Early on Friday 1 August 2008, Nicholas Rice made a mistake that may just have saved his life. He spilled a pan of water. The Californian was sitting in his tent at Camp IV on the shoulder of K2's south-east ridge, preparing to leave for the summit. Getting ready to do anything at 7,900 metres above sea level takes a long time. Melting the snow for that pan of water must have taken an hour. It's as if time accelerates, leaving you plodding along behind, taking an age to put on boots, an epoch to fasten crampons and zip up clothing. To a brain fogged from lack of oxygen, mistakes come easily.
Rice had planned to be on his way at 3am, but the mishap set him back. As he fumbled the pan, water had slopped over his socks. Stuffing his feet into high-altitude climbing boots when they were wet did not appeal. He risked frostbite setting out like that, so he decided to dry them out first. For a 23-year-old, Rice has a lot of high-altitude experience and a wise head on his young shoulders. K2 would still be there next year. The trick, as British mountaineer Don Whillans used to say, would be to make sure that he was.
Once his socks were dry, Rice headed out into the freezing Karakoram morning. With around 30 climbers ahead of him, the route to the summit was clearly marked. From the tents at Camp IV, a snow slope steepens gradually as it rises to meet a band of rock about 250m up the slope. Kicking his feet into the steps left by the other climbers, Rice began to follow them. He was the last man to leave for the summit that day.
The steps led to a snow-filled gully in the left-hand end of the rock band that sits beneath an enormous ice cliff, called a serac, some 90m high at its apex. A serac forms when a glacier pushes over a steep drop on a mountainside. As this ice creeps down the mountain, chunks drop off without warning. Warmer conditions can provoke a serac fall, but they also happen in the dead of night. What tons of falling ice will do to a body does not take much imagination.
For this reason, mountaineers avoid climbing underneath seracs - if they can. Yet, sometimes, the only practicable route means exposing yourself to the possibility that a huge mass of ice might break off and crush you at any moment. The top of the south-east ridge on K2 is one of those places. It is the kind of situation in which you have to make a simple calculation: is this worth it?
Rice knew that where the gully ran up against the gleaming grey ice of the serac, the footsteps would turn left to where the ice cliff diminished. The ground here is more awkward and steeper. It takes climbers to the ridgeline above the vast gulf of the mountain's south face, a drop of 3,000m to the glacier. It is also the key to passing the overhanging serac and reaching the easier-angled slopes above, which lead to the summit. This section is called the Bottleneck. Even before this summer, more than 10 climbers had died here.
After an hour's effort, Rice began to reconsider his attempt. He was not using bottled oxygen and, despite the effort of punching up the snow slope, his hands stayed frozen. 'I could have summitted,' he told America's NPR radio via satellite phone a few days later, 'but I wasn't going to lose a finger. Not even the tip of a finger.'
Rice could feel the day turning against him. He could see dozens of climbers ahead, in their own private worlds as they struggled towards the summit. Their sheer number was a threat. He could feel his fingers wooden inside his mitts. His instinct nagged at him to descend, so he did. Released from the agony of grinding uphill, Rice was soon back in his sleeping bag. Little more than a day later, 11 of the climbers gasping in the thin air above Rice's tent were dead, turning the 2008 season into the second-worst on record.
K2. 'K' for Karakoram, which is the name of the range of mountains, '2' as opposed to K1, which, as the 1856 Survey of India discovered, had a local name, Masherbrum. K2 was just too remote for the locals to bother. Those who see it up close for the first time are left in a state of mild shock. At Concordia, where the Baltoro Glacier meets the Godwin-Austen Glacier flowing from K2, it fills the sky. Reinhold Messner, the first person to climb all of the world's peaks over 8,000m, once said: 'An artist made this peak.' Its irregular triangle snags a climber's mind like a barbed hook. On the Pakistan side, the altitude at Concordia is 4,700m, just three hours from base camp, while the summit rises up almost another 4km into the deep blue of high altitude. On its steeper north side, in China, it climbs 3.2km in just 3km of horizontal distance.
