Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day (4 page)

Miyolangsangma refused to intercede. The gale pounded them, and, after two days, they were presumed dead. Sonam may have forced himself to stagger several hundred meters before he fell. Climbers discovered his pack below Pasang Lahmu’s body.

As confirmation of Sonam’s death spread to Kathmandu, Chhiring couldn’t accept it. He remembered how Sonam had assured him that Everest could be climbed without consequence. “I saw he was mistaken about that,” Chhiring said. “My head was telling me to quit and go home.” Yet when he returned to Beding, Chhiring saw the power of money. His six-year-old brother Ngawang was plump and wore new shoes. His father had installed a corrugated tin roof. His sister was learning to read. Although the family mourned Sonam, none of Chhiring’s siblings were asking him to quit. “And I couldn’t,” he said. “I didn’t want to.”

The following year, Chhiring was back on Everest with a Norwegian team. Climbers recognized his endurance at altitude and recruited him to work for them on subsequent expeditions. Soon Chhiring had joined teams from Belgium, England, France, Germany, India, Japan, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, and the United States.

As Chhiring landed more jobs, he became more ambitious. When clients asked him to carry a forty-five-pound load, he hauled ninety. Instead of simply carrying, he volunteered to fix ropes, break trails, lead pitches, organize expeditions. He stopped using bottled oxygen, which purists regard as doping. He worked Everest as a yearly routine, reaching the summit ten times, and broke an endurance record for topping out three times in two weeks.

Family members saw him change. He became wealthy by Nepali standards and seemed indifferent to the elders’ prophecy. Sometimes he climbed not for the money but for the exhilaration. His
lama
warned that it was only a matter of time before he’d be cursed. Chhiring’s father, now healthy, decided that his son had gone mad. Villagers were afraid Chhiring’s riches would tempt the younger generation to leave.

They were right. When Chhiring returned to Rolwaling during the off-season, he wore La Sportiva boots and a North Face jacket. He brought provisions for the village—fuel, rice, socks, wool sweaters—and described urban novelties, such as motorcycles and televisions. The teenagers were awed. Mountaineering may be a sin, but it sure made you rich. Villagers flocked to Kathmandu.

Chhiring gave them a place to stay, found them jobs, and started an expedition company, Rolwaling Excursion. The elders appreciated the clothing he brought back, and their opposition softened, even as Beding’s population crashed to
twenty-three permanent residents
.

Chhiring’s accomplishments impressed his peers, but critics dismissed his achievements because they were on Everest. Anyone can climb Everest over and over, they argued, even a
Playboy
centerfold
. The mountain has fixed lines strung from nearly start to finish. Everest is commercial, more a jungle gym for tourists than one of the great climbing challenges. Although this guy may hold an endurance record, it’s from high camp, not Base Camp. Real climbers take on real mountains, like K2. Chhiring craved the chance to prove himself, but getting to K2 cost money, and he was about to settle down.

At sixteen, Chhiring had fallen for Dawa Sherpani, a girl he’d seen herding yaks. Dawa hadn’t taken him seriously then. Now she owned a teashop near Boudhanath, and Chhiring was a regular. He’d sit at a corner table, swilling black tea, and jump up, making his presence felt, if a male patron paid Dawa too much attention. Dawa wasn’t impressed, but Chhiring had learned to move fast. He persuaded Dawa to consult his
lama
to see whether their horoscopes were compatible. It was a perfect match.

They skipped the traditional three-day ceremony, exchanged vows in an hour, and went to his place. Their daughter, Tshering Namdu Sherpa, arrived in the spring. Four years later, Dawa gave birth to a second daughter, Tensing Futi Sherpa. The family, along with Chhiring’s brothers and sisters and Dolkar, a white spaniel, moved into a cream-colored townhouse that resembled a four-tier wedding cake. It had more than just running water and electricity; Chhiring’s home had a television, a microwave oven, an office, a prayer room, two computers, and four bathtubs—luxuries he’d never dreamed of as a child.

