Ordinarily Mortenson would have paid more attention. He would have focused on life-and-death information like the fact that Mouzafer, the porter who had appeared like a blessing and volunteered to haul his heavy bag of climbing gear, was also carrying his tent and nearly all of his food and kept him in sight. And he would have paid more mind to the overawing physicality of his surroundings.
In 1909, the duke of Abruzzi, one of the greatest climbers of his day, and perhaps his era’s most discerning connoisseur of precipitous landscapes, led an Italian expedition up the Baltoro for an unsuccessful attempt at K2. He was stunned by the stark beauty of the encircling peaks. “Nothing could compare to this in terms of alpine beauty,” he recorded in his journal. “It was a world of glaciers and crags, an incredible view which could satisfy an artist just as well as a mountaineer.”
But as the sun sank behind the great granite serrations of Muztagh Tower to the west, and shadows raked up the valley’s eastern walls, toward the bladed monoliths of Gasherbrum, Mortenson hardly noticed. He was looking inward that afternoon, stunned and absorbed by something unfamiliar in his life to that point—failure.
Reaching into the pocket of his shalwar, he fingered the necklace of amber beads that his little sister Christa had often worn. As a three-year-old in Tanzania, where Mortenson’s Minnesota-born parents had been Lutheran missionaries and teachers, Christa had contracted acute meningitis and never fully recovered. Greg, twelve years her senior, had appointed himself her protector. Though Christa struggled to perform simple tasks—putting on her clothes each morning took upward of an hour—and suffered severe epileptic seizures, Greg pressured his mother, Jerene, to allow her some measure of independence. He helped Christa find work at manual labor, taught her the routes of the Twin Cities’ public buses, so she could move about freely, and, to their mother’s mortification, discussed the particulars of birth control when he learned she was dating.
Each year, whether he was serving as a U.S. Army medic and platoon leader in Germany, working on a nursing degree in South Dakota, studying the neurophysiology of epilepsy at graduate school in Indiana in hopes of discovering a cure for Christa, or living a climbing bum’s life out of his car in Berkeley, California, Mortenson insisted that his little sister visit him for a month. Together, they sought out the spectacles that brought Christa so much pleasure. They took in the Indy 500, the Kentucky Derby, road-tripped down to Disneyland, and he guided her through the architecture of his personal cathedral at that time, the storied granite walls of Yosemite.
For her twenty-third birthday, Christa and their mother planned to make a pilgrimage from Minnesota to the cornfield in Deyersville, Iowa, where the movie that Christa was drawn to watch again and again, Field of Dreams, had been filmed. But on her birthday, in the small hours before they were to set out, Christa died of a massive seizure.
After Christa’s death, Mortenson retrieved the necklace from among his sister’s few things. It still smelled of a campfire they had made during her last visit to stay with him in California. He brought it to Pakistan with him, bound in a Tibetan prayer flag, along with a plan to honor the memory of his little sister. Mortenson was a climber and he had decided on the most meaningful tribute he had within him. He would scale K2, the summit most climbers consider the toughest to reach on Earth, and leave Christa’s necklace there at 28,267 feet.
He had been raised in a family that had relished difficult tasks, like building a school and a hospital in Tanzania, on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. But despite the smooth surfaces of his parents’ unquestioned faith, Mortenson hadn’t yet made up his mind about the nature of divinity. He would leave an offering to whatever deity inhabited the upper atmosphere.
Three months earlier, Mortenson had positively skipped up this glacier in a pair of Teva sandals with no socks, his ninety-pound pack beside the point of the adventure that beckoned him up the Baltoro. He had set off on the seventy-mile trek from Askole with a team of ten English, Irish, French, and American mountaineers, part of a poorly financed but pathologically bold attempt to climb the world’s second-highest peak.
Compared to Everest, a thousand miles southeast along the spine of the Himalaya, K2, they all knew, was a killer. To climbers, who call it “The Savage Peak,” it remains the ultimate test, a pyramid of razored granite so steep that snow can’t cling to its knife-edged ridges. And Mortenson, then a bullishly fit thirty-five-year-old, who had summited Kilimanjaro at age eleven, who’d been schooled on the sheer granite walls of Yosemite, then graduated to half a dozen successful Himalayan ascents, had no doubt when he arrived in May that he would soon stand on what he considered “the biggest and baddest summit on Earth.”