The Australian Greg Child, who reached the summit by its north ridge in 1990, summed up the appeal: 'K2 just has something about it. Partly it's the shape and beauty and symmetry of the thing. And partly it's the infamy - the stories of what's happened to people who've tried it: how fucked up they've become and how many have died. K2 is simply not an amateur's mountain.'
The bald statistics are bad enough. There have been around 300 ascents of K2, and 77 deaths. Journalists frequently divide the first number by the second to come up with a death rate of one in four. That is way off the mark. The first figure does not include those who don't reach the summit. Even so, the fatality rate among those who do make the top is around 11 per cent, worse odds than one in 10 and an indication that it is in the descent that many of the dangers lie. When friends go to Everest, it does not trouble me. On the far fewer occasions one goes to K2, I feel anxious. I felt it most strongly talking to English climber Alison Hargreaves, just before she left in 1995 on the second leg of her attempt to climb the three highest mountains in the world in one year. She was blasted off the summit ridge by hurricane winds on 13 August, killed along with five others. Eight died that season, five the year before. And five the year before that.
When Nicholas Rice moved up to make his summit bid, he had been on the mountain for more than two months. K2 base camp is not an easy place to be for that length of time. After two months, sleeping in a tent and defecating al fresco begin to grate. Jim Curran, who witnessed the 1986 tragedy, when 13 climbers from nine different parties died, and wrote a definitive history of the mountain, saw first-hand the slow mental attrition of waiting for a chance at the summit.
From Everest base camp, he explains, you can walk four hours and be lounging on grass, drinking beer with trekkers. It takes more than a week to trek the 40 miles from the last village to K2 base camp. 'K2 stands absolutely on its own. The approach is hard. The base camp feels like the Moon. The mountain itself looks utterly impregnable, and there's no easy way up the thing.'
Worse, the weather is like a slow form of torture. Once acclimatised, climbers wait in nervous anticipation. On Everest, weather patterns are predictable. Climbers expect a weather window during the latter half of May. On K2, you cannot be sure when, or even if, good weather will arrive. Three seasons this decade there has been no ascent at all. That has not happened on Everest since 1974. 'The problem is that the good weather spell is often enough to get to you to the top but not to get you down again,' Curran says.
Of course, given that no one knows for sure how long the good weather will last, when - if - it arrives, those climbers still interested rush up the mountain. That is why K2's accidents often happen all at once and it is what happened at the end of this July. A number of teams converged at Camp IV on the shoulder of the south-east ridge, some via the Abruzzi Spur, others up a parallel route on a spur to the left called the Cesen Route.
The latter included Wilco van Rooijen from Holland and members of his international team. Van Rooijen had been to K2 before and had climbed Everest without oxygen. Irish climber Gerard McDonnell was part of this group. They had been on the mountain longer than anyone else, the first of a reported 16 expeditions to climb on K2 this season, and were making their third attempt on the summit. With that number of expeditions there were bound to be tensions. You need to co-operate, but you do not want to let a less competent party spoil your summit bid. Especially if you have been waiting two months.
Rice also used the Cesen Route. Joining him was a Frenchman, Hugues d'Aubarède, an insurance agent from Lyon, aged 61 and on his third expedition to K2. At that age, time was not on his side. He had come alone with two Pakistani porters to support him, Meherban Karim and Jehan Baig. D'Aubarède said that over the course of the expedition he came to regard Rice like a son.
A Korean team had fixed rope on the Abruzzi Spur and they, too, were at Camp IV. There were also teams from Italy and Serbia, and strong Norwegian and Basque climbers. One of the Italians was a professional mountain rescuer, Marco Confortola; the Norwegians included 33-year-old called Rolf Bae and his new wife Cecilie Skog, a former nurse who is the only woman to have completed the so-called 'explorer's grand slam' (climbing the highest peak on each continent and reaching both poles). Bae, a world-class polar traveller, had just spent 27 days climbing a vertical and overhanging granite wall called Great Trango Tower in northern Pakistan, a climb far harder than K2. Finally, there was an American-led expedition that included Australians and a Swede, Fredrik Strang.
