K2 Read Free

K2 springs into sight. Even though it’s still a dozen miles away, the sheer, towering presence of the mountain overwhelms you.
    Sir Francis Younghusband, the great Victorian explorer, was one of the first Westerners to see K2 from a distance, in 1887. The prospect moved him to an uncharacteristic effusion in his book about the expedition; he later recalled “saying emphatically to myself and to the universe at large: Oh yes! Oh yes! This really is splendid! How splendid! How splendid!”
    Reinhold Messner, who climbed K2 in 1979, unabashedly called it “the most beautiful of all the high peaks.” He added: “An artist has made this mountain.”
    In 1992, Scott and I got our first view of K2 not from Concordia but days earlier, when we hiked up a wooded hill out of our Paiju camp. All of a sudden, there the mountain was, sticking up into the sky, a perfect white pyramid. “Holy shit, that’s big!” said Scott, and I answered, “Wow, we’re almost there!” That evening, I wrote in my diary, “After breakfast, Scott and I scrambled up the ridges above camp and got some great views of K2. That is one huge mo-fo!”
    By the beginning of the summer of 2008, some sixty climbers had assembled at base camp on the south side of K2. Several had tried the mountain before, but for most of the men and women on the Baltoro, it was their first go at K2. After their own first sightings of the magnificent mountain, some of their Internet dispatches had gushed with the same sense of wonder and astonishment that Scott and I had felt in 1992 and that Younghusband had expressed way back in 1887. Nearly all of the climbers were planning to try the Abruzzi Ridge or its variant spur, the Cesen route.
    Too many days spent sitting out storms at base camp, however, had taken their toll on the various teams’ morale. By the end of July, more than a few of the climbers had chucked it in and left for home. Others hovered on a teeter-totter of indecision. A sixty-one-year-old Frenchman, Hugues d’Aubarède, decided on July 20 to give up his attempt. No sooner had he started packing his gear than several forecasts arrived predicting a coming spell of excellent weather. According to journalist Matthew Power, the Dutch leader of another team told d’Aubarède, “Just skip your work for another two or three weeks and then you cansummit K2.” Changing his mind, d’Aubarède called his wife in France to tell her he was going to give the mountain one more shot. It would be a fatal decision.
    The window of clear, windless weather arrived at the very end of July. In the group of thirty who set out early on August 1 to go for the top, there were no superstars. Many of those climbers, however, had previous experience on the world’s highest mountains. A Norwegian couple, for instance, had climbed Everest together in 2005; they had also reached the north and the south poles the same year. The Dutch leader, who had made it to the top of Everest without bottled oxygen, was on his third expedition to K2. Besides Norway, Holland, and France, the mountaineers came from an assortment of countries, including Korea, Serbia, Singapore, Italy, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. There were also several Pakistanis and a number of Sherpa from Nepal.
    Nearly all those climbers set out on August 1 from Camp IV, situated on a broad snow ridge known as the Shoulder, at about 26,000 feet. The Shoulder is the last place on the Abruzzi Ridge where you can reasonably pitch a tent. In 1992, Scott, Charley, and I placed our own Camp IV as far along the Shoulder as we could, just below where the snow slope steepens toward the start of the Bottleneck couloir. Last summer’s climbers, however, pitched their tents on the lower, southern end of the Shoulder. The difference may not seem like such a big deal, but we had good reasons for camping where we did. At altitude, in soft snow, it can easily take a full hour to trudge from one