K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [9]
Besides Zerain, seventeen others reached the top. Their arrival times ranged from 5:20 P.M. to after 7:00 P.M. For some, this meant that they had been going for twenty hours since leaving camp that morning. They were already pretty worn out.
By the time those summiteers got back to the diagonal snow ramp that leads down to the tricky traverse and the Bottleneck, it was pitch-dark. And most of them were exhausted.
It’s at this point that it’s hard to figure out just what happened on K2 late on August 1. The various accounts that filtered back from the survivors are so mutually contradictory, you can’t stitch them together into a coherent narrative. It seems that the strongest climbers hoped to down-climb in the night all the way to Camp IV. But others, upon realizing how late they would arrive on the summit, apparently planned to bivouac well above the crux traverse and the Bottleneck.
By “planned to bivouac,” I don’t mean to suggest that this was part of their preconceived agenda. As far as I can tell, none of them carried a bivouac sack, or a half sleeping bag, or even a stove, and by now nearly all of them were without food and water. It may be that they had become so wasted that there seemed no alternative to bivouacking. But one thing is clear: whether that night or the next morning, they were counting on the fixed ropes to get down through the Bottleneck to Camp IV.
The weather was still perfect. But to survive a night in the open above 27,000 feet without shelter, food, or water, you have to hang your life out on a limb. Yet it’s amazing how many climbers on K2 seem to take for granted the option of bivouacking on the way down as the price to pay for bagging the summit. On our own 1992 expedtion, the ostensible leader of our team, Vladimir Balyberdin, bivouacked above 27,000 feet. Vlad was a tough dude, he had a mild night, and he got away with it. The next night, Chantal Mauduit thought she had no choice but to bivouac at 27,500 feet, but Aleksei Nikiforov, coming down from the top three hours later, roused her out of her apathy and cajoled her into descending with him—probably saving her life.
In 1978, my friend Jim Wickwire was one of the four climbers who became the first Americans to climb K2. Jim and his partner, Lou Reichardt, got to the top at 5:15 P.M. Lou realized the importance of heading down at once, and took off after only a few minutes. But Jim lingered, almost in a trance, taking photographs, changing the film in his camera, and savoring that indescribable achievement, until he had spent close to an hour on the summit. It’s uncannily similar to what happened on Annapurna on the first ascent in 1950: Louis Lachenal was obsessed with getting back to camp, while Maurice Herzog, the team leader, stayed and stayed, caught up in a euphoric vision that would ultimately cost him his toes and fingers.
On K2, Lou made it down to high camp that night, but Jim had to bivouac just below 28,000 feet. He barely survived; by the time he reached base camp, he was suffering from both pneumonia and pleurisy, his vocal cords were paralyzed, and he had incurred some frostbite. He was absolutely wrecked. Porters had to carry him in a litter back to Concordia, and he was eventually helicoptered off the Baltoro.
There’s an old joke: “bivouac” is a French word for “mistake.” I’m proud of the fact that on all thirty of my expeditions to 8,000-meter peaks, I never once had to bivouac. On several occasions, I turned around short of the summit rather than submit to a night out without shelter. In 1990, if Greg Child, Greg Mortimer, and Steve Swenson had bivouacked instead of calling upon their utmost reserves to get back to camp, they might well have died on the north ridge.
After Zerain and several of the Sherpa, the strongest climbers that day were probably the Norwegian trio: Cecilie Skog; her husband, Rolf Bae; and their