Later, from his hospital bed, van Rooijen would say that there had been too many climbers on the mountain that day. Some of these expeditions were marriages of convenience, sharing the cost of logistics to achieve a personal goal. Some were close-knit teams from the same country. Some climbers were much stronger than others. And some, according to comments Confortola made later, were not as good as they thought they were. He called these, sarcastically, 'professori'. Critically, all these groups understood co-operation was vital, especially in the business of fixing ropes. But things don't always work out that way, especially when language differences mean K2 is, most years, a 4km-high tower of Babel.
At 11pm on the night of 31 July, as Nicholas Rice rested in his tent, he was disturbed by Sherpas and Pakistani porters getting ready to leave for the upper section of the mountain. Although none of these expeditions was a commercial guided trip of the kind now seen on Everest, many of them had hired one or two Sherpas, flown in from Nepal to add logistical muscle.
Victor Saunders, an experienced Everest guide whose company Basecamp is organising an expedition to K2 next summer, says bringing one Sherpa over costs around £5,000. But they are worth the money. 'When the Pakistanis are good,' he says, 'they are very good. But currently they are not as reliable or experienced as the Sherpas.' Given that the local population and the Sherpas both speak a dialect of Tibetan, the two groups, Muslim and Buddhist, can work together well. But on the morning of 1 August, the Sherpas were anxious because, according to Rice, the Pakistani porters were slow to get going and in poor morale.
It was these porters' job to go ahead and fix ropes at the steeper sections of the Bottleneck, to give those that followed extra security and a fast way off the mountain. A complex deal, some of which was lost in translation, had been agreed between the Dutch, Italians, Koreans and Americans about who would do what to ensure that sufficient rope was properly fixed and that the route was marked. Some K2 climbers may feel this was asking for trouble.
It seems the first Western climber to leave was the Basque, Alberto Zerain. He alone would have a perfect summit day. At around 2.30am, Rice heard the Dutch team, d'Aubarède and the Serbians leaving camp. Later, the Italians, Norwegians and finally the Americans left, crampons squeaking in the snow, breath rasping in the dry air, as they climbed off into the night, their headlamps points of light on the black mountain.
At 7am, after his aborted attempt, Rice woke in his tent. The Americans were coming back. They told him that the Sherpas and Pakistanis had not fixed the rope at the top of the snow gully and across the traverse, but lower down where it wasn't needed. Not wanting to stand around while the ropes were brought up and fixed on the more difficult traverse, and anxious about the numbers of climbers, they had decided to go back to Camp IV. Other teams waited.
That, at least, is what Rice put on his blog when he got back to base camp. But it's not what Confortola said in a phone interview after his agonising descent. He said that five Sherpas had been assigned to fix the traverse out of the Bottleneck, but that others had completed this task using low-quality anchors fixed into the ice and cheap rope. 'You couldn't even tie hay bales with it.'
Who fixed these ropes is one of several unanswered questions, but if it wasn't the Sherpas, it was most likely the Pakistani porters. Sorting these ropes out took time and slowed the climbers down. Getting up and down in daylight was everyone's priority. At around 8am, a Serbian, 32-year-old Dren Mandic, became detached from the fixed rope and fell, his body accelerating down the slope before coming to rest above Camp IV.
Accounts differ as to how he came to be off the rope - perhaps he was trying to overtake another climber - but van Rooijen said: 'That was a really stupid accident. These accidents are not supposed to happen on K2. People are not used to climbing these technical parts. Everest you can climb without technical experience.' Traversing out of the Bottleneck, he said, is 'a very technical traverse at 8,200 metres'.
