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At this point, even Confortola’s several accounts of what happened didn’t quite jibe. To the Independent reporter, he claimed that “for some strange reason,” McDonnell started “to walk away.” To others, he reported (in Matthew Power’s paraphrase), “Suddenly … Gerard turned around and began to climb back up the slope, back toward the Koreans, offering no explanation.” McDonnell’s friends later concluded that he went back up in a final attempt to give aid to the Koreans.

I’m not surprised at these discrepancies. By the time Confortola finally reached base camp, he was so wiped out that his memory could well have been playing tricks on him. And all climbers accept the sad fact that nonclimbing journalists can never seem to get our stories right. We have all had the experience of thinking that we explained very lucidly to some reporter just what happened on some mountain, only to have a completely garbled version appear in print.

In any event, at this point, while he was still in the Bottleneck couloir, Confortola fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. He awoke to a loud booming noise. He later told the website K2Climb.net, “I saw my friend Gerard’s boots falling among the blocks of ice and snow. That was the worst moment.”

Apparently, a second, smaller serac collapse—a kind of aftershock of the massive initial breakdown of the night before—had engulfed McDonnell and carried him to his death. Later, the grieving Italian remembered his friend: “I used to call him Jesus. The beard, everything, he looked like Christ. He was always smiling. He was a flower.”

By now, chaos reigned among the climbers still trying to negotiate the descent. Van Rooijen bitterly recaptured the scene: “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. They were thinking of using my gas [bottled oxygen], my rope. So actually everybody was fighting for himself and I still do not understand why everybody were [sic] leaving each other.”

Had the climbers been members of a single unified team—like the Americans on K2 in 1953, for example—they might have rallied to one another’s aid. But given how many different teams were on the mountain in 2008, with only whatever rudimentary English each one commanded as a common language, it is not surprising that anarchy prevailed.

By this point, van Rooijen and Confortola had separated. Their solo descents took on the nightmarish quality of last-ditch retreats. And both men became effectively lost. Van Rooijen later told National Geographic Adventure,

The next morning after I spent the night, it was difficult to come down. I had radio contact with my climbing partners in Camp IV, but … [I] didn’t find Camp IV. I was on the wrong side of the mountain. People at base camp saw me go over the wrong side of the ridge…. I had to sit out a whiteout because I couldn’t see anything and I knew I couldn’t go down any further. So I waited.

And to his brother over a satellite phone from Pakistan, Confortola recalled, “During the descent … due to the altitude and the exhaustion, I even fell asleep in the snow, and when I woke up I could not figure out where I was.”

Even without a sleepless night in a bivouac, it’s easy enough to get lost descending a mountain like K2. Coming down from the summit in ‘92, Scott started to veer off in the wrong direction, too far east. If I hadn’t corrected him, he might have led us completely off the Abruzzi Ridge, into uncharted terrain on the east face.

On the way up, a lot of climbers gaze ahead; they never look down at the way they came. But at some point in the descent, they start wondering, “Now, where was it that I came up this thing?” I’ve always made it a fundamental principle to keep looking down on the way up, to memorize the landmarks that will guide my descent. It’s partly instinct, and it’s partly my training as an RMI guide. On Rainier, on Denali, that was hammered home as a crucial thing to do.

The chaos on the morning of August 2 was so total that we