Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day (7 page)

Compact, stretching just shy of five-foot-two, Pasang had hands as rough as a cat’s tongue. When he was twenty-four years old, he looked fifteen and accepted his nickname: “Little Pasang.” Clients occasionally doubted that he was an adult and asked for “another sherpa with more experience than this baby.” To age himself, Pasang rarely shaved, but it made no difference. His chin refused to grow a beard.

Pasang’s village, Hungung, lies on the Tibetan border in the Upper Arun Valley along the watershed of 27,765-foot Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest peak. For decades, Nepal’s government has restricted anthropologists, journalists, and some relief organizations from entering this sensitive border area. But it’s easy enough to
sneak in
. To get to Hungung from the nearest airstrip in the village at Tumlingtar, visitors have to ride for a day in a jeep and then undertake a ten-day trek.

The trails leading into the village fork around rod-shaped mounds of limestone. By custom, all travelers must pass by the mounds on their left; even Hungung’s Tibetan mastiffs follow this rule. The residents live in rock-and-mud homes that roost among terraced hillsides, and black pigs dominate the pens. A stream trickles through the center of the village, providing running water of sorts, and rooftop solar panels, installed by a long-forgotten NGO, generate electricity. A health post is stocked with antibiotics, but no doctors.

About
250 people
live in the region. It was once the hub of a medicinal plant trade; now a general store deals in flashlights, lollipops, Neosporin, and Communist manifestos that, curiously, are available only in French. The residents speak Ajak Bhote, an endangered language derived from Tibetan, and believe they descend from the Ajak, an ancient priestly class once charged with protecting Tibetan royalty. Most villagers are Buddhists who work as farmers, herders, or blacksmiths.

Growing up in Hungung, the oldest of four children, Pasang was reared without a father. Phurbu Ridar Bhote, a mountaineer, moved to Kathmandu to find work when his son was six. Phurbu visited his family every two or three years. Sometimes Pasang dreamed that an avalanche had buried Phurbu, but Hungung’s
lama
reassured the boy. Using clairvoyance, the
lama
updated Pasang on his father’s whereabouts—whether Phurbu was bound for Everest or K2 that year—and delivered messages Phurbu sent in prayer. The
lama
told Pasang that his father wanted him to apply himself and study mathematics. Pasang read whatever books he could find and attended school as often as he could, but living was usually hand to mouth. He sowed the millet and barley fields and dug potato tubers. He gathered firewood and swept the homes of wealthier villagers in exchange for rice or a few coins.

When Pasang was fifteen, he received word from his father to join him in Kathmandu. After a decade of saving and a stint on K2, Phurbu had amassed the equivalent of $1,000, plenty to send his son to prep school and university. “I wanted him to stay as far away from mountains as possible,” Phurbu said. “Who would climb if he had a choice? It’s only a matter of time before you’re killed. I didn’t want my first-born son to die before I did. He needed to get an education. I climbed mountains so he wouldn’t have to.”

Before leaving for Kathmandu, Pasang changed his surname from Bhote to Lama because he didn’t want his heritage to hold him back. Pasang is Bhote, a Tibetan ethnicity culturally distinct from Sherpa. Although the two groups have related beliefs and share many rituals, Bhotes frequently face discrimination. Like an immigrant taking the surname Rockefeller, Pasang chose Lama, the highest Sherpa caste, so no one in the city would look down on him.

With a new name and a new life ahead of him, Pasang Lama left for Kathmandu. During the ten-day trek to the nearest road, he planned his future. First he’d earn a degree that would lead to a safe and respectable job. Next he’d get so rich he would send his siblings to prep school in the city. Then he’d buy solar panels for his mother. Maybe he’d build her a new house. By the time Pasang reached the highway and saw a metal creature rumbling toward him, he had convinced himself that anything was possible. The teenager had never seen a bus before, but he confidently climbed inside and left his old life behind.

For several days, as the wheeled machine bounced down the road, Pasang watched a ghastly world appear. Kathmandu’s pollution and bustle rattled him. How could a million people cram into such an intolerably tight space? As the bus kept plowing through traffic, he missed Hungung’s expansive skies. Finally the vehicle delivered him to Balaju, a densely populated area northwest of the city center. Pasang joined his father and six other relatives in a one-room rental. At night, they all piled onto the same mattress. During the day, they tipped it upward to allow living space. The toilet was a hole dug in the courtyard.

Soon after arriving, Pasang started eleventh grade at British Gurkha Academy, studying commerce. His classmates taunted him. “They pointed at me and shouted, ‘Bhote, Bhote, Bhote!’ ” Pasang recalled. “They were calling me a stupid villager.” The teenager struggled to keep pace, unaccustomed to schoolwork in Nepali, a foreign language to him. He flunked the first year, costing his family precious tuition money. Demoralized, Pasang went back to Hungung for a season to harvest the potato crop. He then returned to Kathmandu in September 2000 to give school another shot. This time he was on track to finish, but in June the royal massacre disrupted exams. Kathmandu went into lockdown.