The other Serbians and their porters descended to help Mandic, but he was already dead. Two of the American team who had returned to Camp IV, Strang and Eric Meyer, climbed back up to see if they could help bring Mandic's body down, only to find a chaotic scene. In the rush to help, one of the porters, Jehan Baig, also lost his footing and fell to his death. When Strang brought news of this back to Camp IV, Rice packed at once to descend. His K2 season was over.
Confortola says it was he who refocused the group on getting busy with the climb and, once they did, progress was better. The Koreans were using oxygen and drew ahead of the Norwegians, followed by the Dutch, Confortola, d'Aubarède, and McDonnell. But the first to reach the summit, at 3pm, was Alberto Zerain. Not bothering to wait while the ropes were sorted out, he had climbed on, reaching the top with plenty of daylight left to make a safe descent.
Two of the Norwegians, Cecilie Skog and Lars Naesse, reached the summit two hours later. Oystein Stangeland had turned back earlier, for reasons that have not yet become clear, while Rolf Bae, perhaps exhausted from his climb on Great Trango, had fallen behind on the ascent. According to a spokesman for the Norwegians, Bjørn Sekkesæter, the three reconvened just below the summit and made the descent together with Bae in the lead. As he crossed back into the Bottleneck, he caught the full force of a huge chunk of ice that peeled off the serac some time in the early evening. 'Cecilie was behind Rolf, attached by rope, and she felt a shiver,' Sekkesæter reports. 'It only took Rolf; the rope snapped under the weight of the ice.' Bae was killed outright.
One can only imagine what Skog must have been feeling; the couple had been married since just May 2007. However, she needed to continue the descent and the ropes that had been set up earlier had now been washed away by the ice slide. She and Naesse used a 100m Kevlar rope to abseil down one of the steeper sections, but the line was not long enough. They were forced to climb down backwards until they reached the less precarious part of the shoulder on the south-east ridge. They eventually reached Camp IV between 11pm and midnight. 'Rolf's accident was pure bad luck,' Sekkesæter told OSM. 'He didn't trip, he didn't make a mistake. Other people died from doing the wrong thing, like unclipping themselves from the rope... But he wanted to be on K2, so he was on the right spot at the wrong time.'
In a seemingly unrelated incident, Jumic Bhote, one of the Koreans' Nepalese porters, was also hit by ice, and a second Nepalese, Pasang Bhote, tried to help him. Both fell to their deaths.
Above the Bottleneck, a number of climbers were either just reaching the summit or were on their way down. These included Wilco van Rooijen and Cas van de Gevel with their Sherpa Pemba Gyalje, Gerard McDonnell - the first Irishman to climb K2 - Marco Confortola, and Hugues d'Aubarède with his Pakistani high-altitude porter, Meherban Karim. 'I'm too cold,' d'Aubarède told friends at home from the summit via satellite phone. 'I'm too happy.' Three of the Koreans, Park Kyeong-hyo, 28, Kim Hyo-gyeong, 33, and Hwang Dong-jin, 44, were also still descending to the Bottleneck.
Confortola knew they had to hurry. He reached the top at 7pm in temperatures of -20C. As night fell, this would plummet to something like -40C. In down suits but with no tents or sleeping bags, or a stove to melt snow, surviving the night would be a bitter struggle. All the climbers had missed the previous night's sleep. None would be able to get much rest that night either. And they were still above 8,000m. In the death zone.
'I was with the Dutch,' Confortola says. 'I kept looking at my wristwatch. We were so late. On the top I've literally taken four pictures, and then we started down. Problem was, during the descent, no one had the route flags we had agreed to bring. I had a few in my sack, but not enough. And during the night, a bit tired, a bit confused because we climbed without oxygen, disaster struck.'
There was no moon as he descended with McDonnell. The two had become good friends, despite the language barrier, and Confortola had nicknamed McDonnell 'Jesus', because of his beard. At 8.30pm, still above the serac barrier, Confortola heard a sound and told the Irishman to stop. Below, they could see the three Koreans had fallen or been hit by ice. Assuming they could not survive the fall, Confortola decided enough was enough, and suggested they bivouac. They would go on when they could see what was happening.
