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By Root 1108 0

there’s no viable analogy between Everest in 1996 and K2 in 2008. Not a single one of the eleven climbers who died that August on the world’s second-highest mountain was a true client in the sense that Scott Fischer’s Mountain Madness or Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants customers were. None of them were paying big bucks to have a commercial guiding company get them up the mountain. They were almost uniformly experienced climbers in their own right. The Pakistani porters may have helped the Europeans carry loads and establish camps, but they were not acting as true guides. And the Sherpa on K2 were not hired hands but climbers going for the top themselves, on an equal footing with their Western counterparts.

Yet in one respect, 2008’s mountaineers allowed themselves to slip closer to the status of clients than nearly anyone had on previous K2 campaigns. This had to do with their dependence on fixed ropes. In the aftermath of the tragedy, too much focus has been put on the collapse of the serac, too little on the whole business of the fixed ropes.

In general in the mountains, it’s harder to climb down a pitch than to climb up it. And if you’ve relied on fixed ropes to get yourself up the Bottleneck and across the traverse—just “jugging” along, with your ascender clipped to the line—it can be terrifying to face having to descend those same passages without fixed ropes. Especially in the dark, after you’re really strung out from taking so long to get to the summit.

In 1992, Scott, Charley, and I had no fixed ropes to help us get up and down the Bottleneck. We climbed the couloir; then, on the descent, despite the dangerous accumulation of new snow, we simply faced in, kicked in our crampons, planted our ice tools, and climbed down that steep, 600-foot slope. Even Jim Wickwire in 1978, though near death after his bivouac, summoned the nerve and the technique to climb down the traverse and the Bottleneck unaided by fixed ropes or partners.

No one even thought of fixing ropes all the way through the Bottleneck until about two years ago. How quickly, though, the comfort of fixed ropes gets taken for granted. It even starts to seem to some climbers like a privilege that ought to come with the K2 package, as reflected in Wilco van Rooijen’s petulant complaint that some of the designated fixers didn’t “show up” and that other climbers placed the ropes in “the wrong places.”

If you’re counting on fixed ropes to get you over all the hard places, you’re much less likely to carry your own rope, much less any pitons or ice screws. Cecilie Skog and Lars Nessa may have survived because Skog carried her own thin rope, with which the two of them improvised a rappel over the most difficult passage. It doesn’t seem as though any of the other “stranded” climbers even thought about rappelling—probably because they didn’t carry their own ropes and hardware. It’s easy to imagine this scenario, since carrying extra gear for those “just in case” situations is not a priority anymore, while trimming weight and traveling light is. The three Koreans were found tangled up in their climbing rope. Why didn’t they untie and try to rappel with it? Perhaps they were simply too exhausted, too befuddled by hypoxia, their fingers too stiff with cold to manage the operation. We’ll never know.

After the tragedy, a member of the Dutch Norit team, Cas van de Gevel, who reached the summit and downclimbed successfully, was quoted in Outside magazine as saying, “On the mountain there were no heroes.”

Instead, there was full-blown chaos, the every-man-for-himself panic that van Rooijen later so vividly described. The chief reason for that, I believe, is that there was nothing like a unified band of mountaineers on K2. Instead, there were ten different teams with climbers from fifteen different countries. Most of them didn’t know each other beforehand, and at base camp they didn’t form lasting friendships beyond the boundaries of their own teams.

But there was also something relatively new going on that summer, something that has already played itself out with