by Ed Viesturs
After the tragedy, a member of the Dutch Norit team, Cas van de Gevel, who reached the summit and downclimbed successfully, was quoted in Outside magazine as saying, “On the mountain there were no heroes.”
Instead, there was full-blown chaos, the every-man-for-himself panic that van Rooijen later so vividly described. The chief reason for that, I believe, is that there was nothing like a unified band of mountaineers on K2. Instead, there were ten different teams with climbers from fifteen different countries. Most of them didn’t know each other beforehand, and at base camp they didn’t form lasting friendships beyond the boundaries of their own teams.
But there was also something relatively new going on that summer, something that has already played itself out with a vengeance on Everest in recent years. It’s a kind of dehumanization, and if it’s inevitably the wave of the future, as I think it may be, well, that says something sad about mountaineering. It involves a scenario in which one climber comes across another climber who’s in a truly desperate situation. And it’s as if the climber who’s not in trouble says to himself, I don’t know you. You’re not my problem. And so he leaves the victim to die—or at least to get himself out of his own predicament.
I just don’t understand that way of thinking. Six times on 8,000ers, I’ve given up my own plans to try to help save the lives of others. Sometimes they were partners and good friends, such as Dave Carter on Everest, J.-C. Lafaille on Broad Peak, and Jimmy Chin on Cho Oyu. But others—like Beck Weathers on Everest and Gary Ball and Chantal Mauduit on K2—were strangers to me before we met at base camp. I can’t really say what other people should have done in comparable predicaments; I just know what seemed instinctively to me to be the right thing to do. I couldn’t live with myself if I’d just walked past someone in bad trouble and left him to save himself.
Van de Gevel was wrong, however. Last summer, there were heroes on K2. As seems increasingly to be the case on the world’s tallest mountains, they happened to be Sherpa.
From Camp IV, on the afternoon of August 2, several climbers could see the three Koreans at about 27,000 feet, above the traverse and the Bottleneck. They were still moving feebly, though making no downward progress. With them was a Sherpa, Jumic Bhote, who had also summited, and who may have been effectively guiding the Koreans. In Camp IV were Tsering Bhote and Pasang Bhote, Jumic’s brother and cousin, respectively.
These two Sherpa performed an incredible feat. They climbed the Bottleneck and the traverse—without fixed ropes, of course. In the lead, Pasang reached the three Koreans, who were almost unconscious, and Jumic. Pasang managed to revive two of the Koreans and his cousin and get them started down the mountain again.
Just as the four climbers reached the top of the Bottleneck, according to Freddie Wilkinson, who reconstructed what happened for Rock and Ice, another huge chunk of the Motivator cut loose. It scoured the Bottleneck, sweeping the two Koreans and the two Sherpa with it. As Tsering Bhote watched in horror, all four men plunged to their deaths. Deeply shaken, Tsering managed to descend safely to Camp IV.
Meanwhile, the media were focused on the survival stories of Marco Confortola and Wilco van Rooijen, reporters hanging on every word the Italian and the Dutchman uttered from their hospital beds in Islamabad. Thus this last and most deadly episode of the tragedy, which concealed the genuine heroism of Pasang Bhote and Tsering Bhote, nearly passed beneath the radar.
Sherpa heroism did not end there. Along with Alberto Zerain, the two most competent and experienced climbers on K2 that summer were thirty-four-year-old Chhiring Dorje and thirty-four-year-old Pemba Gyalje. Chhiring had climbed Everest ten times, Pemba six. In the early morning hours of August 1, Pemba had been one of the lead climbers fixing rope up the Bottleneck. Far stronger than the Europeans, he could have left them behind and gone for the top on his own. But on the summit, he waited until the last European topped out, just to make sure everyone was all right, and only then descended with the stragglers.
Pemba did this not because he was a “hired gun,” which he was not, but just, I suspect, because he was a Sherpa. The best Sherpa have far more endurance at the end of a long summit day. Westerners tend to think, Boy, that was hard. I’m exhausted. Sherpa think, Well, yes, it’s hard, but that’s what it is.
