18

The Savage Mountain

We saw out the night, shivering in the freezing conditions for several hours. As we climbed down the next morning, my confidence seemed to return gradually; I felt stronger and more comfortable when dealing with extreme exposure. By the time we made it back to Base Camp, the worst of the wobbles I’d experienced at the top of GI were behind me, or so I hoped, although I guessed I wasn’t yet back to 100 per cent. My plan was to work hard on bombproofing my emotions through Gasherbrum II, because I would need every ounce of emotional resilience to survive the more challenging terrain of K2. For now, I had to focus on the primary mission, by leaning into an age-old military adage.

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.

When I looked up at GII from Camp 1, a peak that was considered to be fairly calm, I readied myself for a challenge, though I was excited at the realisation that I could move like a regular mountain climber at least. We weren’t planning on climbing all 8,034 metres of it in one hit. Instead, the team would rest at Camps 2 and 3, and as we worked our way up the mountain, GII’s moods felt calm. We summited on 18 July, and at the top I felt awe and excitement. In the distance was K2, and it looked picturesque. The sharp peak curved towards the skyline like a shark’s tooth; it was glowing pink with the sunrise.

I’m going to be on top of that. And I’m going to show the world how it’s done.

Not everyone shared my optimism. As I made my way down GII, I learned that K2 had been in a fairly unforgiving mood. A number of experienced climbers were waiting at Base Camp and several expedition parties were holding out there for a suitable weather window – some of them had been hanging around for months. Around two hundred climbing permits (including Sherpas) had been issued by the Pakistani authorities that year, but around 95 per cent of those hoping to climb K2 had packed up and gone home. The other five had hung around, hoping I might lead them to the top.

I passed several teams that were trekking away from the mountain as I arrived, many of them stopping to tell us their K2 horror stories. At least two summit attempts had taken place, but on both occasions, the line-fixing teams brave enough to attack the peak had been beaten back by some horrendous conditions. They had only made it past Camp 4 and onto a section called the Bottleneck, a thin couloir positioned below the peak at 8,200 metres above sea level. Meanwhile, a number of ridges along the way were apparently primed to explode with avalanches. Even the Sherpas were in fear of what might happen up there.

When I joined up with the others at Base Camp, I was pulled aside by Mingma Sherpa, a friend of mine with serious expertise on the big mountains. He had twice set the lines on K2 in recent years and was regarded as a fearsome climber within the guiding community. This time, though, Mingma Sherpa had been spooked by the mountain.

‘Nimsdai, it’s so, so dangerous to climb,’ he said, pulling out his phone to play several minutes of video footage captured from his attempt at the summit a few days earlier. ‘Take a look . . .’

The clip made for sobering viewing. The snow was chest-deep in some sections, which wasn’t going to be a physical issue for me, or my team, but every step was loaded with risk. At one point, according to Mingma Sherpa, the lead climber in the fixing team had been swept away by an avalanche. Luckily, he’d survived, but the video certainly had me worried.

I gathered my team around me. ‘Right, tonight we drink,’ I said, patting Mingma Sherpa on the back and sparking up a cigarette. ‘We party hard. And tomorrow we plan.’

It was time to prepare for the worst.

* * *

My mission was in jeopardy.

As I met with the various expedition parties at Base Camp and figured out how best to tackle K2, an update arrived regarding my permit request for Shishapangma – the world’s fourteenth-highest mountain and the final peak on the project schedule. So far, the problem in reaching it had been geo-political. Located in Tibet, it was up to the Chinese government to rule upon who could climb it and who couldn’t, and for the entire mountaineering season of 2019, it had been decided that nobody was being granted access to the peak.

I’d hoped they might make some exception, given the scale of my mission, but the news wasn’t great. The Chinese Mountaineering Association (CMA) had turned me down flat, citing a number of safety concerns, and Shishapangma was to remain closed, no exceptions. The chances of my climbing the final mountain of Phase Three seemed increasingly unlikely.

It was hard not to feel a little disheartened. So far, I had scaled every peak on the schedule in the time and the style I’d promised from the outset. The team had proven self-sufficient and effective, and we’d worked with speed. Now bureaucracy was about to crush my ambitions, but I wasn’t going to let it derail me: there would be some way of finishing off the job. There had to be. For now, though, it was important to absorb the latest intelligence on Tibet and the Chinese permit issues, before boxing it away emotionally. With K2 to deal with, shutting the door on any negative thought became important. The politics and paperwork could wait.

