bivouac. On several occasions, I turned around short of the summit rather than submit to a night out without shelter. In 1990, if Greg Child, Greg Mortimer, and Steve Swenson had bivouacked instead of calling upon their utmost reserves to get back to camp, they might well have died on the north ridge.
After Zerain and several of the Sherpa, the strongest climbers that day were probably the Norwegian trio: Cecilie Skog; her husband, Rolf Bae; and their teammate Lars Nessa. At dusk, ahead of all the others, they climbed down the ramp and clipped in to the last fixed rope on the near end of the traverse to the Bottleneck.
It was at this precise moment, sometime between 8:00 P.M. and 9:00 P.M., that the geologic fluke that would transform the gathering fiasco into a true catastrophe occurred. As Freddie Wilkinson reconstructed the event in Rock and Ice:
Bae [was] in the lead. Skog traversed next and heard the sickening roar of a large avalanche in the darkness. A second later, Skog was wrenched off balance as the rope she was clipped to broke somewhere below. Bae’s headlamp disappeared.
Skog called out in the black night for her husband, but got no response.
A huge section of the Motivator, that ferocious but apparently stable ice cliff hanging over the route, had collapsed at the worst possible moment.
Despite the unfathomable shock of having her husband crushed by tons of ice as he traversed just ahead of her, then hearing his body plunge and vanish with the falling debris, Skog kept her wits about her. She carried a thin 165-foot rope in her pack. Now she and Nessa tied that cord to the broken end of a dangling fixed rope and rappelled into the Bottleneck. They downclimbed the couloir in the dark and made their way back to Camp IV in the early morning hours.
When the first bulletins from K2 hit the newspapers and the Internet, the initial scenario made it sound as though the collapsing ice cliff had wiped out most of the climbers who had died on the mountain. But Bae was apparently the sole direct victim of the crashing ice blocks. Far more consequential was the fact that the debris took with it a sizable section of fixed ropes—estimates by the climbers themselves ranged from 600 to 1,500 feet. And this unforeseen event effectively stranded all the climbers above the Norwegians in a cul-de-sac that was, paradoxically, of their own making.
By the time Rolf Bae was killed, several of the other climbers had already decided to bivouac. The Dutch leader, Wilco van Rooijen, later reported that he never saw the serac collapse, and didn’t know until much later that it had. At something like 27,200 feet, van Rooijen carved out a seat in the snow slope and settled into it as he anticipated a grim night with neither sleeping bag nor food nor water. Beside him, two other members of the Dutch Norit team prepared their own bivouac seats. They were the Italian, thirty-seven-year-old Marco Confortola, and a thirty-seven-year-old Irishman, Gerard McDonnell. A fun-loving folk musician and oil worker, McDonnell was especially well liked by his teammates. A few days earlier, he had left a farewell note on his online blog upon leaving base camp, a phrase in Gaelic that translates as “That’s all for now, friends. The time is coming.” On reaching the top late on August 1, McDonnell phoned his girlfriend in Alaska. He had become the first Irishman to climb K2.
From a hospital in Islamabad, Confortola recounted his bivouac to a reporter from the British newspaper the Independent. “Since Gerard was having a difficult time,” the Italian said, “I made his hole bigger to help him lie down for a little bit. Gerard was very cold. I was also cold and began to shiver on purpose to create heat. I was wasting energy, but I needed to get warm.” The bivouac ledge was perilously exposed. “I made sure not to fall asleep,” Confortola added, “because I could have fallen [off the mountain].”
The three men managed to get through the night, then started down in the morning. Somewhere they came across three Korean climbers, tangled up in a single rope with which they were tied together. “There was a Korean guy hanging upside down,” van Rooijen recalled. “There was a second Korean guy who held him with a rope but he was also in shock and then a third guy was there also, and they were trying to survive but I had also to survive.”
Van Rooijen said that the Koreans declined his offer of help. But Confortola insisted that he and McDonnell spent three hours trying to disentangle the Koreans from their snarled rope and get them started down, to no avail.
At this point, even Confortola’s several accounts of what happened didn’t quite jibe. To the Independent reporter, he claimed that “for some strange reason,” McDonnell started “to walk away.” To others, he reported (in Matthew Power’s paraphrase), “Suddenly … Gerard turned around and began to climb back up the slope, back toward the Koreans, offering no explanation.” McDonnell’s friends later concluded that he went back up in a final attempt to give aid to the Koreans.