Later, reports claimed that the 10 climbers were trapped above the Bottleneck because the ropes had been swept away when Rolf Bae died. But Cas van de Gevel and Sherpa Pemba Gyalje managed to use what light was left to descend to Camp IV that evening. It was the lack of visibility that stopped the others. In the morning they would be able to see to climb the difficult ground back to the gully leading down to Camp IV.
Confortola dug shallow pits to sit in, perched above the huge drop of the south face. He extended McDonnell's a little because the Irishman was suffering more. Wilco van Rooijen, similarly disorientated, also bivouacked. Hugues d'Aubarède, older and running on empty, seems to have collapsed and died on the descent from the summit. His porter Meherban Karim fell, attempting to climb down without him.
During the night Confortola had rubbed the Irishman's legs while he made himself shiver to keep his body temperature up. In the morning, he and McDonnell were in a state of abject exhaustion. At first light, he saw van Rooijen descending. They tried to talk to each other but, Confortola says: 'My English is awful.' After the Dutchman was gone, McDonnell moved across the slope to urinate and spotted the Koreans. They were still alive. He called out to Confortola.
Struggling down the ropes, Confortola and McDonnell tried to improvise a rescue. The Koreans had spent the night hanging off a fixed rope and were most probably beyond saving. At least one was badly injured, and two were unconscious. Confortola noticed one had lost his gloves and boots, so he stuck a spare glove on his exposed foot. The Koreans' limbs would have been frozen solid, but still, Confortola tried to get them upright. Time seemed to slide past unnoticed.
At 3pm, four Sherpas arrived to help and Confortola abandoned his efforts to save the Koreans in order to save himself. 'I tried everything and more, but I simply couldn't do it, could not take them back home. In my role of mountain rescuer I felt worthless, I felt useless. I come down, do the traverse, descend the Bottleneck, and then at the bottom I hear this big booming noise. I look up and 400 metres above there's this big avalanche coming down from the serac, and below some boots. I've recognised them - it was Jesus.'
With the Koreans beyond help, and McDonnell dead, one of the Sherpas, Pemba, brought Confortola down to Camp IV. Even then they were hit by another fall of ice. Then Pemba went out to look for van Rooijen, who had failed to find the camp. They missed each other. Van Rooijen had descended on the wrong side of the ridgeline as clouds gathered, obscuring features that could have guided him home. He was forced to spend a second night out, his lips and tongue blistered from dehydration, his mind hallucinating wildly as exhaustion took its toll. Next day he stumbled into Camp III on the Cesen Route, where team-mates fed him drink and oxygen.
The combination of the high death toll and K2's grim reputation put the tragedy high on news bulletins around the world. Stories of desperate rescue attempts and climbers trapped high on the mountain were fed by phone calls and emails from base camp. Very quickly, those early news stories gave way to gloomy commentaries on the credentials of those tackling the mountain.
After putting the story on the front page, the New York Times website was filled with readers' comments, mostly saying the same thing: 'Utterly pointless'; 'Reckless incompetents commit utterly predictable suicide'; 'No sympathy. Sorry.' Under the headline 'Does Climbing Matter Anymore?', the paper quoted veterans including Reinhold Messner railing against what climbing on K2 had become: 'People today are booking these K2 package deals almost as if they were buying some all-inclusive trip to Bangkok.'
Mountaineer and historian David Roberts warned that money was warping the motivation of those on the highest peaks. True, there were some old-school climbers around, 'but now climbers are sponsored. They are making big bucks on speaking tours. There is a whole new breed of wannabes who see it as a shortcut to fame or at least notoriety.'