With hindsight, this was the best position to adopt. When climbing K2, I knew that the work often became a test of both psychological and physical resilience – and there was little room for distractions. Yes, it was a tough mountain to top and the conditions were often unforgiving, but I had faith that my team had the psychological minerals to manage the workload, though I feared the news about Shishapangma might knock them off course. It felt important to maintain a positive mood, and despite the increasing levels of fatigue, everyone within the expedition party seemed to be fired up and incentivised.

So far, my tactics for the big peaks had been to lead experienced Nepalese climbers to the top of mountains they were yet to scale; by doing that, they would have the credentials to work there in the future, and as a result the demand for their services would increase. (When a climber tackles an 8,000er for the first time, they will always prefer a guide who has climbed it previously because they know the route and its dangers.) It was my way of setting them up as legitimate guides with Elite Himalayan Adventures, while preserving their energy for the good of the overall mission. Once the project was finished, they could expect to be held in high esteem.

I also had to consider how best to tackle K2. Before showing up at Base Camp, I’d been toying with the idea of taking on Broad Peak first – a small expedition party had climbed it a few days previously, and all the trailblazing and line-fixing had been completed. But when I spoke to the other climbers at K2, I realised they’d been waiting on me to arrive. They wanted to see if my team were able to finish the rope-fixing job, before deciding on whether to pack up and go home themselves. That increased the pressure weighing on us for sure, but I liked the idea of helping those climbers to their dream of scaling one of the most dangerous peaks on earth.

I needed all the experience and manpower I could get. On K2, the weather was set to be horrendous and high winds were predicted for the next few days; it would be painfully cold, too. I understood that failure on K2 would mean I’d have to make a second attempt at it, or more, before climbing Broad Peak, and by that point the Pakistan climbing season would be over.

Time was bloody tight and I mission-planned accordingly: it was down to us to fix the last of the lines on the mountain above Camp 4. Meanwhile, I hoped to climb K2 with Gesman and Lakpa Dendi Sherpa, but the mountain’s unforgiving nature and the sketchy conditions around the peak required me to plan with a near military precision.

‘Look, guys, this is a risky climb,’ I said. ‘The work is going to be rough. My plan is to assess the situation from Camp 4. Gesman and Lakpa Dendi, you’re coming with me. If it’s too dangerous up there, we’ll come down and I’ll swap you out. Mingma and Geljen, you’ll then fall in behind and we’ll go again. I’m going to rotate two guys every time so you can rest, but I’m going to lead this thing from the front. And I’m only giving up when we’ve made at least six, seven attempts at the top.’

There was another pressing issue to deal with, too. Many of the climbers waiting nervously at Base Camp were rattled by fear, and some of them appeared beaten already. They had learned that the South African-born Swiss, Mike Horn – an explorer known for climbing Gasherbrum I and II, plus Broad Peak and Makalu without oxygen – had been held back by the dangerous weather.

The understanding that some other big-time mountaineers were unable to scale K2 was unsettling the expedition parties still in attendance. A number of individuals even wanted to bail out and go home, and it didn’t help that several people were noticeably freaked out, having watched a line-fixer being swept away by an avalanche ahead of them as they climbed. The incident had left some mental scars.

One afternoon, Clara – a woman from the Czech Republic, whom I’d known to be a very strong climber – came to my tent. She was scared.

‘Look, Nims, I don’t think I can do this. It’s too much.’

The morale at Base Camp was clearly broken and it was down to me to fix it. When I gathered everybody together for a group briefing, I outlined my plan, detailing to the expedition parties how I intended to use my guides to help forge a path to the top, and how everyone could follow in behind me. Then I tried to lift the group’s self-belief. I preferred not to prepare or operate when surrounded by bad energy and pessimism. On K2, I sensed that the battle was being lost in the mind, but the climb was within everybody’s grasp if they showed enough heart. Positivity was needed.

A lot of people might wonder why I cared so much about how confident the other climbers were feeling about their expeditions. The truth is that it would have been quite easy for me to behave selfishly. I could have moved over to Broad Peak, climbed there first and returned to K2 a little later, once the other parties had left the area. Instead, I wanted to show them that the impossible was within reach.

‘You’ve already been up to Camp 4,’ I said. ‘But you only turned back because there were no fixed lines beyond that, and the conditions were bad. Since then, you’ve had time to rest. You’re strong.’

‘But it’s so tough up there,’ said one climber.

‘Look brother, don’t talk yourself out of it. I’ve just climbed back-to-back mountains without sleep. In Nepal I made rescue attempts and then climbed again the next day. You guys haven’t had to do that. You’re in a much stronger position than I was on Everest, or Dhaulagiri, or Kanchenjunga. We’ll lead the way and a day later, you’ll summit.’