I’m not surprised at these discrepancies. By the time Confortola finally reached base camp, he was so wiped out that his memory could well have been playing tricks on him. And all climbers accept the sad fact that nonclimbing journalists can never seem to get our stories right. We have all had the experience of thinking that we explained very lucidly to some reporter just what happened on some mountain, only to have a completely garbled version appear in print.
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In any event, at this point, while he was still in the Bottleneck couloir, Confortola fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. He awoke to a loud booming noise. He later told the website K2Climb.net, “I saw my friend Gerard’s boots falling among the blocks of ice and snow. That was the worst moment.”
Apparently, a second, smaller serac collapse—a kind of aftershock of the massive initial breakdown of the night before—had engulfed McDonnell and carried him to his death. Later, the grieving Italian remembered his friend: “I used to call him Jesus. The beard, everything, he looked like Christ. He was always smiling. He was a flower.”
By now, chaos reigned among the climbers still trying to negotiate the descent. Van Rooijen bitterly recaptured the scene: “People were running down but didn’t know where to go, so a lot of people were lost on the mountain on the wrong side, wrong route. They were thinking of using my gas [bottled oxygen], my rope. So actually everybody was fighting for himself and I still do not understand why everybody were [sic] leaving each other.”
Had the climbers been members of a single unified team—like the Americans on K2 in 1953, for example—they might have rallied to one another’s aid. But given how many different teams were on the mountain in 2008, with only whatever rudimentary English each one commanded as a common language, it is not surprising that anarchy prevailed.
By this point, van Rooijen and Confortola had separated. Their solo descents took on the nightmarish quality of last-ditch retreats. And both men became effectively lost. Van Rooijen later told National Geographic Adventure,
The next morning after I spent the night, it was difficult to come down. I had radio contact with my climbing partners in Camp IV, but … [I] didn’t find Camp IV. I was on the wrong side of the mountain. People at base camp saw me go over the wrong side of the ridge…. I had to sit out a whiteout because I couldn’t see anything and I knew I couldn’t go down any further. So I waited.
And to his brother over a satellite phone from Pakistan, Confortola recalled, “During the descent … due to the altitude and the exhaustion, I even fell asleep in the snow, and when I woke up I could not figure out where I was.”
Even without a sleepless night in a bivouac, it’s easy enough to get lost descending a mountain like K2. Coming down from the summit in ‘92, Scott started to veer off in the wrong direction, too far east. If I hadn’t corrected him, he might have led us completely off the Abruzzi Ridge, into uncharted terrain on the east face.
On the way up, a lot of climbers gaze ahead; they never look down at the way they came. But at some point in the descent, they start wondering, “Now, where was it that I came up this thing?” I’ve always made it a fundamental principle to keep looking down on the way up, to memorize the landmarks that will guide my descent. It’s partly instinct, and it’s partly my training as an RMI guide. On Rainier, on Denali, that was hammered home as a crucial thing to do.
The chaos on the morning of August 2 was so total that we don’t even know what happened to some of the climbers who died. One of them was the sixty-one-year-old Frenchman, Hugues d’Aubarède, the guy who almost pulled up stakes and went home, before van Rooijen talked him into giving the mountain a last shot. On the summit, d’Aubarède radioed his final message home: “It’s minus twenty [degrees Celsius], I’m at 8,811 [meters]. I’m too cold, I’m too happy. Thank you.”
Somewhere on the descent, d’Aubarède simply vanished. In all likelihood, he fell off the mountain as he tried to downclimb. Like those of many K2 victims over the decades, his body may never be found.
By the time the disaster had run its course, eleven climbers had died in a single thirty-six-hour period on K2. Besides the Serb Dren Mandic, the Pakistani porter Jehan Baig, the three Koreans, Rolf Bae, Gerard McDonnell, and Hugues d’Aubaréde, the victims included another Pakistani porter who was climbing with the Frenchman, and two veteran Sherpa.
To be sure, a lot of mistakes were made on K2 in August 2008. Too late a start by too many climbers from Camp IV; too many people on the route at the same time, climbing too slowly, which created the traffic jam; the further delay when the team leaders insisted that the fixed ropes in the Bottleneck had to be repositioned; summit fever, which kept so many from turning back short of the summit; too late an hour when all but Zerain topped out; the panic that set in after the serac collapse in the night.
The initial media coverage, however, made it sound as though the collapse of the Motivator was the direct and sole cause of the tragedy, almost like an act of God. But except for Rolf Bae, people didn’t die because of the serac collapse. They died because of what that serac collapse created, after all the other ominous conditions surrounding the ascent had come into play.
