No Way Down. Life and Death on K2

This was a quick read (snow days help) so I barely had to time to extract promises from my sons that they would never climb in the Himalayas before I was done reading Graham Bowley's journalistic account of a 2008 ascent of K2. The 2008 ascent was marred by over-crowding (much more like what Everest suffers in general) and a long-stable serac that decides it's time to let go, completely indifferent to the fact that some 20 people are still above its tilting overhang.

Unlike the 1996 disaster on Everest, natural and unpredictable events help cause the tragedy of 11 deaths on K2. Yes, like the Everest event, people summitted too late. Yes, there was crowding and a lack of coordination, but the weather turned on Everest and most climbers knew that it would. In the K2 case, the glacier moved, tumbling skyscraper-sized chunks of ice down on both climbers and, more urgently, on the equipment--the lines, the snow markers--that would have helped them get down in the dark.

Unlike John Krakauer who so excellently reported the Everest tragedy, Graham Bowley is not a climber. He's a journalist who has little-to-no interest in mountaineering. In some ways the book suffers from his lack of first-hand experience (not with the tragedy itself, but with what it's like being atop the tallest places on earth). While Krakauer could make you feel exactly what is going on with your body as you become oxygen-deprived in the so-called Death Zone, and how that affects your life-and-death judgement, Bowley can only report. At times his subjects seem indifferent to what is unfolding around them and where Krakauer made me understand this as a normal reaction to high altitude, Bowley made me think slightly less of his characters.

On the other hand, Bowley was perhaps the perfect writer to bring together all the accounts of what happened over that weekend in August 2008. He did extensive interviews and right up front warns that "the accounts were contradicting one another and it was clear that memory had been affected by the pulverizing experience of high altitude, the violence of the climbers' ordeals and, in a few instances, possibly by self-serving claims of glory, blame, and guilt." Still, the journalist takes over and the accounts are laid out matter-of-factly (that's not to say they are dull. They aren't. They're each and all gripping accounts of life and death above 26,000 ft). It's only in the epilogue that Bowley admits to some controversy among accounts--who was to blame for mistakes made, who helped whom, who was affected most by altitude sickness... By then, it doesn't matter. When you've read about finding three Koreans dangling upside down, overnight, and about having to make the agonizing decision to stop and help or to save yourself; when you've read about a body falling in front of you with no scream or shout and having to sort through your muddled mind to remember whose suit was that color; when you, the reader, know that the character you admire most will either die or lose all his toes, it's hard to place blame or care about egos. These are all amazing men and women and, unlike the Everest tragedy, the mistakes seem minor. Unfortunately, any poor decision, however minor, can be fatal in the Death Zone.