He’d come shatteringly close, within six hundred meters of the summit. But K2 had receded into the mists behind him and the necklace was still in his pocket. How could this have happened? He wiped his eyes with his sleeve, disoriented by unfamiliar tears, and attributed them to the altitude. He certainly wasn’t himself. After seventy-eight days of primal struggle at altitude on K2, he felt like a faint, shriveled caricature of himself. He simply didn’t know if he had the reserves left to walk fifty more miles over dangerous terrain to Askole.
The sharp, shotgun crack of a rockfall brought him back to his surroundings. He watched a boulder the size of a three-story house accelerate, bouncing and spinning down a slope of scree, then pulverize an iceberg on the trail ahead of him.
Mortenson tried to shake himself into a state of alertness. He looked out of himself, saw how high the shadows had climbed up the eastern peaks, and tried to remember how long it had been since he’d seen a sign of other humans. It had been hours since Scott Darsney had disappeared down the trail ahead of him. An hour earlier, or maybe more, he’d heard the bells of an army mule caravan carrying ammunition toward the Siachen Glacier, the twenty-thousand-foot-high battlefield a dozen miles southeast where the Pakistani military was frozen into its perpetual deadly standoff with the Indian army.
He scoured the trail for signs. Anywhere on the trail back to Askole, there would be debris left behind by the military. But there were no mule droppings. No cigarette butts. No food tins. No blades of the hay the mule drivers carried to feed their animals. He realized it didn’t look much like a trail at all, simply a cleft in an unstable maze of boulders and ice, and he wondered how he had wandered to this spot. He tried to summon the clarity to concentrate. But the effects of prolonged exposure to high altitude had sapped Mortenson of the ability to act and think decisively.
He spent an hour scrambling up a slope of scree, hoping for a vantage point above the boulders and icebergs, a place where he might snare the landmark he was looking for, the great rocky promontory of Urdukas, which thrust out onto the Baltoro like a massive fist, and haul himself back toward the trail. But at the top he was rewarded with little more than a greater degree of exhaustion. He’d strayed eight miles up a deserted valley from the trail, and in the failing light, even the contours of peaks that he knew well looked unfamiliar from this new perspective.
Feeling a finger of panic probing beneath his altitude-induced stupor, Mortenson sat to take stock. In his small sun-faded purple daypack he had a lightweight wool Pakistani army blanket, an empty water bottle, and a single protein bar. His high-altitude down sleeping bag, all his warm clothes, his tent, his stove, food, even his flashlight and all his matches were in the pack the porter carried.
He’d have to spend the night and search for the trail in daylight. Though it had already dropped well below zero, he wouldn’t die of exposure, he thought. Besides, he was coherent enough to realize that stumbling, at night, over a shifting glacier, where crevasses yawned hundreds of feet down through wastes of blue ice into subterranean pools, was far more dangerous. Picking his way down the mound of scree, Mortenson looked for a spot far enough from the mountain walls that he wouldn’t be crushed by rockfall as he slept and solid enough that it wouldn’t split and plunge him into the glacier’s depths.
He fo
und a flat slab of rock that seemed stable enough, scooped icy snow into his water bottle with ungloved hands, and wrapped himself in his blanket, willing himself not to focus on how alone and exposed he was. His forearm was lashed with rope burns from the rescue, and he knew he should tear off the clotted gauze bandages and drain pus from the wounds that refused to heal at this altitude, but he couldn’t quite locate the motivation. As he lay shivering on uneven rock, Mortenson watched as the last light of the sun smoldered blood red on the daggered summits to the east, then flared out, leaving their afterimages burning in blue-black.
