Death on K2: The Mystery of Mountaineering

I’ve been reading news accounts of the disaster that struck climbers on the Himalayan peak K2 last week. Falls and avalanches ended up taking the lives of eleven men, on a mountain that experts say is more difficult and dangerous to climb than Everest. My heart aches for those killed, and the families and friends they leave behind.

I try to understand why people would put themselves in such mortal danger to reach the top of a mountain, what aspect of their personality and character has them willingly enduring the torturous conditions and constant peril of such an endeavor. I’m sure I couldn’t do it. But, more to the point, I’m sure I WOULDN’T do it. Eleven people are dead because they needed to climb K2. I can’t think of a single thing I would CHOOSE to accomplish in this world, to be able to say “yeah, I did that,” that would have a chance of ending that way. Life is tough enough the way it is.

Like millions of others, I read “Into Thin Air,” Jon Krakauer’s stunning first person account of a disastrous expedition to climb Mount Everest in 1996 that took eight lives. Novice climbers and top experts were among the casualties. As I read the account, from the first page to the last, one question consumed me: why in the world would anyone subject themselves to such utter, constant misery and danger to do something like this? It’s not like climbers just head toward the peak, camping out for a few nights as they make their way up. Weeks at a time have to be spent at base camps, so their bodies can acclimate to the altitude and thin air. For two months—two months!—the K2 climbers had waited for the tiny window of opportunity the weather on the mountain allows in early August. Only to end, when the “opportunity” came, with the deaths of all those people—people who were fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands.

I’m sure there are people reading this who would find my attitude something less than adventuresome, if not downright cowardly. But I’m not a coward, and I’ve had many wonderful adventures in the great outdoors, including arduous backpacking, canoe and whitewater rafting trips. There was even a time or two when I wondered if my friends and I were facing dangerous situations that we weren’t up to, but we always pulled through, and we talk about it to this day.

I guess that’s why there’s that other small group of people who try and climb K2 and Mount Everest; to talk about it, and remember it forever. But I can’t relate to their frame of mind. There were a few survivors who made it down from K2 last week, frostbitten and in shock. Will it all be worth it to them, for the rest of their lives, to be able to say they had this experience? I honestly don’t know, but clearly, they and I—they and most of us, I’m sure—are made of different stuff.

In closing, to those of you who answer the question, “why do they climb the mountain?” with the classic, “because it’s there!” here’s something to think about. The man who said that was the great British mountaineer George Mallory, before his 1923 expedition to summit Everest, and his words inspired this poem by Robert William Service:

Why seek to scale Mount Everest,
Queen of the Air,
Why strive to crown that cruel crest
And deathward dare?
Said Mallory of dauntless quest
`Because it's there.

Inspiring, no doubt. But there’s always been another interpretation of Mallory’s answer; that he simply got sick and tired of being asked by journalists why he wanted to make the climb, and finally in exasperation, he sarcastically blurted out “because it’s there.”

Funny how the exact same phrase can be framed in such different ways. Mallory himself was never able to fully explain what he meant. He was killed in a fall during his Mount Everest climb. His frozen body was found at the bottom of a cliff in 1999, 75 years later, and it remains there today.