It’s very much like what happened on Everest in 1996. The “killer storm” of May 10–11 wasn’t the single direct cause of the tragedy. It was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. That camel had already been overloaded by climbers starting too late, going too slowly, refusing to turn around, and using up their reserves of energy and bottled oxygen.
Even so, I was shocked by the viciousness of the public response to 2008’s tragedy. All kinds of nonclimbers riveted by the news from K2 seemed to derive a kind of spiteful glee from the terrible events. After the New York Times ran its front-page story about the disaster, scores of folks weighed in online. Something like 90 percent of their comments were derogatory I-told-you-sos. The Times article said nothing about “heroes,” yet carpers made such comments as “It’s long past time to stop calling these egomaniacs heroes and call them what they are. Selfish, egomaniacs, and stupid.” Another reader wrote in, “Heroes my ass. No one should feel an inch of sympathy for these egg heads.” Yet another proclaimed, “They engaged in marginally suicidal behavior and wound up dead. To me, they were stupid and reckless beyond all limits.”
It was as if mountaineering itself were considered by the public—or at least by a significant sector of the public—to be nothing more than a selfish, idiotic form of Russian roulette. It was also assumed that the climbers on K2 were fat-cat millionaires. Wrote another Times respondent, “Because someone is rich enough to travel to the end of the Earth to play chicken with suicide does not make him a hero.”
Call this the Krakauer effect, though you can’t blame it on Jon Krakauer. Since I was involved in the ‘96 Everest catastrophe, when our IMAX team temporarily gave up our own summit plans to try to rescue climbers in trouble, I had a front-row seat as the tragedy unfolded. At the time, I was critical of some of the decisions made by both clients and guides that May, and I still feel they made fatal mistakes. But I can’t imagine sitting in some armchair back home and rejoicing that these “clueless dilettantes” got what they were asking for. Sadly, a major vein in the public response to Into Thin Air ran along just those lines.
But there’s no viable analogy between Everest in 1996 and K2 in 2008. Not a single one of the eleven climbers who died that August on the world’s second-highest mountain was a true client in the sense that Scott Fischer’s Mountain Madness or Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants customers were. None of them were paying big bucks to have a commercial guiding company get them up the mountain. They were almost uniformly experienced climbers in their own right. The Pakistani porters may have helped the Europeans carry loads and establish camps, but they were not acting as true guides. And the Sherpa on K2 were not hired hands but climbers going for the top themselves, on an equal footing with their Western counterparts.
Yet in one respect, 2008’s mountaineers allowed themselves to slip closer to the status of clients than nearly anyone had on previous K2 campaigns. This had to do with their dependence on fixed ropes. In the aftermath of the tragedy, too much focus has been put on the collapse of the serac, too little on the whole business of the fixed ropes.
In general in the mountains, it’s harder to climb down a pitch than to climb up it. And if you’ve relied on fixed ropes to get yourself up the Bottleneck and across the traverse—just “jugging” along, w
ith your ascender clipped to the line—it can be terrifying to face having to descend those same passages without fixed ropes. Especially in the dark, after you’re really strung out from taking so long to get to the summit.
In 1992, Scott, Charley, and I had no fixed ropes to help us get up and down the Bottleneck. We climbed the couloir; then, on the descent, despite the dangerous accumulation of new snow, we simply faced in, kicked in our crampons, planted our ice tools, and climbed down that steep, 600-foot slope. Even Jim Wickwire in 1978, though near death after his bivouac, summoned the nerve and the technique to climb down the traverse and the Bottleneck unaided by fixed ropes or partners.
No one even thought of fixing ropes all the way through the Bottleneck until about two years ago. How quickly, though, the comfort of fixed ropes gets taken for granted. It even starts to seem to some climbers like a privilege that ought to come with the K2 package, as reflected in Wilco van Rooijen’s petulant complaint that some of the designated fixers didn’t “show up” and that other climbers placed the ropes in “the wrong places.”
If you’re counting on fixed ropes to get you over all the hard places, you’re much less likely to carry your own rope, much less any pitons or ice screws. Cecilie Skog and Lars Nessa may have survived because Skog carried her own thin rope, with which the two of them improvised a rappel over the most difficult passage. It doesn’t seem as though any of the other “stranded” climbers even thought about rappelling—probably because they didn’t carry their own ropes and hardware. It’s easy to imagine this scenario, since carrying extra gear for those “just in case” situations is not a priority anymore, while trimming weight and traveling light is. The three Koreans were found tangled up in their climbing rope. Why didn’t they untie and try to rappel with it? Perhaps they were simply too exhausted, too befuddled by hypoxia, their fingers too stiff with cold to manage the operation. We’ll never know.