They’ve worked hard every day since they were kids. They’re used to carrying heavy loads from village to village. Their whole lives are about hardship and struggle.
When climbers such as McDonnell, van Rooijen, and Confortola chose to bivouac, both Chhiring and Pemba decided to climb down toward Camp IV in the dark. Near the top of the Bottleneck, Chhiring ran into another Sherpa, Pasang Lama, who had also reached the summit, but who by now had dropped his ax. If anyone was truly stranded on the mountain, it was Pasang.
“Pasang Lama was worried, but I said don’t worry,” Chhiring later e-mailed Freddie Wilkinson. “We have only two options—one is staying here, which is very dangerous under the serac. The other option is to descend down with one ice ax, which may lead us to Camp IV …if we don’t slip.”
So Chhiring cut off a short hank of broken fixed rope, tied Pasang to him in a tight tether, then, facing in, used his ax and his crampons to descend the Bottleneck, with his fellow Sherpa almost dangling from his harness like a haul bag. The two eventually reached Camp IV without mishap.
That’s a pretty astounding deed. But I can just imagine how you might pull it off: kick each foot in solid, plant the ax, then tell the other guy to kick with his own feet and even punch holds with his hands. Don’t move until he’s secure. Still, if Pasang had come off, he probably would have taken Chhiring with him. Talk about selfless!
It’s a Sherpa thing. They’re loyal. It’s their ethos, instilled in them on Everest. They just feel it’s the right thing to do.
But if Chhiring and Pasang could make it down with one ice ax between them, one guy short-roped like a dead weight to the other, why couldn’t those Europeans have downclimbed the Bottleneck unencumbered?
Pemba Gyalje reached Camp IV by 1:00 A.M. on August 2. In the morning, on learning that a bunch of climbers were still unaccounted for, he simply headed back up the mountain. To do that, after an exhausting summit day of your own—and both Chhiring and Pemba had summited without supplemental oxygen, the first Sherpa to do so on K2—takes incredible fortitude. And, once again, incredible selflessness.
Pemba reached Marco Confortola halfway up the Bottleneck. The Italian was unconscious and probably suffering from severe altitude sickness. With bottled oxygen, Pemba got Confortola going again. But almost as soon as the two men had started down, the third serac collapse—the one that carried the two Koreans and Pasang Bhote and Jumic Bhote to their deaths—nearly took out Confortola and Pemba. The Italian was struck in the back of the head by a chunk of falling ice. He started to fall, but Pemba grabbed him from behind and held him. The Sherpa then shepherded the Italian the rest of the way down to Camp IV. There is no doubt that Confortola would have died had Pemba not rescued him.
This time, as he collapsed in his tent, Pemba was truly worn out. But the next morning, when he learned that Wilco van Rooijen was still missing, he went out again.
Van Rooijen had gotten wildly off route as he made his impulsive and desperate descent. He had wandered to the west not only of the Abruzzi Ridge but of its western variant, the Cesen route, by which the Dutch team had ascended. He may have glancingly intersected the prominent snow ridge called “the Shoulder,” but he missed Camp IV altogether. After a second night out, van Rooijen was truly lost—and near death.
Bizarrely enough, the ring of the Dutchman’s sat phone in the darkness gave his team the first inkling of his whereabouts. On August 3, Pemba and Cas van de Gevel found van Rooijen. They led him slowly back to Camp III, which the three men reached only well after dark.
In his interviews with reporters, van Rooijen made scant mention of Pemba’s rescue. Recounting his epic to National Geographic Adventure, the Dutchman credited instead his own skil
ls: “My mountaineering experience let me be quiet and patient enough to wait for better weather…. I took a risk climbing some difficult technical parts to traverse to easier slopes and to easier glaciers. I finally survived.”
This is a sad trend in recent mountaineering on the 8,000ers. When something screws up, the Sherpa are the first ones to be blamed. But when a Sherpa performs heroically, as Pemba did in saving the only two climbers who bivouacked above the Motivator and then got off the mountain alive, they barely get credited, and often they are not even named.
