K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [7]
Still falling, Mandic grabbed wildly at the rope, jerking two other climbers off their feet. He then lost his grip and tumbled down the steep couloir, pinwheeling hundreds of feet back down toward the Shoulder. “Just one moment, and he was gone,” says Wilco.
Uncertain whether their teammate was still alive, two Serbians and a Pakistani porter descended to his body. By the time they got there, Mandic was dead. According to Power, however, over the radio from base camp, the Serbian team leader ordered that trio to try to haul the body back to Camp IV. As they began the effort, the porter, Jehan Baig—described by Power as “inexperienced”—suddenly slipped and fell. Eyewitnesses claimed that Baig never tried to self-arrest with his ice ax. Instead, he cartwheeled down the slope and plunged out of sight over a cornice.
If Power is correct in his assertion that the body recovery was ordered by the team leader, that directive strikes me as questionable at best. It’s hard enough to help a sick or wounded climber descend under his own power from 26,000 feet on an 8,000er; it’s virtually impossible to haul a dead body from such a perilous perch back to camp. It’s not clear what the ultimate point of that mission would have been, since the body could never have been taken all the way down the mountain. That order, if in fact it was given, cost Jehan Baig his life. It’s curious that in his public announcement, the Serbian team leader made no mention of Baig’s death. Instead, he wrote, “We muffled our friend’s body in the Serbian flag, secured it with pickaxe and put it on 7,900 m [25,900 feet] to the right from direction C4-Bottleneck. Our friend rest near the heaven. Let God bless him.”
It’s also unclear how many of the climbers stuck in the traffic jam were even aware that Mandic had fallen to his death. Almost certainly, none of them knew about the second fatal accident down below. In any event, now that the rope salvaged from the bottom of the Bottleneck had been fixed in place on the culminating traverse (the hardest part of the whole route), most of the climbers in the traffic jam kept plodding, ever so slowly, upward.
One of the few in the crowd who had decided to turn around and give up his summit attempt, the American Chris Klinke took an amazing photo of the upper mountain from Camp IV just after noon on August 1. (The shot, which captures in a single image the fiasco that was unfolding on K2 that day, was run splashed across a two-page spread in Men’s Journal.) The picture is so sharp that you can clearly see twenty-two tiny, insectlike human figures on the route. At the bottom of the photo, well below the Bottleneck, two of them are engaged in the effort to recover Mandic’s body, only minutes before Baig would fall to his death. Most of the climbers have finally escaped the Bottleneck and the traverse, but the traffic jam is alive and well: nineteen of the climbers are so tightly bunched that it looks as though each one is on the verge of stepping on the heels of the climber in front of him. Far, far above even the leader of the traffic jam, a solitary climber—Alberto Zerain—rests in the lee of a small serac before starting on to the summit.
In my view, many of those climbers still heading upward ought to have thought a little more seriously about turning back. Turnaround times aren’t an ironclad rule on K2, but I believe in them for myself. On our own summit day, Scott and I got moving from Camp IV at 1:30 A.M. Charley, who started a little later, caught up with us, having followed the tracks we’d kicked in the deep snow. I had resolved that if we didn’t summit by 2:00 P.M., I’d turn around. As it was, we topped out at noon.
In August 2008, I suspect, summit fever took over in the traffic jam. All those climbers