Compared to Beding, this was easy living. Chhiring’s expedition company boomed, nearly doubling in size every year. Chhiring began organizing climbs with dozens of employees, many from his village. By now a major patron of Rolwaling’s monastery, Chhiring finally had won approval from the elders. He held platinum elite status at the Mount Everest Summiters Club. His daughters were becoming fluent in English and attended a private prep school. Only his wife seemed worried.

“So many people relied on him,” Dawa said. “If he got killed in the mountains, Chhiring wouldn’t just be hurting himself. He’d be hurting me and the children. I didn’t know what we’d do if he died.”

2

Doorway to Heaven

K
2 was born during a period of mass extinction. Sixty-five million years ago, as dinosaurs were dying off, the Indian continental plate sped north at six inches a year, a reckless pace in geological time. It plowed into Eurasia, wedging itself under the larger continent, and K2, like Everest, rose from the sea. Still rising, the Karakorum is earth’s youngest mountain range, with jagged edges unfiled by the elements.

The word
Karakorum
stems from several languages in the Altaic linguistic family of Central Asia:
kara
means “black” and
kor’um
means “gravel” or “rock.” The city of Karakorum was Genghis Khan’s opulent capital in thirteenth-century Mongolia, and traders used
karakorum
to describe the
highest pass
along the way. The British explorer William Moorcroft climbed the Karakorum Pass in the 1820s and applied the name to the mountains around it. In the 1930s, the Royal Geographical Society
affirmed the title
.

The range extends southeast through Kashmir, along the borders of Pakistan and China, and latches into the Himalaya. The Karakorum has the world’s largest concentration of peaks more than five miles high. Harsher than the Himalaya, it is the most glaciated place outside the polar regions—so remote that Western explorers hadn’t mapped it until the mid-nineteenth century.

The mountain now called K2 entered surveyors’ books in 1856. The Great Trigonometric Survey of India had ordered British lieutenant Thomas Montgomerie to map Kashmir as part of an empire-wide effort to determine the exact shape of the earth. With help from Kashmiri porters, Montgomerie spent four days towing a plane table, heliostat, and brass theodolite up Mount Haramukh in the Himalayan foothills. The climb rewarded him with a panorama of spires. Two peaks 130 miles northeast jutted from the range’s spine, towering above the rest. Montgomerie peered through the theodolite, took the mountains’ bearings, and inked their outlines in his field book.

The closest peak, a hexagon with two summits, appeared taller to him. He labeled it K1.
K
stood for “Karakorum”; the numeral signified that it was the first peak in his survey. He marked the glistening pyramid farther away as K2 and later logged more mountains, all the way to K32. Along with the other peaks, K1 reverted to its local name,
Masherbrum
, or “mountain of fire” in Balti, the local language. K2’s designation stuck. Mapmakers knew its local name,
Chogori
, was a cursory description the Baltis used to signify a great peak. Linguists now claim that
Chogori
is a Tibetan word that means “doorway to heaven.” The Buddhist ancestors of the Baltis named the mountain soon after they migrated from Tibet.

Montgomerie’s visual estimate was off by 2,592 feet. K2 towers over Masherbrum. Straddling the borders of China and Pakistan, the peak looms above the Karakorum, soaring 28,251 feet, making it the second-tallest mountain on earth. Everest stands just 778 feet higher. From a distance, K2 resembles a prehistoric shark tooth. Closer in, you can see its striated gneissic rock, encased in ice. On clear mornings, the summit floats imperiously above the clouds and the sun bathes its glaciers with golden light.

Thomas Montgomerie’s Sketch of K2:
A British lieutenant sketched the mountain’s profile in his field book and labeled it K, for the Karakorum mountain range, and 2, for the second mountain in the survey. To locals, K2 is
Chogori
, or “doorway to heaven” in Tibetan. Mountaineers often refer to it as the Savage Mountain.

