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July 6 - July 9, 2024
The final toll was bleak: within twenty-seven hours, eleven climbers had died in the deadliest single disaster in K2’s history.
Some considered the climb an example of hubris, a waste of life fueled by machismo or madness: thrill-seekers trying too hard to get noticed by corporate sponsorship; lunatics climbing in a final act of escape; oblivious Westerners exploiting the lives of impoverished Nepalis and Pakistanis in a bid for glory; the media feeding off deaths to sell papers and products; gawkers observing the spectacle for entertainment.
Kathmandu is still waiting for the Big One, an earthquake that could flatten the city. The tremors of 1253, 1259, 1407, 1680, 1810, 1833, 1860, and 1934 knocked down temples and killed tens of thousands. The next quake will be worse.
During their first week on the job, some Sherpas who have never climbed will be breaking trail, hauling gear, and establishing camps for professional guides and their clients. It makes a certain kind of sense on Everest. Thousands of people have summited it. The routes are well established, the climbing is nontechnical, and the wage for each support climber is substantial—about $3,000 plus a bonus for each client who tops out. Sherpas from mountain villages are better acclimatized than their clients and often have superior strength and balance at high altitude. On Everest, these abilities can
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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.
In the late 1970s, Pakistan, which had limited the number of K2 expeditions to one a year, began allowing many more. Overcrowding contributed to the death toll, which spiked in 1986 when thirteen climbers perished in a single summer.
The death of David Sharp in 2006 epitomized this decline. A thirty-four-year-old math teacher, Sharp was descending from the summit of Everest when he collapsed, still clipped to the fixed line, fewer than 800 feet above the highest camp. Over the next twelve hours, as many as forty summit-hungry climbers reportedly passed him as he lay dying.
But people don’t climb because it makes sense. You can come up with reasons—it gives direction to the lost, friends to the loner, honor to the reprobate, thrills to the bored—but, ultimately, the quest for a summit defies logic. So does passion. So does a trip to the moon. There are better things to do. Safer, cheaper, more practical. That’s not the point.
Two hours before he murdered them, Crown Prince Dipendra tried to get his family to relax. He started a billiards game, poured drinks, and joked about turning thirty. The Tarantino-style bloodbath that followed inflamed a civil war that displaced 150,000 Nepalis, including a potato farmer named Pasang Lama.
At sea level, Sherpas have such a low red-blood-cell count that they are technically anemic, but, curiously, they don’t show symptoms.
Probably by circulating blood faster. Sherpas have wider blood vessels. They breathe more often when at rest, providing their blood with more oxygen to absorb, and they exhale more nitric oxide, a marker of efficient lung circulation.
According to custom, an individual’s primary name is one of seven weekdays. Boys and girls born on Monday go by Dawa; Tuesday babies are Mingma; for Wednesday, it’s Lhakpa; Thursday, Phurbu; Friday, Pasang; Saturday, Pemba; Sunday, Nima.
The word resurfaced in the 1901 Darjeeling census, which classified Sherpas as one of four types of Bhotias, or Tibetans. Nepal’s most recent census considers Sherpas to be a self-reported ethnicity, so anyone can claim to be one.
Safdar had ascended the throne by chucking one brother off a cliff, beheading a second, dismembering a third, poisoning his mother, and garroting his father, who had murdered his own father by sending him a smallpox-laced robe. “Patricide and fratricide may be said to be hereditary failings of the royal families of Hunza,” contemporary historian E. F. Knight once noted. The Mir, “whose cruelty was unrelieved by any redeeming feature,” took personal and military advice from a drum pounded by invisible hands, audible only to him.
When Art Gilkey’s team gathered stones to honor their friend in 1953, they started a morbid tradition. To keep their campsites sanitary, climbers began using the memorial as a place to dispose of the fingers, pelvic bones, arms, heads, and legs found in the glacial melt. Burying these scraps under the Gilkey Memorial felt more respectful than leaving them to the ravens.
During a sky burial, Buddhist lamas or others with religious authority carry the body to a platform on a hill. While burning incense and reciting mantras, they hack the corpse into chunks and slices. They pound the bones with a rock or hammer, beating the flesh into a pulp and mixing in tea, butter, and milk. The preparation attracts vultures, and the birds consume the carcass, carrying the spirit aloft and burying it in the sky, where it belongs.
To persuade skittish tourists, the Alpine Club of Pakistan had successfully lobbied for climber-friendly incentives. By 2008, the Ministry of Tourism, using a sliding scale based on altitude and season, had slashed fees for 8,000-meter peaks to half their pre-9/11 rates. Some lesser peaks were on sale at 95 percent off. A K2 permit was $12,000, while Everest cost seven times more. At the same time, the ministry stopped enforcing caps on the number of expeditions to K2 and other peaks. In practice, anyone with ready cash could attempt any Pakistani mountain, at any time, by any route.
Acclimatization hinges on genetics. Some mountaineers can adjust to altitude in two weeks; others will never get used to it. No matter how much they train, they can’t climb high mountains without bottled oxygen. These different physical responses help explain why climbing is rife with theories about how best to acclimatize. Climbers will tell you to eat bananas, meditate, practice yoga, sleep on your left side, swallow Diamox, or avoid it and instead chew yarsagumba, a mummified caterpillar with a mushroom spore shooting from its brain.
During acclimatization, the kidneys excrete more bicarbonate ions, acidifying the blood, which quickens respiration. The bone marrow revs up red-cell production so the blood can transport more oxygen. Blood flow surges in the brain and lungs. Without acclimatization to altitude, someone dropped off at the summit of K2 would black out within minutes. Those who have acclimatized can last several days.
Capillaries in the eyes explode like fireworks, and this hemorrhaging blurs vision in severe cases. When the fluid collects in the lungs, which have the body’s greatest concentration of capillaries, climbers suffer from high-altitude pulmonary edema. Instead of breathing normally, victims of high-altitude pulmonary edema can only pant. The cough resembles the bark of a sea lion. The pulse races. Lungs cannot deliver oxygen. Death comes within hours unless the climber descends fast or is entombed within an inflatable pressure bag.
Teams would advance along two routes, the Abruzzi and the Cesen, which converge at high camp, or Camp 4. Twenty-six climbers had claimed the Abruzzi; ten had chosen the Cesen.
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.
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.
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.
At his back was China; to his face, Pakistan; and above, infinity. At 28,251 feet, Pasang was the highest human on earth.
In a worst case, the body revolts with acute vasospasm as arteries constrict, cutting blood supply to the organs. Within three minutes of acute vasospasm, cells wither in the heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, and brain. Within twenty minutes, the organs degrade to medical waste, and the climber does too.
“It was quiet,” she later wrote. “No wind. Just stars and loneliness.”
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.
But Marco had alienated Pemba Gyalje, the Sherpa who had saved his life. In Marco’s memoir, he characterized Pemba as a porter, not an equal, and misidentified him as “Pemba Girgi.”
By helping Pasang down the Bottleneck, Chhiring had pulled off one of the most heroic rescues in K2 history; by sacrificing his ice axe and anchoring it to a rope system, Pasang had anonymously prevented many climbers from wandering off-route to their deaths.
