Freddie Wilkinson - One Mountain Thousand Summits: The Untold Story Tragedy and True Heroism on K2

I would like to request for both professional and non-professionalmountaineers please respect the expedition philosophy, that means respectthe mountain and try to understand the mountain, respect your ownphysical and climbing ability in high altitude, try to be a good decisionmaker, summit is only half way. One mountain thousand summits...

PEMBA GYALJE SHERPA

In the early-morning hours of August 1, 2008, more than twodozen men readied in the starry darkness for their final ascentto the summit of K2, the worlds second-highest mountain.In little more than twenty-four hours, eleven climberswould be dead...

Four voices spoke in the night.
The mountain around them was windless and still. No moon showed. Breathing in the air felt like breathing shards of glass. The voices spoke in anxious staccato bursts, the air pushed up from somewhere deep within the gut of each man, forced up out of the lungs and through their cracked lips to dissipate into darkness. It was a strange language, mixed with the occasional English word, but if you listened carefully, there was a melody lost in the indecipherable cadences:

Hamile pahila fixed lines ko tupo khuchnu parcha.

We have to find the top of the fixed ropes.

Yo ta derai naramro avalanche aucha jasto cha.

These are very bad avalanche conditions. This is a wind-slab.

La!!! Batoi chaina. Sabai pahirole lagecha.

Everybody is wandering off the trail.

Sabai jana eutai route ma janu parcha avalanche.

Keep everyone together on one path or it will trigger an avalanche.

ONE MOUNTAIN
THOUSAND SUMMITS

THE UNTOLD STORY OF TRAGEDY
AND TRUE HEROISM ON K2

FREDDIE WILKINSON

First published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in 2010
First published in the United States in 2010 by NAL Signet,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright Freddie Wilkinson 2010

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Maps by Emilie Lee
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CONTENTS

For Janet Bergman

ONE MOUNTAIN
THOUSAND SUMMITS

F our voices spoke in the night.

The mountain around them was windless and still. No moon showed. Breathing the air felt like breathing shards of glass. The voices spoke in anxious staccato bursts, the speech pushed from somewhere deep within the gut of each man, forced up out of the lungs and through their cracked lips to dissipate into darkness. It was a strange language, mixed with the occasional English word, but if you listened carefully there was a melody lost in the indecipherable cadences:

Hamile pahila fixed lines ko tupo khuchnu parcha.

We have to find the top of the fixed lines.

Yo ta derai naramro avalanche aucha jasto cha.

These are very bad avalanche conditions. This is a wind slab.

La! Batoi chaina.

Whoa! Theres no trail.

Sabai jana eutai route ma janu parcha avalanche.

Keep everyone together on one path or it will trigger an avalanche.

As the four conferred in terse declarations, the others were mostly silent. A few were sitting down, their heads drooping toward the ground, the beams of their headlamps focusing tighter on the small patch of snow at their feet. One or two might have already fallen asleep. The rest coughed and wheezed in the biting cold of the night sky at eighty-five hundred meters, but no one had the energy to speak.

We need to keep descending, Pemba said, switching to slightly clipped English. Everyone stand up! Two more headlamps bobbed down toward them, jumping a small crevasse and splashing into their collective pool of light. It was Cas and Marco. The last two to leave the summit. No one else moved.

Pemba looked around him, trying to focus on each individual beam. There were his three teammates, Cas, Wilco, and Gerard; the Italian, Marco; the Korean leader, Mr. Kim, his partner Ms. Go, and three more of their teammates; the Frenchman, Hugues, and his Pakistani guide, Karim. Eleven climbers, Pemba thought, plus Pasang Lama, Chhiring Dorje, Jumik Bhote, and himself. Fifteen people, and every one of them was wrecked from the struggle to stand on top of the mountain.

Somewhere in the darkness below, Pemba knew, was the top anchor of the lines they had fixed earlier that day, on their ascent to the summit. Now, those ropes were quite literally their lifeline back to Camp IV, another five hundred meters in elevation below on the Shoulder of the Abruzzi Ridge. Without them, they would have to descend the exposed sections of water-ice in the Diagonal snowfield and the Bottleneck couloir unroped. It would be every man for himself. Pemba glanced at the exhausted men around him one more time. If they didnt get to the fixed lines, he knew, the weaker ones were surely lost. They had to navigate precisely down the interminable thirty-degree slope, searching for the highest anchor, an old hunk of spectra line that emerged from the surface of the mountain at the very edge of the serac. Pemba knew it was somewhere in the darkness, perhaps another hundred and fifty vertical meters below. Scarcely a hundred meters above them, resting peacefully in the eerie calm of that night, was the summit of K2.

They keep falling asleep, Chhiring responded, switching back to Nepali. And they cant walk in a straight line either.

At a lower elevation, the terrain separating them from the security of the fixed lines would not be considered excessively challenging; it wasnt much steeper than an expert ski trail. But the mountain was in unforgiving conditions, stripped bare by weeks of hurricane winds. Anyone who fell would not stop.

The others were looking at Pemba. Pemba spoke.

Sabai jana eutai rope ma bandnu, he said. Everyone should tie together on a rope, Pemba repeated in English. We need to make belay, to find the proper route to the top of the fixed lines.

Only one voice responded. Yes, Marco Confortola said, I agree with what you propose to do. The strain of the previous eighteen hours crept into his voice.

The four climbing Sherpas looked at one another. Each mans visage was hidden behind stretch balaclavas and the thick hoods of their down parkas. But in the shadows cast by their headlamps one could faintly see the general contours of their faces, the flat noses and broad sweep of Asiatic features. They nodded in agreement.