Nearly a century earlier, Filippo De Filippi, doctor for and chronicler of the duke of Abruzzi’s expedition to the Karakoram, recorded the desolation he felt among these mountains. Despite the fact that he was in the company of two dozen Europeans and 260 local porters, that they carried folding chairs and silver tea services and had European newspapers delivered to them regularly by a fleet of runners, he felt crushed into insignificance by the character of this landscape. “Profound silence would brood over the valley,” he wrote, “even weighing down our spirits with indefinable heaviness. There can be no other place in the world where man feels himself so alone, so isolated, so completely ignored by Nature, so incapable of entering into communion with her.”
Perhaps it was his experience with solitude, being the lone American child among hundreds of Africans, or the nights he spent bivouacked three thousand feet up Yosemite’s Half Dome in the middle of a multiday climb, but Mortenson felt at ease. If you ask him why, he’ll credit altitude-induced dementia. But anyone who has spent time in Mortenson’s presence, who’s watched him wear down a congressman or a reluctant philanthropist or an Afghan warlord with his doggedness, until he pried loose overdue relief funds, or a donation, or the permission he was seeking to pass into tribal territories, would recognize this night as one more example of Mortenson’s steely-mindedness.
The wind picked up and the night became bitterly crystalline. He tried to discern the peaks he felt hovering malevolently around him, but he couldn’t make them out among the general blackness. After an hour under his blanket he was able to thaw his frozen protein bar against his body and melt enough silty icewater to wash it down, which set him shivering violently. Sleep, in this cold, seemed out of the question. So Mortenson lay beneath the stars salting the sky and decided to examine the nature of his failure.
The leaders of his expedition, Dan Mazur and Jonathan Pratt, along with French climber Etienne Fine, were thoroughbreds. They were speedy and graceful, bequeathed the genetic wherewithal to sprint up technical pitches at high altitude. Mortenson was slow and bearishly strong. At six-foot-four and 210 pounds, Mortenson had attended Minnesota’s Concordia College on a football scholarship.
Though no one directed that it should be so, the slow, cumbersome work of mountain climbing fell naturally to him and to Darsney Eight separate times Mortenson served as pack mule, hauling food, fuel, and oxygen bottles to several stashes on the way to the Japanese Couloir, a tenuous aerie the expedition carved out within six hundred meters of K2’s summit, stocking the expedition’s high camps so the lead climbers might have the supplies in place when they decided to dash to the top.
All of the other expeditions on the mountain that season had chosen to challenge the peak in the traditional way, working up the path pioneered nearly a century earlier, K2’s Southeastern Abruzzi Ridge. Only they had chosen the West Ridge, a circuitous, brutally difficult route, littered with land mine after land mine of steep, technical pitches, which had been successfully scaled only once, twelve years earlier, by Japanese climber Eiho Otani and his Pakistani partner Nazir Sabir.
Mortenson relished the challenge and took pride in the rigorous route they’d chosen. And each time he reached one of the perches they’d clawed out high on the West Ridge, and unloaded fuel canisters and coils of rope, he noticed he was feeling stronger. He might be slow, but reaching the summit himself began to seem inevitable.
Then one evening after more than seventy days on the mountain, Mortenson and Darsney were back at base camp, about to drop into well-earned sleep after ninety-six hours of climbing during another resupply mission. But while taking a last look at the peak through a telescope just after dark, Mortenson and Darsney noticed a flickering light high up on K2’s West Ridge. They realized it must be members of their expedition, signaling with their headlamps, and they guessed that their French teammate was in trouble. “Etienne was an Alpiniste,” Mortenson explains, underlining with an exaggerated French pronunciation the respect and arrogance the term can convey among climbers. “He’d travel fast and light with the absolute minimum amount of gear. And we had to bail him out before when he went up too fast without acclimatizing.”
Mortenson and Darsney, doubting whether they were strong enough to climb to Fine so soon after an exhausting descent, called for volunteers from the five other expeditions at base camp. None came forward. For two hours they lay in their tents resting and rehydrating, then they packed their gear and went back out.
Descending from their seventy-six-hundred-meter Camp IV, Pratt and Mazur found themselves in the fight of their lives. “Etienne had climbed up to join us for a summit bid,” Mazur says. “But when he got to us, he collapsed. As he tried to catch his breath, he told us he heard a rattling in his lungs.”
