K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [12]
Somewhere on the descent, d’Aubarède simply vanished. In all likelihood, he fell off the mountain as he tried to downclimb. Like those of many K2 victims over the decades, his body may never be found.
By the time the disaster had run its course, eleven climbers had died in a single thirty-six-hour period on K2. Besides the Serb Dren Mandic, the Pakistani porter Jehan Baig, the three Koreans, Rolf Bae, Gerard McDonnell, and Hugues d’Aubaréde, the victims included another Pakistani porter who was climbing with the Frenchman, and two veteran Sherpa.
To be sure, a lot of mistakes were made on K2 in August 2008. Too late a start by too many climbers from Camp IV; too many people on the route at the same time, climbing too slowly, which created the traffic jam; the further delay when the team leaders insisted that the fixed ropes in the Bottleneck had to be repositioned; summit fever, which kept so many from turning back short of the summit; too late an hour when all but Zerain topped out; the panic that set in after the serac collapse in the night.
The initial media coverage, however, made it sound as though the collapse of the Motivator was the direct and sole cause of the tragedy, almost like an act of God. But except for Rolf Bae, people didn’t die because of the serac collapse. They died because of what that serac collapse created, after all the other ominous conditions surrounding the ascent had come into play.
It’s very much like what happened on Everest in 1996. The “killer storm” of May 10–11 wasn’t the single direct cause of the tragedy. It was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. That camel had already been overloaded by climbers starting too late, going too slowly, refusing to turn around, and using up their reserves of energy and bottled oxygen.
Even so, I was shocked by the viciousness of the public response to 2008’s tragedy. All kinds of nonclimbers riveted by the news from K2 seemed to derive a kind of spiteful glee from the terrible events. After the New York Times ran its front-page story about the disaster, scores of folks weighed in online. Something like 90 percent of their comments were derogatory I-told-you-sos. The Times article said nothing about “heroes,” yet carpers made such comments as “It’s long past time to stop calling these egomaniacs heroes and call them what they are. Selfish, egomaniacs, and stupid.” Another reader wrote in, “Heroes my ass. No one should feel an inch of sympathy for these egg heads.” Yet another proclaimed, “They engaged in marginally suicidal behavior and wound up dead. To me, they were stupid and reckless beyond all limits.”
It was as if mountaineering itself were considered by the public—or at least by a significant sector of the public—to be nothing more than a selfish, idiotic form of Russian roulette. It was also assumed that the climbers on K2 were fat-cat millionaires. Wrote another Times respondent, “Because someone is rich enough to travel to the end of the Earth to play chicken with suicide does not make him a hero.”
Call this the Krakauer effect, though you can’t blame it on Jon Krakauer. Since I was involved in the ‘96 Everest catastrophe, when our IMAX team temporarily gave up our own summit plans to try to rescue climbers in trouble, I had a front-row seat as the tragedy unfolded. At the time, I was critical of some of the decisions made by both clients and guides that May, and I still feel they made fatal mistakes. But I can’t imagine sitting in some armchair back home and rejoicing that these “clueless dilettantes” got what they were asking for. Sadly, a major vein in the public response to Into Thin Air ran along just those lines.
But