To older mountaineers, there were some obvious ironies in these comments. Messner, after all, has made a fortune from sponsorship deals and lecture tours. He had dubbed K2 the 'mountain of mountains' on the cover of one of his many books. In the building of K2's brand, the Italian lent a considerable hand. To suggest K2's slopes were clogged with incompetents was laughable.
Still, it must be irksome for those who have shared in K2's greatest triumphs, the noble rescues, the dedicated teamwork, to see that heritage diluted by the image of lesser talents who buy and bluff their way to the kind of glory true heroes earned the hard way. Imagine if you could pay cash to play in a rematch of the 1966 World Cup final. And now imagine how Bobby Charlton would feel about that.
As it happens, those mountaineers breaking new ground are rarely found on K2 these days. They do not rely on ropes fixed to the mountain by someone else. They do not use porters. K2 was first climbed as long ago as 1954 via the Abruzzi Spur. It's tough, it's dangerous even by Himalayan standards, and it gets respect from the very best. But standards have moved on since 1954. A lot.
Messner, however, has left a curious legacy. A dozen or so others have now repeated his feat of climbing the 14 peaks over the height of 8,000m, including Briton Alan Hinkes. The simplicity of the idea and the fact that most of these peaks are well known makes it an easy sell to sponsors. It's like a freakishly dangerous form of Munro-bagging. Partly thanks to Messner's list, many of these giant peaks - Everest, K2, Nanga Parbat - are fixed in the public's imagination. The routes of their first ascents, done more than 50 years ago, attract more climbers than all the other thousands of peaks in the Himalaya put together. A small semi-nomadic international community of high-altitude climbers return again and again to these Himalayan giants like bees to a flower. The attrition rate seems quite horrendous to outsiders, but it's a dramatic, adventurous life that attracts dramatic, adventurous people.
The aftershocks of this year's season on K2 will resonate for a long time. Marco Confortola remains depressed and angry, particularly about the death of McDonnell. He must face up to a long and painful recovery from frostbite, as does Wilco van Rooijen. Both men were evacuated by helicopter to hospital in Islamabad. Cecilie Skog flew back to Norway within days of reaching base camp, escaping the media to be with her family.
Many questions remain. No version of events has emerged that answers all the contradictions and gaps in the narrative. It is possible, given the confusion generated by exhaustion and hypoxia, it never will. Facts and the memory of them can seem hazy at sea level, let alone among a strung-out group of climbers whose brains are dying.
Those who believe high-altitude mountaineering has become a selfish and consumerist travesty of itself will find the facts to fit their theories. But it is worth stating that among the climbers on K2 this year, Rolf Bae was truly gifted, while van Rooijen and Confortola showed incredible stamina. Many climbers and porters fought hard to help each other, at grave risk to their own safety.
Climbers die in the Karakoram every year. But then climbers die on Mont Blanc or in Scotland. Mountain climbing is a dangerous sport, whether practised by saints or sinners. Many climbers, I would guess, would be only too pleased if newspapers listened to the readers of the New York Times and stopped reporting accidents. Nicholas Rice, meanwhile, is thinking about going back. 'Maybe not next year. Maybe not the year after. But I can say for sure I'll come back. It's always been a dream of mine to be up there.'
K2: Death and the mountain
1953
On one of the earliest expeditions, injured American Art Gilkey is in a makeshift stretcher when he slips from the mountain and disappears. The memorial at base camp to all K2's dead is named after him.
1986
Alan Rouse becomes the first Briton to conquer K2, on 4 August. He dies six days later, trying to wait out a storm. Thirteen people died on the mountain in this year.
1995
'Summit or die, either way I win,' says Rob Slater before tackling K2. Ominous words: the American and six others, including Briton Alison Hargreaves, are killed in a freak storm.
2004
Seven climbers die from June to August, including three South Koreans, found in a crevice in their sleeping bags, and Manel de la Matta from Spain, who develops appendicitis during his descent as part of a Catalan expedition.
2006
Four Russians die 200 metres from the summit when struck by a 'silent' avalanche.