Fine was suffering from pulmonary edema, an altitude-induced flooding of the lungs that can kill those it strikes if they aren’t immediately evacuated to lower ground. “It was terrifying,” Mazur says. “Pink froth was pouring out of Etienne’s mouth. We tried to call for help, but we’d dropped our radio in the snow and it wouldn’t work. So we started down.”
Pratt and Mazur took turns clipping themselves to Fine, and rapelling with him down the West Ridge’s steepest pitches. “It was like hanging from a rope strapped to a big sack of potatoes,” Mazur says. “And we had to take our time so we wouldn’t kill ourselves.”
With his typical understatement, Mortenson doesn’t say much about the twenty-four hours it took to haul himself up to reach Fine other than to comment that it was “fairly arduous.”
“Dan and Jon were the real heroes,” he says. “They gave up their summit bid to get Etienne down.”
By the time Mortenson and Darsney met their teammates, on a rock face near Camp I, Fine was lapsing in and out of conciousness, suffering also from cerebral edema, the altitude-induced swelling of the brain. “He was unable to swallow and attempting to unlace his boots,” Mortenson says.
Mortenson, who’d worked as an emergency room trauma nurse for the freedom the irregular hours gave him to pursue his climbing career, gave Fine injections of Decadron to ease the edema and the four already exhausted climbers began a forty-eight-hour odyssey of dragging and lowering him down craggy rock faces.
Sometimes Fine, ordinarily fluent in English, would wake enough to babble in French, Mortenson says. At the most technical pitches, with a lifelong climber’s instinct for self-preservation, Fine would rouse himself to clip his protective devices onto the rope, before melting back into deadweight, Mortenson remembers.
Seventy-two hours after Mortenson and Darsney set out, the group had succeeded in lowering Fine to flat ground at their advance base camp. Darsney radioed the Canadian expedition below, who relayed his request to the Pakistani military for a high-altitude Lama helicopter rescue. At the time, it would have been one of the highest helicopter rescues ever attempted. But the military HQ replied that the weather was too bad and the wind too strong and ordered Fine evacuated to lower ground.
It was one thing to issue an order. It was quite another for four men in the deepest animal stages of exhaustion to attempt to execute it. For six hours, after strapping Fine into a sleeping bag, they communicated only in grunts and whimpers, dragging their friend down a dangerous technical route through the icefall of the Savoia Glacier.
“We were so exhausted and so beyond our limits that, at times, we could only crawl ourselves as we tried to get d
own,” Darsney remembers.
Finally, the group approached K2 base camp, towing Fine in the bag behind them. “All the other expeditions strolled about a quarter mile up the glacier to greet us and give us a hero’s welcome,” Darsney says. “After the Pakistani army helicopter came and evacuated Etienne, the Canadian expedition members cooked up a huge meal and everyone had a party. But Greg and I didn’t stop to eat, drink, or even piss, we just fell into our sleeping bags like we’d been shot.”
For two days, Mortenson and Darsney drifted in and out of the facsimile of sleep that high altitude inflicts on even those most exhausted. As the wind probed at their tents, it was accompanied by the sound of metal cook kit plates, engraved with the names of the forty-eight mountaineers who’d lost their lives to the Savage Mountain, clanging eerily on the Art Gilkey Memorial, named for a climber who died during a 1953 American expedition.
When they woke, they found a note from Pratt and Mazur, who’d headed back up to their high camp. They invited their teammates to join them for a summit attempt when they recovered. But recovery was beyond them. The rescue, coming so quickly on the heels of their resupply climb, had ripped away what reserves they had.
When they finally emerged from their tent, both found it a struggle simply to walk. Fine had been saved at a great price. The ordeal would eventually cost him all his toes. And the rescue cost Mortenson and Darsney whatever attempt they could muster at the summit they had worked so hard to reach. Mazur and Pratt would announce to the world that they’d stood on the summit a week later and return home to glory in their achievement. But the number of metal plates chiming in the wind would multiply, as four of the sixteen climbers who summited that season died during their descent.