K2 lacks the mass of Everest, but it’s sleeker—and meaner. Climbers call it “The Savage Mountain.” The peak has all the obstacles of Everest, and more. K2’s glaciers are riddled with fissures concealed by layers of snow; climbers step on these crevasses, punch through, and, if unroped, disappear. Blocks of ice cleave off overhanging glaciers; avalanches roar down icy flanks. And then there’s the altitude. No human, plant, or animal can tolerate such harsh conditions for more than a few days. With each lungful of air, climbers on the summit suck in only a third of the oxygen they breathe at sea level. Oxygen deprivation saps their strength and compromises their judgment. Altitude illness breaks them, giving some the coordination of toddlers.

As if these difficulties weren’t enough, storms are harsher on K2. It stands 882 miles northwest of Everest, and, being farther from the equator, is more vulnerable to extratropical cyclones and their accompanying jet streams. Everest at least follows a reliable weather pattern: Water evaporates from the Bay of Bengal east of India, forming cloud banks; they float northward over the Himalaya, nudging the jet stream off the summit, in advance of the monsoon. In May, relatively windless weather graces Everest for as long as two weeks. In contrast, K2’s weather window is a crapshoot. Climbers don’t know when the window will open—or whether it will open at all.

All this makes for dismal statistics. Before 2008, only 278 people had stood on K2’s summit. Everest’s summit roll was 4,115, and its fatality rate—the percentage of climbers who went above Base Camp and died—had
averaged 0.7 for the previous decade
. Although the Himalayan Database crunches the numbers for Everest, no accurate statistics exist for K2. Climbers of the Savage Mountain can’t reliably approximate their chances of survival and don’t want to. In 2008, the fatality rate of those leaving Base Camp for a summit bid was 30.5 percent, higher than the casualty rate at Omaha Beach on D-day. Among high-altitude climbers if not statisticians, there’s no comparison: K2 is more lethal than Everest.

It took a century of alpinism before a mortal stood on K2’s summit. One early attempt involved “The Wickedest Man on Earth.” Mountaineer, author, pornographer, and occultist, Aleister Crowley had eclectic passions, attracting admirers long after his death. The Beatles featured him on the album jacket of
Sgt. Pepper’
s Lonely Hearts Club Band
just as prominently as Karl Marx and Marilyn Monroe. In 1902, Crowley and his friend Oscar Eckenstein decided to climb K2.

On the way to the mountain, Eckenstein was arrested for espionage. Crowley, meanwhile, loaded the packs with tomes by Milton and whipped the porters. Some of these porters deserted, stealing Crowley’s clothes.

As Crowley and his teammates negotiated K2’s Northeast Ridge, weather pushed him back five times. One man’s lungs filled with fluid, and Crowley was hallucinating from a combination of altitude and opium. At high camp, Crowley pulled out a revolver and tried to discipline a teammate, who knocked the gun away and socked him in the gut. Crowley accused another climber of hoarding food and going mad. He booted the hungry man off the team.

After nine weeks and five summit bids, they failed to reach the top, but Crowley’s expedition achieved a measure of success. They spent a record amount of time at high altitude—more than two months—and climbed to a respectable 21,400 feet, a record on K2 that stood for decades.

If Crowley embodies the climbing nut, the leader of the next major expedition epitomizes the climbing aristocrat. Luigi Amedeo Giuseppe Maria Ferdinando Francesco di Savoia-Aosta, more concisely known as the Duke of the Abruzzi, was a veteran explorer who had lost four fingertips trying to reach the North Pole. Fleeing a scandalous romance in 1909, he decided to head for the hills. The duke failed to get permission to scale Everest, so he christened K2 as the Third Pole and left his
palazzo
to climb it.

Abruzzi departed Europe on the steamer
Oceana
, laden with 10,454 pounds of luggage, including a brass bedstead, feather pillows, and sleeping bags layered with four types of animal hides. Trekking through the princely states of Kashmir, he was slowed by banquets, polo matches, and gift-giving ceremonies. Runners brought in daily mail and newspapers, and one of the duke’s early concerns was, to quote the expedition diary, “the smell of the natives,” who were “unbearable, even in open air.”

