No way down Life and death on K2

THE front-page story resounded across the globe: Aug. 2, 2008, was fast becoming the deadliest day ever on the world's second-highest mountain. K2, in the Karakoram range of northern Pakistan, was living up to its lethal reputation. Eleven fatalities amid unthinkable, and sometimes contradictory, tales of heroics and folly. A book (or a dozen) would, of course, follow. At first I was suspicious of this one. How could a nonclimber who wasn't present chronicle this tragic event? But in "No Way Down: Life and Death on K2," the New York Times reporter Graham Bowley relies on a copious study of the events and interviews with survivors and families to artfully and assiduously piece together an account of a fractious day in brutal real time. Fatality by fatality. A crowded field of climbers - from sponsored Koreans to an independent Basque, professional Sherpas to young Serbs and Americans - set out for the summit on Aug. 1, working in loose coordination. On that sparkling morning they "felt a sort of inner transcendence. . . . Now at last, after weeks, months, years of preparation and toil, they were closing in." Some were on supplementary oxygen, others not; many lacked equipment, and most were dependent on climbing aids. They bumped packs and egos, and language barriers complicated matters. Yet the climbers sensed safety in numbers, and by early afternoon, despite some early missteps and two fatalities, 19 of them made the fateful "groupthink" decision to carry on, thus committing themselves to the twin sins of a late summit assault and a dark descent. About the time many of the climbers were euphorically topping out - clicking photos and calling their loved ones from K2's 28,251-foot summit - a giant sérac collapse wiped out the fixed ladders and ropes below, changing the terrain and creating a volatile funnel ripe for avalanches. Small errors and bad decisions made earlier in the day had set the stage for wide-scale disaster, and an already risky descent became a nightmarish free-for-all. The sweet and salty details we learn about the climbers make their demise - when it comes, by avalanche, slip or in a courageous rescue effort - all the more devastating. Three (one of whose baby boy was born only hours before in Katmandu) are gruesomely strung upside down tangled in ropes for 24 freezing hours. They escaped that torturous predicament only to be avalanched later on the descent, along with Pasang Bhote, who had ventured up to save them. Were the three ultimately freed from their icy entanglement by Gerard McDonnell, the Irish-drum lover from Limerick? We'll never know, as a thundering chunk of glacier swept him to his death as well. And there is the harrowing story of the Dutch tough guy Wilco Van Rooijen, who, nearly blind and hallucinating, endured two nights exposed above 25,000 feet. He managed to call his wife, who contacted colleagues in the Netherlands, and they tracked his cellphone coordinates. Only then could Pemba Gyalje and Cas van de Gevel set out to rescue him. He lost most of his toes, but miraculously, not his life. Bowley ends the story not on the frigid slopes that entomb the bodies of dozens of climbers, but at funerals among the confused families and with the disaster's survivors, hunkered down across the world in different states of ill repair and mourning. Given the wreckage, the reader briefly wonders if elite climbers might re-evaluate the "groupthink" notion that the rewards of climbing K2 are worth the risks. Doubtful, it seems. When Bowley asks one survivor, Alberto Zerain, what it would take to go back to K2, "he pushed back his chair and clenched his fist demonstratively. 'I would go back now!' he said, in a surprisingly loud voice, gazing through the window as if the mountain were already calling him." Holy Morris is the author of "Adventure Divas" and a presenter on the PBS series "Globe Trekker."

New York Times reporter Bowley attempts to re-create the chaotic events that led to the deaths of 11 climbers on K2 in 2008. Using interviews with the surviving mountaineers, he provides a detailed if sometimes disjointed and detached explanation of the problems, including a serac (ice ridge) collapse and heavy reliance on fixed ropes, that doomed many climbers. Narratives on climbing tragedies are often controversial owing to the conflicting, sometimes unreliable accounts of oxygen-deprived alpinists, so Bowley's decision to present the main portion of his chronicle with relatively few qualifications or alternative points of view seems questionable. Only in the epilog do we learn that pivotal events surrounding the death of Irish climber Gerard McDonnell are highly disputed and have been reported differently in other sources. Bowley's account would seem more complete and fair if he had shown a greater willingness to examine the conflicting versions of aspects of the disaster in the main narrative. -VERDICT As a nonclimber, Bowley can't provide the degree of analysis that can be found in other works, such as expert climber Ed Viesturs's K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain. Best suited for recreational adventure readers and climbing aficionados.-Ingrid Levin, Salve Regina Univ. Lib., Newport, RI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Harrowing adventure near the summit of the second-tallest mountain in the world.Located on the border between China and Pakistan, K2 is notoriously difficult to climb in "ordinary" conditions, with its steep summit approaches, deep crevasses and unpredictably violent weather. But as teams from the Netherlands, Serbia, the United States and Korea, among others, as well as their Sherpa guides, contended with K2's idiosyncrasies on the first weekend of August 2008, they were unaware until too late that a giant serac, or glacier, above one of the steepest approaches was dangerously unstable. With dozens descending the peak in early evening under darkening skies, the crumbling serac sliced the rope leading back to safety, taking one climber with it as his wife and a friend watched helplessly. New York Times reporter Bowley confesses that he is no mountaineer, and it took him a while to warm up to the story when he was assigned it by the Times's foreign desk. It was only when he got to meet some of the survivors and learned the background stories of those who lost their lives that he became enthralled. He traveled Europe and South Asia, interviewing climbers who were on the mountain and family members of the mountain's victims, trying to piece together the complicated sequence of events that resulted in 11 deaths and numerous lost extremities. A Norwegian climber who witnessed the first stirrings of the ice-fall that led to the weekend's worse carnage told the author, "[w]e think you are the one to tell our story." The author's remove from the events may put off fans of John Krakauer's highly personal Into Thin Air (1997), but Bowley is an intrepid journalist and gifted storyteller. In a brisk epilogue, he tells of his own adventures interviewing the remarkable men and women involved in the tragedy and finding heroism and triumph despite unbearable suffering.Thrilling and wrenching.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.