K2 -Mount Everest's Deadly Sister: "A Tale of Chaos & Survival"

K2 is known as the world’s hardest and most dangerous mountain more challenging even than Everest. In 1856 Captain T.G. Montgomerie, working on a survey of India, saw the Karakorum range and measured its peaks, identifying them with a series of numbers prefixed by the letter 'K' an abbreviation of the Karakorum name; hence K2. K2 on the Pakistan/Chinese border,  is the second highest mountain in the world at 28,250 feet. Farther north and 1,500 miles from Everest, it collects heavy snow and storms, and climbers have only a few days each year when they can try for the peak, usually in early August. “For a professional, seasoned mountaineer it’s more of the holy grail than Everest,” says the veteran American climber Ed Viesturs. “There is no easy way to climb K2.”

At least nine climbers were reported dead Sunday on K2, after an avalanche struck them on a steep gully at a height of about 27,000 feet, just below the summit, mountaineering officials said.

For two months, the New York Times reported yesterday, dozens of mountaineers had huddled at camps below the peak, acclimating to the thin air, practicing their ascent and waiting, waiting, for the moment. The final push began in the dark hours after midnight on Aug. 1. Members of at least five expeditions — and perhaps as many as nine — "began the last leg of their climb to conquer Mount Everest’s slightly shorter but far more dangerous sister, K2, its peak towering, glistening and pyramidlike above them, laden with snow from recent storms."

Gerard McDonnell, 37, an Irish engineer (image patfalvey.com, via AFP — Getty Images) climbing with a Dutch team, wrote on his blog when the start date was set: “Let luck and good fortune prevail!!! Fingers crossed.”

But luck did not hold, the Times went on to report: "On the way up the last 2,000 feet, a Serbian climber fell to his death, and a Pakistani porter died trying to recover his body. And on the way back, a chunk of glacier splintered and came crashing down, sweeping at least four climbers on ropes to their deaths and leaving a handful of others trapped in the death zone above 26,000 feet — desperately cold, starved for oxygen and without ropes."

Over the next few hours and days, some of those still left on K2 battled their way to safety, some fell to their deaths and others were simply lost forever in the cold wastes of the mountain.

On Tuesday, the climber likely to be the last of the survivors, an Italian, Marco Confortola, staggered on frostbite-blackened feet to the base camp, for a time refusing help and oxygen, preferring to make his own way down.

Wilco van Rooijen, the Dutch leader of one of the teams that was climbing K2 last week, was found alive on the mountain on Saturday. He’s since spoken to reporters from a hospital in Pakistan, where he is being treated for frostbitten feet.

After the avalanche severed the climbers’ lines across a part of the mountain called the bottleneck, Mr. van Rooijen spent the night with Gerard McDonnell, the first Irishman to climb K2, and Marco Confortola, an Italian mountaineer. About 12 climbers were stranded above the avalanche, Reuters said.

In the morning, the three men began descending, but they lost track of one another in the dense mists and clouds shrouding the mountain. Here is how Mr. van Rooijen described the chaotic, surreal scene to Reuters:

    “If you can’t go down, you have to climb up,” van Rooijen said. “So in such a difficult situation, you are taking more risks; you’re climbing more technical slopes and finally you make a little mistake and you’re gone.”

    As team leader, he appeared haunted by the panic that gripped some of his fellow climbers.

    “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 and then you have a big problem.”

    He said he was screaming for people to work together, but many failed to react, apparently locked in their own personal struggle for self-preservation.

    “They were thinking of using my gas, my rope,” he said. “So, actually, everybody was fighting for himself, and I still do not understand why everybody were leaving each other.”

The saddest scene described by Mr. van Rooijen, whose survival skills were honed during a climb of Mount Everest without the help of oxygen tanks, involved three Korean climbers. From The Associated Press:

    One sat dazed in the snow. Another held a rope. The third was suspended at the other end, hanging upside down.

    “They were trying to survive,” [Mr. van Rooijen] recalled Monday, “but I had also to survive because I was getting snow blind.” He said he offered help but they declined, believing help was already on the way.

None of the Koreans survived, and neither did Mr. McDonnell. But Mr. Confortola made it to an advance base camp and was rescued from the mountain today; at last report he was on his way to the hospital, where Mr. va Rooijen was also joined by another Dutch climber who made it.

More stories are to be expected in the coming days, especially when Cecilie Skog makes it back to base camp. She ascended with her husband, Rolf Bae, but lost him during the avalanche. According to Paul Falvey, an Irish mountaineer closely following the climb, “she saw him being washed away.”

There will also be heated debate over what went wrong, and whether it was anyone’s fault. Already, there discussion over whether too many climbers were heading towards the summit at once, and thus were in harm’s way when the avalanche happened. But Mr. Falvey dismissed any suggestions that “summit fever” had been a factor in the disaster.

Posted by Jason McManus.

Sources:

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/tales-of-chaos-and-survival-on-k2/
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/world/asia/04K2.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/07/world/asia/07k2.html?pagewanted=2&h

Comments

[Eric]

Is K2 the most dangerous? It may be the most "difficult" to climb, but it's my understanding that the most "dangerous" is supposed to be Annapurna. Viesturs himself said so: http://articles.latimes.com/2005/may/24/news/os-viesturs24