Mountain Time

On the two-year anniversary of the K2 mountain disaster, Andrew Ladd reviews two very different books about the deadly climb.

The mountain K2, which sits neatly on the border between Pakistan and China, got its name by chance: the first British surveyor in the area simply sketched a picture of the skyline and labeled the two highest peaks, from left to right, as K1 and K2 (the K stood for Karakoram, the name of the region).

K1, it turned out, was already known natively as Masherbrum—a moniker the British happily adopted—but K2, perhaps tellingly, had never been named by the locals, and the clinical-sounding survey designation stuck.

But the ‘2’ part, anyway, was a prescient choice, because these days the mountain is recognized as both the second highest and the second deadliest in the world. Since the first successful summit expedition in 1954, only 299 people have successfully reached the top (a tenth of the number who have summitted Everest), and 73 more have died attempting it—making the death rate among K2 climbers about 25%. (Until fairly recently, it was 100% for female climbers.)

But that doesn’t seem to deter anyone from continuing to try; if anything, it seems to make people more determined. In that spirit, on the first day of August two years ago, ten international teams set out for the summit.

They would have been better off staying home: their expedition would be known, only days later, as the 2008 K2 disaster. Only eighteen of the more than sixty people across the different teams reached the top and successfully returned to base camp. Eleven died.

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Disasters seem to be one of the few things that still reliably sell books, which is probably why the 2008 K2 disaster has spawned so many.

Two of the climbers, Dutchman Wilco van Rooijen and Italian Marco Confortola, have already authored tell-alls in their native languages (Surviving K2 and Days of Ice respectively), and this summer two American publishers have independently released their own third-party English accounts: One Mountain Thousand Summits by veteran mountaineering journalist Freddie Wilkinson (New American Library, $24.95), and No Way Down (Harper, $25.99) by New York Times staff writer Graham Bowley.

The predictable question to ask of the latter two books, published within a week of each other, is “which one is better?” Well, it depends on what you’re looking for. If these books were films, Wilkinson’s would be the thoughtful, indie documentary, and Bowley’s the “based on a true story” Hollywood blockbuster.

The story of this disaster seems to have all the essential ingredients of a good disaster flick, and in that respect Bowley makes a sensible decision to write it “like fiction only real” (a description that sounds as if he must have been high when he wrote it, and not in the mountaineering sense).

There’s a love story, a series of dramatic rescues, escalating conflict between the different factions on the ascent, the tragic ends of several heroic figures, an absurdly unbelievable setting (the only route to the summit is beneath a constantly advancing glacier), and finally the ultimate banding together of almost all the principals in the face of adversity. Bowley gives us each of these elements in a lean, fast-moving, and morally uncomplicated narrative, just like any good thriller.

But Bowley is far from the next Robert Ludlum. Though he tries to write the book “like fiction,” he’s unable to quite let go of his journalistic compunctions, which means we get neither a fiction writer’s illuminating depiction of the characters’ inner landscapes, nor a judicious exclusion of irrelevant practical details.

The story’s movement is too often interrupted by factual asides that have little bearing on the plot (because they’re necessary for reportage), and too seldom interrupted by an explanation of exactly what each character is thinking. Of course, that isn’t, strictly speaking, possible in a nonfiction account, but in his more dramatic approach Bowley creates a natural opening for them and then repeatedly confounds us by not filling it.

Wilkinson, on the other hand, has the opposite problem. Rather than give us a no-nonsense blow-by-blow of events on the mountain, he takes a much wider view of the story, and circles in and out of the action by way of lengthy historical asides about mountaineering, the development of the sherpa industry, and the formative events in many of the players’ lives. (In that respect Wilkinson’s book actually serves as a nice companion to Bowley’s, filling in all the back story that the pseudo-novelization skips over.)

But while the result of all Wilkinson’s digressions is undeniably an educational exploration of extreme mountaineering, as an account of the 2008 K2 disaster his book is harder to follow than Bowley’s meticulously plotted one, and as a result it’s far less gripping.

It also has a much more noticeable agenda, which is where the indie documentary analogy falls apart (or hinges, depending on your feelings about indie documentaries). Wilkinson seems convinced that the sherpas of the tale—and sherpas in general—are poor, put-upon souls, taken advantage of by Western mountaineers and consequently in dire need of defense by an outside advocate.

Many of the other people who were intimately involved in piecing together what happened on K2 that August, though, seem a little bewildered, even in Wilkinson’s own retelling, about why he has such a chip on his shoulder about the sherpas’ plight. He insists throughout that they’ve been maltreated and yet provides no real evidence for this; what’s more, the sherpas themselves don’t seem to think they’ve been harmed.

If anything, it’s Wilkinson’s dogged attempts to get them a fair look that seems to have caused them the most strife, shoving them into the jungle of Western media attention without preparing them for the beasts that lurk within. (Two of them are now collaborating with a third American journalist, Peter Zuckerman, on yet another K2 book, Buried in the Sky, forthcoming from W.W. Norton; another two have reportedly fallen out since Wilkinson brought their stories to the press.)

Perhaps I’m just being paternalistic; perhaps the sherpas are perfectly capable of handling the media. (They can certainly handle high-altitude physical feats a lot better than me or most people in the publishing world.) But it does seem slightly disingenuous for Wilkinson to claim that he’s sticking up for the sherpas when, in the end, his tenacious investigating seems only to have complicated their lives.