I was very gratified, then, when Pemba Gyalje was hailed by National Geographic Adventure in December 2008 as its Adventurer of the Year, an award I had won in 2005. The National Geographic Society, or NGS, flew Pemba to Washington, D.C., for the ceremony, and I heard that he really enjoyed it, as he stood beaming and holding aloft his trophy, while the audience in the posh society headquarters gave him a wild standing ovation.
Topping off the encomiums, the American Alpine Club bestowed its most prestigious honor, the David A. Sowles Memorial Award (for heroism in saving the lives of other climbers), on Pemba at its annual meeting in Golden, Colorado, in February 2009.
People often ask me if a disaster like last summer’s is bound to happen again on K2. And my answer, sadly, is yes. Too many of the climbers who survive such a fiasco tell themselves, Well, I got away with it. And too many others, planning their own future expeditions, think, Oh, it’s not going to happen to me.
The most those of us who have climbed the world’s highest mountains can hope to do is educate others. I also tried to educate myself every step of the way on all of my climbs, realizing I could never learn enough. But sometimes I wonder if even trying to educate others is a lost cause. Little that we say or do seems to sink in. The appeal of risk seems to outweigh the rewards of discipline on hazardous peaks. To cite an oft-quoted statistic, after the 1996 season, when so many inexperienced clients came to grief on Everest, in 1997 the numbers of applicants willing to pay as much as $75,000 apiece to get guided up the highest mountain significantly increased.
After No Shortcuts to the Top was published in 2006, I got hundreds of letters and e-mails from readers. Very few of them were negative or critical, and many folks wrote to say that they were captivated or even inspired by my story. But the e-mail that probably moved me the most—the one that almost stunned me, it came so out of the blue—didn’t arrive until December 2008. That e-mail alone helped reaffirm for me that it was worth writing and talking about the risks and rewards of our glorious but dangerous pastime—that some good may yet come out of sharing with others what the mountains have taught me.
The e-mail was from Chris Klinke, the American on K2 in 2008 who, dismayed by the traffic jam on August 1, turned back. Klinke and I had never met, but he wrote:
Hi Ed,
I wanted to thank you for something that you are not even aware of at this point. But as I was making my decision to turn around just below the Bottleneck I kept remembering a discussion that I had with my teammates at BC….
The thing that helped me make the decision was the discussion we had about your feeling of regret about your summit on K2 because you violated your own personal rules of listening to your gut….
In remembering that conversation with my teammates and your description of that feeling in your book I made the decision to turn around. Despite the fact that there were 24 people heading to the summit, despite the fact that the weather was amazingly perfect, I felt my gut telling me something entirely different.
Listening to that feeling was a good decision for myself, and I appreciate the fact that I had the ability to get guidance from those on the mountain and those who came before me.
I hope to meet you in the future and I thank you for blazing the trail on so many mountains.
Be Well,
Chris Klinke
2
DECISION
In 2007, after another controversial spring season on Mount Everest—record numbers reached the summit, but seven climbers died—I was asked by the New York Times to write an op-ed piece. The editor’s only half-articulated premise was What can we do about this mess? As we talked and e-mailed back and forth, I began to realize that what she really wanted from me was a rigid set of rules and restrictions that somehow could immediately be put into action. When I told her that I thought you couldn’t make rules about mountaineering, she quickly lost interest in my writing a piece.
All kinds of commentators shared the Times editor’s sentiments in the wake of 2008’s K2 disaster. There was also a widespread determination to pinpoint the supposed “villains” of the story. If we could only identify the cause of the tragedy, these armchair judges implied, we could fix it so it wouldn’t happen again.
I’m afraid I just don’t see things that way. About arriving on the summit as late as 7:00 P.M., for instance, I have no trouble saying that I’d never do that. But that doesn’t mean that I can tell other climbers what to do. In mountaineering, right and wrong aren’t black-and-white. For every “rule” you might try to apply to our pastime, you can come up with a classic example of some daring alpinist who flagrantly violated it, and in the process became a legend. In 1953 on Nanga Parbat, according to the wisdom of the day, the Austrian climber Hermann Buhl should never have gone for the summit alone. He should have turned around rather than reach the top as late as 7:00 P.M. Above all, he should not have let himself get so strung out that he would have to bivouac on a ledge so tiny he couldn’t even sit down on it. But Buhl did all of the above, and although he lost toes to frostbite, by making the only first ascent of an 8,000er ever to be accomplished solo, he immortalized his deed as one of the boldest climbs ever performed in the Himalaya.
