K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [10]
It was at this precise moment, sometime between 8:00 P.M. and 9:00 P.M., that the geologic fluke that would transform the gathering fiasco into a true catastrophe occurred. As Freddie Wilkinson reconstructed the event in Rock and Ice:
Bae [was] in the lead. Skog traversed next and heard the sickening roar of a large avalanche in the darkness. A second later, Skog was wrenched off balance as the rope she was clipped to broke somewhere below. Bae’s headlamp disappeared.
Skog called out in the black night for her husband, but got no response.
A huge section of the Motivator, that ferocious but apparently stable ice cliff hanging over the route, had collapsed at the worst possible moment.
Despite the unfathomable shock of having her husband crushed by tons of ice as he traversed just ahead of her, then hearing his body plunge and vanish with the falling debris, Skog kept her wits about her. She carried a thin 165-foot rope in her pack. Now she and Nessa tied that cord to the broken end of a dangling fixed rope and rappelled into the Bottleneck. They downclimbed the couloir in the dark and made their way back to Camp IV in the early morning hours.
When the first bulletins from K2 hit the newspapers and the Internet, the initial scenario made it sound as though the collapsing ice cliff had wiped out most of the climbers who had died on the mountain. But Bae was apparently the sole direct victim of the crashing ice blocks. Far more consequential was the fact that the debris took with it a sizable section of fixed ropes—estimates by the climbers themselves ranged from 600 to 1,500 feet. And this unforeseen event effectively stranded all the climbers above the Norwegians in a cul-de-sac that was, paradoxically, of their own making.
By the time Rolf Bae was killed, several of the other climbers had already decided to bivouac. The Dutch leader, Wilco van Rooijen, later reported that he never saw the serac collapse, and didn’t know until much later that it had. At something like 27,200 feet, van Rooijen carved out a seat in the snow slope and settled into it as he anticipated a grim night with neither sleeping bag nor food nor water. Beside him, two other members of the Dutch Norit team prepared their own bivouac seats. They were the Italian, thirty-seven-year-old Marco Confortola, and a thirty-seven-year-old Irishman, Gerard McDonnell. A fun-loving folk musician and oil worker, McDonnell was especially well liked by his teammates. A few days earlier, he had left a farewell note on his online blog upon leaving base camp, a phrase in Gaelic that translates as “That’s all for now, friends. The time is coming.” On reaching the top late on August 1, McDonnell phoned his girlfriend in Alaska. He had become the first Irishman to climb K2.
From a hospital in Islamabad, Confortola recounted his bivouac to a reporter from the British newspaper the Independent. “Since Gerard was having a difficult time,” the Italian said, “I made his hole bigger to help him lie down for a little bit. Gerard was very cold. I was also cold and began to shiver on purpose to create heat. I was wasting energy, but I needed to get warm.” The bivouac ledge was perilously exposed. “I made sure not to fall asleep,” Confortola added, “because I could have fallen [off the mountain].”
The three men managed to get through the night, then started down in the morning. Somewhere they came across three Korean climbers, tangled up in a single rope with which they were tied together. “There was a Korean guy hanging upside down,” van Rooijen recalled. “There was a second Korean guy who held him with a rope but he was also in shock and then a third guy was there also, and they were trying to survive but I had also to survive.”
Van Rooijen said that the Koreans declined his offer of help. But Confortola insisted that he and McDonnell spent three hours trying to disentangle the Koreans from their snarled