I told them about the UK Special Forces Selection process. How around 200 people put themselves through it every year, knowing that sometimes only around five or six people would qualify. ‘Yeah, there’s always a high risk of failure,’ I said, ‘but those two hundred people all started out from a point of positivity. They didn’t quit before the very first day.’

I reminded them that with positive thought, courage and discipline they would survive, but approaching K2 with a negative mind was the fastest route to failure, or death.

‘You can rest in the jungle when you’re tired and still survive. You can give up in a desert without food or water for a few days and still be rescued – you won’t die instantly. But death happens fast on the mountain and to give up, or to be half-hearted, will only cause you to stop. And to stop is to freeze and die.’

I knew the climb would still prove hard going, regardless of my enthusiasm for adventure. Beyond the hair-trigger avalanches and screaming gales on the famous Abruzzi Spur route of the mountain – the most popular line to the top – K2 had another booby trap in its armoury: the Bottleneck.

At that point on the route I’d have to lean on my oxygen supply, though that wasn’t going to help me to negotiate the more pressing dangers. The Bottleneck bristled with seracs and was set at around fifty-five degrees, so its steep, overhanging face couldn’t be climbed using rope and ice axes. Instead the only way up was to traverse cautiously around it, all the while keeping a watchful eye on the precarious seracs above.

It was an unnerving approach, but there was no alternative line. The Bottleneck was the fastest route to the top, although according to some stats, a worrying percentage of K2’s fatalities had happened there – in 2008, eleven climbers were killed during the worst single incident on the mountain; a number of them having died as a result of an ice avalanche in that stretch of the climb.

Timing was also an issue. With the conditions, it was important to hit the Bottleneck at around 1 a.m. during a summit push. In the middle of the night, the terrain was colder and the snow tended to harden, so it would be possible to trailblaze through it without slipping and sliding around. Any later and most climbers hitting the Bottleneck found that the surfaces were softer and trickier to negotiate. Climbing at that time also presented me with a psychological advantage. In the dark, it wouldn’t be possible to look up at the intimidating seracs above.

We took our time, rolling up the mountain, fixing any anchors that were damaged, while still working out our route to the top. The climb was marked by a series of physical and emotional tests. Our backs were weighed down by rope, anchors, and oxygen, and between Camps 1 and 2 we had to negotiate the House Chimney, a 100-foot-tall wall of rock, so called because of a ‘chimney’ crack that ran through the middle of it, and also due to the fact that American mountaineer, Bill House, was the first to climb it in 1938. Luckily, we were able to scale it fairly easily, making the most of some fixed ropes that dangled from the top.

Later, beyond Camp 2, was the infamous Black Pyramid section of the mountain, an imposing, triangular rock buttress that stretched up for 365 metres and required us to scramble over a tricky stretch of rock and ice. We worked slowly, taking our time so as not to suffer a disastrous slip, but my body was feeling weird. I’d started out strong, but as we approached the Shoulder, a glacial hump that was manageable without the use of a fixed rope, there was a worrying gurgle in my guts. Then another. My bowels were cramping and knotting, and I recognised the first onset of explosive diarrhoea. I prayed that the sensation was a one-off.

By the time we arrived at Camp 4 at 3 p.m., my stomach had settled a little, but I knew the situation would be doubly tricky, as we were fixing the lines in tough conditions. Above us sat the Bottleneck and the summit of K2. On a good day, we might expect to take around six hours to reach the end. The Bottleneck was followed by a short but challenging ice ridge, which eventually led to the peak, and there were stories of several climbers being fatally buffeted by high winds around the summit. Unable to hold their footing, they were then blown off the side of K2, where they tumbled to their deaths.

I decided it was best to stress over those issues as and when they happened. For now, my biggest concern was how best to manage the lurching in my stomach, because on troublesome expeditions there were always events that could not be planned for, no matter the moods of the mountain.

I decided to adjust my thinking, pulling out my camera and grabbing several reconnaissance photos, zooming into the image to pick out the best route around the Bottleneck. I wanted to figure out an alternative line should the well-travelled route prove trickier than expected. My team had gathered around me. We were fully geared up with ice axes, crampons, snow bars, ropes and ice screws. We were ready. The time had arrived to deliver my war briefing.

‘Guys, we are the best climbers from Nepal,’ I said. ‘It is time to show the world what we are capable of. Let’s get this done.’

We pulled on our heavy packs and oxygen masks. Then we started our climb to the top, moving with the energy of one hundred men.