Suppose you did try to establish rules about climbing on Everest or K2. What committee would enforce them? What gatekeeper is going to stand at base camp and say, “Okay, you can head on up the mountain. Nope, you better turn around and go home.” Suppose the American Alpine Club tried to tell Nepal or Pakistan that they ought to limit the number of permits they give to expeditions every year or screen the applicants for competence. Forget it—those impoverished countries make serious amounts of money from expedition permits. Who are we to tell them how to run their business? In 2008, when the Chinese government cleared all other climbers off the north (Tibetan) side of Everest so that they could carry the Olympic torch over the summit, and even persuaded Nepal to make radical restrictions on the south side of the mountain, a lot of Western climbers got pretty pissed off. But the real victims were the Sherpa. By now, a significant portion of the whole Sherpa economy depends on the spring and fall seasons on Everest. A Sherpa who goes high to carry loads, fix ropes, and establish camps for American or German or Korean climbers can earn from a single expedition most of the yearly income that supports himself and his family. You didn’t read much about it in the newspapers, amid all the coverage of protests in Paris and San Francisco and Lhasa, but thanks to Chinese arrogance, in 2008 a lot of Sherpa people were hit hard by the financial backlash.
As for disasters: we can’t stop the kind of catastrophe that played out on K2 in August 2008 from happening again. We shouldn’t even try.
Paradoxically, the glory of mountaineering has everything to do with this state of affairs. Climbing is about freedom. There’s no prize money; there are no gold medals. The mountains are all about going there to do what you want to do. That’s why I’ll never tell anyone else how to climb. All I can say is, This is how I prefer to do it.
These feelings, which are central to my philosophy of mountaineering, rose to the surface not only in the aftermath of 2008’s disaster on K2, but as that tragedy made me think all over again about my own expedition to the world’s second-highest mountain in 1992. Among all my thirty expeditions to the 8,000ers, I feel now, the K2 campaign was the one most marked by ecstatic highs alternating with abysmal lows. And it was also morally the most complicated.
That expedition was a roller-coaster r
ide of a learning experience for me, but I was young, ambitious, and hungry for any type of opportunity. That’s why I was willing to accept and suffer all the difficulties that were thrown into my path.
Scott Fischer and I would have preferred to go to K2 with a solid team made up of good friends. When I first heard that he was organizing an expedition, and I got up the nerve, in effect, to invite myself along, Scott had so many teammates lined up that all he could promise was to put me on the waiting list. But as the trip drew near, one by one the others dropped out, until the “team” consisted only of Scott and me. By then we were so broke that both of us doubted whether we could afford an expedition to K2.
That’s why we ended up buying slots on somebody else’s expedition. We joined a Russian team led by Vladimir Balyberdin, or simply “Vlad,” as everybody called him. On paper, the deal looked like a reasonable quid pro quo: the Russians were eager to sell places on their permit in order to afford the expedition themselves, since what they lacked above all was hard currency. Vlad proved to be a strong climber (like me, he’d already gotten up Everest and Kangchenjunga), but he was a leader in name only. Almost from the start, there were tensions between the Russians and the rest of us who had bought places on the team. The word “team,” in fact, would be an oxymoron that summer.
It was only in 1975 that the Pakistani government caught on to the lucrative trick of selling multiple permits to K2 in a single season. That summer, instead of leasing the mountain only to Americans (as it had in 1953) or Italians (1954), the Ministry of Tourism granted simultaneous permits to teams from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, Austria, and Japan. “Throughout the summer,” writes K2 historian Jim Curran, “there was a more or less continuous procession of porters carrying supplies and equipment up the Baltoro Glacier. The result was chaos.
