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In a big dome tent at the Italian base camp, Jim Curran joined the vigil for the French climbers. Chamoux had tried to talk Parmentier into descending with him, but after the man had refused to abandon his teammates, Chamoux had given him a radio.

Eventually, Parmentier had started down in an all-out storm. At base camp, the listeners waited and waited beside the radio. Finally they heard a faint voice: “Ici Michel, ici Michel” (“Michel here”). Still above the top of the fixed ropes, Parmentier was lost in the storm. (One more example of how willow wands marking the route can make all the difference in the world.)

Chamoux got on the radio and did a remarkable thing: he tried to talk Parmentier down, giving him the “beta” of the route from memory. Curran captured some of the dialogue: “Keep right, keep right, don’t veer to the left, then straight down for perhaps two, three hundred metres … over.” Turning to the others in the dome tent, with the radio off, Chamoux said, “He has perhaps a fifty-fifty chance that he finds the ropes. If not….” Curran fought back tears.

Hours passed. Parmentier’s voice was weaker with each short burst of broadcast. But at dusk, after one more exchange, Chamoux turned to the others and said, “He has found piss stains in the snow.”

The piss stains led the played-out climber to the top of the fixed ropes. Two days later, Parmentier staggered down to advance base, where Chamoux met him and helped him the rest of the way to base camp.

The Barrards never made it down the Abruzzi Ridge. A month later, an Austrian team discovered Liliane’s body at the foot of the south face. Maurice’s body was found two years later, in a crevasse on the Godwin Austen Glacier.

In the appendix to Curran’s K2: Triumph and Tragedy, Rutkiewicz later coolly pondered the possibilities:

How did the Barrards die? Possibly part of the summit serac broke off and hit them as they climbed down the Bottleneck. Perhaps the one behind [on the rope], Maurice, was exhausted and fell, taking Liliane with him. Perhaps they lost their way on the big snowslopes below the Bottleneck during the white-out and were avalanched down the South Face. I’m sure, too, we stayed too long at altitude. The cooking on the summit day, the slow descent from the bivouac at 8,300 metres [27,200 feet] both showed that the Barrards were more exhausted than Michel and I realised. That’s how accidents happen.

At base camp, Parmentier was overcome with anguish about the loss of his partners and about the duty of getting in touch with their families. But Rutkiewicz, in Curran’s opinion, was so blasé, she seemed in some kind of denial. He wrote in K2: Triumph and Tragedy,

Wanda, whose frostbitten fingers were obviously very painful, seemed to be out of touch with reality, already planning to climb Broad Peak, which in her present condition she was not fit for. Even if she recovered physically, which at K2 Base Camp seemed unlikely, she would be risking much worse frostbite. She sounded vague, irrational, and quite obsessed with 8,000-meter peaks.

Yet at the same time, he noted, “I remained in awe of the strength, skill and determination of the first woman to climb K2, and amazed that the experience had not left her, temporarily at least, satisfied.”

Curran wrote that passage five years before Rutkiewicz would vanish on Kangchenjunga, but I think he hit the nail on the head. A disturbing fanaticism seizes many of the climbers who decide to go after all fourteen 8,000ers. That’s a frame of mind I did my best to avoid during the eighteen years it took me to complete my Endeavor 8000, which is partly why, among my thirty expeditions, I returned from ten of them without a summit in my pocket. It’s easy to see how a fixation with getting all fourteen peaks climbed becomes an ambitious climber’s driving motivation. As soon as he or she knocks off one peak, plans for the next one go on the front burner. And in some cases, I believe, the climber’s sense