he air was loud with the sound of ravens. Metal mess plates, punched with the names of some of the fallen climbers, tinkled gently in the breeze. About 12,000 feet above us, the top of the mountain was hidden by cloud; only its vast toes of black and brown rock were visible, stretching down onto the frigid boulder-strewn rubble of the Godwin-Austen Glacier a few hundred feet below.
It was just below freezing. Descending quickly, I tried not to look at the warren of rocks around me where some of the bodies, blasted by storms down K2’s slopes, were buried. Parts of some of the bodies were visible, and occasionally I glimpsed a piece of ripped climbing suit or an old boot, or smelled something sickly on the air.
The experience must have affected one of my Balti porters, Abbas. Later, around midnight, he ran barefoot over the dangerous crevasses back toward the memorial, my porters told me, screaming to the dead that he belonged with them. A couple of the other porters held him down and brought him back to the tent. Believing he was possessed, they read the Koran to soothe him, but he bolted again.
At 5 a.m. when I lifted the flap of the mess tent, Abbas was asleep on a mat on the cold, stony floor, his hands and feet trussed. When he awoke, he was untied, and he rubbed his wrists groggily. He shook his head no when I offered porridge and green tea. He staggered outside to the porters’ shelter, a circle of blue-tarpaulin-covered stones where half a dozen porters were throwing down gasoline, lighting wisps of purple flames to warm themselves in the clear, freezing dawn.
I had finally realized my goal of reaching the base camp at K2, in the heart of the Karakoram Mountain range in northern Pakistan. Situated on the western edge of the Himalayas, the range contains one of the highest concentrations of the world’s tallest peaks. My purpose was to research a book about the climbers who challenge these slopes, and in particular an accident on K2 in 2008 when 11 people died, one of the worst disasters in Himalayan mountaineering history.
At 28,251 feet, K2 is almost 800 feet shorter than Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain. But while Everest has been largely demythologized by a seemingly constant stream of films, books and magazine articles, K2 — distant and reclusive — has retained an aura of mystery and danger. Among hard-core mountaineers its ascent is considered a far greater achievement than Everest.
The statistics support this. In the 2009 season, some 450 climbers reached the top of Everest while none summited K2. But K2 is not just more challenging; it is also more deadly. By the end of the 2009 climbing season, only 296 people had ever conquered K2, and at least 77 had died trying, a much higher casualty rate than for Everest.
I thought about this as I stood awestruck that cold morning, staring up at K2’s stark face, and contemplated whether Abbas, in his frenzy, understood something intrinsic about this mountain and its reputation for death.
MY journey to K2 had begun two weeks earlier in Islamabad, the hot, tumultuous Pakistani capital. It was a time of escalating insurgency in the Swat Valley, and tensions were high. The capital was locked down by roadblocks and terrorist threats.
Our hotel was the Islamabad Regency, a dark, unfinished structure along the main highway from the Benazir Bhutto International Airport, with mold growing up the shower curtains. It was situated in a row of apparently empty villas whose boarded-up windows signified the unfulfilled promise of a city conjured from the wilderness five decades ago. Whenever we tried to leave the hotel, we were turned back by a guard with a gun swinging from his shoulder. “Unsafe,” he would say. It was sobering to realize that climbing K2 these days meant traveling through a country at war.
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