K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [14]
I just don’t understand that way of thinking. Six times on 8,000ers, I’ve given up my own plans to try to help save the lives of others. Sometimes they were partners and good friends, such as Dave Carter on Everest, J.-C. Lafaille on Broad Peak, and Jimmy Chin on Cho Oyu. But others—like Beck Weathers on Everest and Gary Ball and Chantal Mauduit on K2—were strangers to me before we met at base camp. I can’t really say what other people should have done in comparable predicaments; I just know what seemed instinctively to me to be the right thing to do. I couldn’t live with myself if I’d just walked past someone in bad trouble and left him to save himself.
Van de Gevel was wrong, however. Last summer, there were heroes on K2. As seems increasingly to be the case on the world’s tallest mountains, they happened to be Sherpa.
From Camp IV, on the afternoon of August 2, several climbers could see the three Koreans at about 27,000 feet, above the traverse and the Bottleneck. They were still moving feebly, though making no downward progress. With them was a Sherpa, Jumic Bhote, who had also summited, and who may have been effectively guiding the Koreans. In Camp IV were Tsering Bhote and Pasang Bhote, Jumic’s brother and cousin, respectively.
These two Sherpa performed an incredible feat. They climbed the Bottleneck and the traverse—without fixed ropes, of course. In the lead, Pasang reached the three Koreans, who were almost unconscious, and Jumic. Pasang managed to revive two of the Koreans and his cousin and get them started down the mountain again.
Just as the four climbers reached the top of the Bottleneck, according to Freddie Wilkinson, who reconstructed what happened for Rock and Ice, another huge chunk of the Motivator cut loose. It scoured the Bottleneck, sweeping the two Koreans and the two Sherpa with it. As Tsering Bhote watched in horror, all four men plunged to their deaths. Deeply shaken, Tsering managed to descend safely to Camp IV.
Meanwhile, the media were focused on the survival stories of Marco Confortola and Wilco van Rooijen, reporters hanging on every word the Italian and the Dutchman uttered from their hospital beds in Islamabad. Thus this last and most deadly episode of the tragedy, which concealed the genuine heroism of Pasang Bhote and Tsering Bhote, nearly passed beneath the radar.
Sherpa heroism did not end there. Along with Alberto Zerain, the two most competent and experienced climbers on K2 that summer were thirty-four-year-old Chhiring Dorje and thirty-four-year-old Pemba Gyalje. Chhiring had climbed Everest ten times, Pemba six. In the early morning hours of August 1, Pemba had been one of the lead climbers fixing rope up the Bottleneck. Far stronger than the Europeans, he could have left them behind and gone for the top on his own. But on the summit, he waited until the last European topped out, just to make sure everyone was all right, and only then descended with the stragglers.
Pemba did this not because he was a “hired gun,” which he was not, but just, I suspect, because he was a Sherpa. The best Sherpa have far more endurance at the end of a long summit day. Westerners tend to think, Boy, that was hard. I’m exhausted. Sherpa think, Well, yes, it’s hard, but that’s what it is.
They’ve worked hard every day since they were kids. They’re used to carrying heavy loads from village to village. Their whole lives are about hardship and struggle.
When climbers such as McDonnell, van Rooijen, and Confortola chose to bivouac, both Chhiring and Pemba decided to climb down toward Camp IV in the dark. Near