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June 28th, 2009 by Jake
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Today started off very well - my slight bit of altitude sickness from the walk into BC yesterday had completely cleared up when I awoke. The sun was shining, the odd blackbird was squawking, and the mountain was bathed in a beautiful glow. Best of all, we were at Base Camp on K2! If I thought that the mountain looked impressive from Concordia, then it looked even more incredible when viewed out of the window of my tent in BC, only a few miles away, completely dominating the horizon. After breakfast, we went for a walk up to the base of the route (Cezen - SSE Ridge), carrying all of our climbing equipment and sharps (crampons/ice axes) and lots of rope (around 3000m of it!). It's not particularly far, perhaps less than a couple of miles up the glacier (helped enormously by the fact that we had pitched our camp nice and high on the strip), but as it was our first time (and we were carrying a fair amount of kit), we took it nice and slowly. Rather than taking a straight line up along the side of the glacier, it was important that we ventured out in a wide curve (into the middle of the glacier) to avoid any danger from avalanche runout. Fabrizio said that on his numerous previous trips here, he'd seen avalanche and serac collapses which had swept right out into the centre of the glacier, burying anything (or anyone) in their path. After dumping all of our kit at the base of the route, we wandered back, the whole round trip taking less than a couple of hours (and bound to get faster as we acclimatise more). Once we got back, we drifted off to our tents to sort out our mountains of personal kit, or to have a bit of a snooze. It was at this point that the day took a serious turn for the worse.
On the same route as us, although several weeks ahead, were a pair of extreme skiers, who were attempting to climbing the mountain and then to ski down. They'd done several trips up the hill, and spent some nights of the mountain, and were skiing down from camp 2. At this point I was actually in the communal dome tent trying to teach one of the guys how to play backgammon, but a few of the others were outside, and they happened to see the skiers carving their way down the slopes. Now we're not exactly sure how it happened, but one of the skiers had a fall, and ended up falling quite a considerable way down the slope, before coming to a rest, still and unmoving. We watched with baited breath willing the guy to get up and continue skiing down the slope to his partner, but nothing happened. As the other skier started to climb back up to his fallen comrade, we knew that something wasn't right (although we were all hoping than maybe it was a trivial injury). At this point our team started mobilising, and realising that our stretcher was down in BP BC, we had to improvise. A few of us collected a tarpaulin and some heavy duty tent poles as well as a first aid kit, and then moved up the glacier to one of the other teams who were slightly closer. Meanwhile some of the more experienced climbers had walked up the glacier to get a better view point of the proceedings, and were in contact with us via radio. By this point, the second skier had reached the fallen skier, but he remained still. We'd managed to get hold of a pair of binoculars, and took turns in trying to see exactly what was going on - even though we had one of their camp-staff members with us, it still wasn't clear whether it was the Swede or the Italian who had fallen, but either way things were really not looking good. We were still praying that the chap was just unconscious, until we got a call on the radio from the glacier informing us that it would now be a body recovery, not a rescue, and of the Italian. We were all stunned - although perhaps this fact might have been quite obvious for sometime now - we still didn't dare to entertain the thought that he had been killed.
Now, everyone here is fully aware of this mountain's particularly tragic history, but we certainly weren't expecting that on day one at BC, something as terrible as this to happen, especially since there wasn't even a chance for anybody to try and do anything about it.
That evening, as we contemplated the day's events, many of us volunteered to help the next day in the recovery of the body, and do whatever we could to try and help in this terrible situation.
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Today started off very well - my slight bit of altitude sickness from the walk into BC yesterday had completely cleared up when I awoke. The sun was shining, the odd blackbird was squawking, and the mountain was bathed in a beautiful glow. Best of all, we were at Base Camp on K2! If I thought that the mountain looked impressive from Concordia, then it looked even more incredible when viewed out of the window of my tent in BC, only a few miles away, completely dominating the horizon. After breakfast, we went for a walk up to the base of the route (Cezen - SSE Ridge), carrying all of our climbing equipment and sharps (crampons/ice axes) and lots of rope (around 3000m of it!). It's not particularly far, perhaps less than a couple of miles up the glacier (helped enormously by the fact that we had pitched our camp nice and high on the strip), but as it was our first time (and we were carrying a fair amount of kit), we took it nice and slowly. Rather than taking a straight line up along the side of the glacier, it was important that we ventured out in a wide curve (into the middle of the glacier) to avoid any danger from avalanche runout. Fabrizio said that on his numerous previous trips here, he'd seen avalanche and serac collapses which had swept right out into the centre of the glacier, burying anything (or anyone) in their path. After dumping all of our kit at the base of the route, we wandered back, the whole round trip taking less than a couple of hours (and bound to get faster as we acclimatise more). Once we got back, we drifted off to our tents to sort out our mountains of personal kit, or to have a bit of a snooze. It was at this point that the day took a serious turn for the worse.
On the same route as us, although several weeks ahead, were a pair of extreme skiers, who were attempting to climbing the mountain and then to ski down. They'd done several trips up the hill, and spent some nights of the mountain, and were skiing down from camp 2. At this point I was actually in the communal dome tent trying to teach one of the guys how to play backgammon, but a few of the others were outside, and they happened to see the skiers carving their way down the slopes. Now we're not exactly sure how it happened, but one of the skiers had a fall, and ended up falling quite a considerable way down the slope, before coming to a rest, still and unmoving. We watched with baited breath willing the guy to get up and continue skiing down the slope to his partner, but nothing happened. As the other skier started to climb back up to his fallen comrade, we knew that something wasn't right (although we were all hoping than maybe it was a trivial injury). At this point our team started mobilising, and realising that our stretcher was down in BP BC, we had to improvise. A few of us collected a tarpaulin and some heavy duty tent poles as well as a first aid kit, and then moved up the glacier to one of the other teams who were slightly closer. Meanwhile some of the more experienced climbers had walked up the glacier to get a better view point of the proceedings, and were in contact with us via radio. By this point, the second skier had reached the fallen skier, but he remained still. We'd managed to get hold of a pair of binoculars, and took turns in trying to see exactly what was going on - even though we had one of their camp-staff members with us, it still wasn't clear whether it was the Swede or the Italian who had fallen, but either way things were really not looking good. We were still praying that the chap was just unconscious, until we got a call on the radio from the glacier informing us that it would now be a body recovery, not a rescue, and of the Italian. We were all stunned - although perhaps this fact might have been quite obvious for sometime now - we still didn't dare to entertain the thought that he had been killed.
Now, everyone here is fully aware of this mountain's particularly tragic history, but we certainly weren't expecting that on day one at BC, something as terrible as this to happen, especially since there wasn't even a chance for anybody to try and do anything about it.
That evening, as we contemplated the day's events, many of us volunteered to help the next day in the recovery of the body, and do whatever we could to try and help in this terrible situation.