But even as Abruzzi pressed a scented handkerchief to his nostrils, he took in a majestic vista. K2 was “the indisputable sovereign of the region, gigantic and solitary, hidden from human sight in innumerable ranges, jealously defended by a vast throng of vassal peaks, protected from invasion by miles and miles of glaciers.” The landscape impressed him enough to bestow his own name on its features. Some of these names, such as K2’s Abruzzi Spur and the nearby Savoia Glacier, are still used today.

The duke spent six weeks trying one route after another, surveying and posing for photographs. He never made it above 20,500 feet. “If anyone does get to the top,” he later informed the Italian Alpine Club, “it will be a pilot, not a mountaineer.”

The duke’s prediction held for nearly half a century, but two men almost disproved it in 1939 during what became “the
most bizarre tragedy
in the history of Himalayan mountaineering.”

Fritz Wiessner—“Baby Face” to his friends—had the dimples of a cherub and the charm of a hornet. Famous for first ascents on monoliths such as Devils Tower in Wyoming, he had hired eight Sherpas to help him bag K2. On the evening of July 19, one of them, Pasang Dawa Lama, had him on belay 750 feet below the summit. As the sun dipped, trailed by a sliver of moon, Pasang
heard a rustle
. Blue scales flared in the dusk.

According to
lamas
who mythologize the climb, Pasang was familiar with the goddess of K2 and her appetite for human flesh. He watched in horror as Takar Dolsangma dismounted her dragon, hitched the beast to the slope by its tongue, and sniffed the air. It had been 1,122 years since her last meal.

Pasang “was so afraid,” recounted Wiessner. Oblivious of the danger, he shouted for more slack.

“
No, sahib
,” Pasang responded, gripping the rope. “Tomorrow.”

Incredulous, Wiessner turned back. The retreat, however, did not appease the goddess. As Pasang rappelled down the ice, she gripped the dragon’s withers and soared into the sky. Spiraling toward Pasang, the dragon grazed his pack, knocking two pairs of crampons down the slope. Attempting the summit was now hopeless, and Pasang began strategizing about how to get down.

His first challenge was Wiessner, who was bent on topping out. The next day, as the men recuperated at high camp, Pasang watched for dragons, and Wiessner
sunbathed nude
. “Since the day before, [Pasang Lama] had no longer been his old self,” Wiessner recounted. “[H]e had been living in great
fear of the evil spirits
, constantly murmuring prayers, and had lost his appetite.”

At dawn, the men climbed to the Bottleneck and examined the ice. “With crampons, we could have practically run up,” Wiessner puffed, but without crampons there was no choice.
They turned around
for the last time.

On descent, Pasang relaxed. The camps below would be stocked with supplies and armed with Sherpa support. He had provoked Takar Dolsangma yet somehow survived.

But she hadn’t forgiven him. On an icy slope above Camp 8, Pasang’s body lurched forward, as if jabbed by an invisible elbow. His throat let loose “
a funny little noise
” as he began to slide. Wiessner knew what to do. “I put myself in position,
dug in
as much as possible, and held him on the rope.” Pasang regained balance, but what he encountered in the next camp shook him more than the fall. There was nothing: no additional supplies and no one except a dehydrated straggler, American millionaire Dudley Wolfe, who was slurping snowmelt from the folds of a tent.

Wolfe joined the rope team, and the trio descended through the fog until the goddess evidently tripped Wolfe. The line pulled taut and jerked all the men off their feet. They barreled toward a 600-story drop, gear spilling from their packs. “All I was thinking was,
how stupid
this has to happen like this,” Wiessner recounted. About 20 yards before the cliff, he flipped onto his stomach, swung his axe, and broke the fall. All skulls were intact, but only one sleeping bag had survived. The men would have to share it.