Hungung was worse. The Royal Nepalese Army invaded during a festival, publicly killing three suspected terrorists who were about Pasang’s age. Fighting flared. Pasang’s mother, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, and nieces fled.

“It
wasn’t safe to stay
, especially as a woman alone with children,” said Pasang’s mother, Phurbu Chejik Bhoteni. Bus tickets were too expensive. Carrying two toddlers and whatever else she could strap on her back, Phurbu walked the entire way to Kathmandu on a fractured leg. The journey took more than a month. Exhausted and hungry, she and the children arrived in the spring of 2002 at Pasang’s one-room flat.

They couldn’t all fit inside, so Pasang, his mother, his father, his two younger sisters, his younger brother, and a fluctuating number of desperate relatives moved into a separate room that cost more than they could afford. Food and rent became higher priorities than education. Pasang had to find a job.

Competition was cutthroat. Refugees were flooding the job market. Destitute, they accepted any employment they could get. Wages fell; unemployment rose. After three months, Pasang found work, but it was humble. He received an offer to earn $3 a day carrying pots and pans to Gosaikunda, a holy lake north of the city.

Grateful for this first portering job, Pasang shouldered loads over the undulating terrain between Kathmandu and the lake. Afterward, with one trip on his résumé, it was easier to find the next job, and the next. An American trekker befriended him and offered to pay his tuition, so Pasang attended classes during the slow season between expeditions, but he no longer considered himself a commerce student. School could not support his family; portering could.

Still, he disliked it. Pasang didn’t speak the same language as many of the other porters, and he hadn’t learned their protocol. One misunderstanding nearly cost him his job. In 2004, Pasang carried a pack stuffed with tinned fruit, Clif bars, freeze-dried soup, and kerosene to the Base Camp of Annapurna, a mountain whose name means “full of food.” Pasang had brought nothing of his own to eat, expecting his employers to feed him. They didn’t. Pasang scrounged for handouts from kitchen hands, gathered scraps from his clients’ plates before washing them, and bartered clothing for rations. When the clients extended the trip, supplies dwindled further. Pasang’s peers had no more food to share. Feeling sorry for him, the cook brewed him stew from roots found around camp and offered him three days’ worth of lemon-lime Tang. When the Tang ran out, Pasang reeled from hunger.

As he lugged his eighty-pound load, all he could think of was food, food, food. His muscles jittered. His feet kept missing the places he intended to step. “I was going to pass out unless I found something to eat,” Pasang recalled. He didn’t consider asking the Western climbers for help. “You just don’t do that,” he said. “Porters aren’t hired to beg for things or complain.” If he had, other staff would have alerted the expedition outfitter, who’d blacklist him.

Stealing seemed safer. After four days without food, Pasang staggered off the path and hid behind a boulder. Setting down his load, he rummaged through it and pulled out a tin of mandarin oranges and hammered it against a rock. The metal burst and the edge sliced deep into his middle and index fingers. Blood smeared over the can, but Pasang was smiling. He jimmied back the lid, slurped the sweet syrup, and dropped the delicate wedges into his mouth. Sugar coursed through his body. Revitalized, Pasang shouldered his load and tied a rag around his bleeding right hand.

On the trail that day, Pasang had visions of mandarin oranges—luscious wedges, dripping in syrup, melting in his mouth. He craved other tins inside the pack but resisted the urge until that evening, when he stole a can of tuna. If the other porters suspected, they stayed quiet. The thefts continued until his job finished three days later. “Annapurna was the first and last time I was a thief,” he said.

After Annapurna, jobs poured in. Clients called him a porter, but Pasang—who eventually was setting ropes, pitching tents, and hauling gear up rock and ice—saw himself as something better. By the time he reached the summit of Everest in the spring of 2006, he was unquestionably a mountaineer. The civil war and its bombing and maiming had slowed that year, and the Maoists called a truce in November, but Pasang’s mother doubted the fighting would stop. Refusing to return to Hungung, Phurbu Chejik said she’d seen enough violence. She and the children would stay in Kathmandu. Pasang continued to support them with the wages of what he considered to be a temporary career.

A proposal in May 2008 raised the stakes. Pasang was ushering a South Korean woman named Go Mi-sun up Lhotse, the world’s fourth-highest peak. On their return from the summit, “Ms. Go” told Pasang about her ambitions. There are fourteen mountains taller than 8,000 meters, she explained. She intended to be the first woman to climb them all—and to do it faster than anyone else had. With five down and nine to go, K2 was next. Would Pasang help?

He was more than a little infatuated with Ms. Go, who laughed with him, joined him for meals in the kitchen tent, shared her energy bars, and asked whether he had a girlfriend. When her climbing partner, “Mr. Kim”—Kim Jae-soo—lost his cool, Ms. Go smoothed things over. To Pasang, she was angelic, and she had his trust.

Once in Kathmandu, Pasang had only had a few days to decide whether he’d join her. He scoured the Internet to learn more about Ms. Go. She was Asia’s sweetheart. After a 200-foot fall shattered her backbone, she’d made a comeback as a star of the Asian X-Games. Go was backed by Kolon Sport, the Nike of Korea, and adored by her fan club.

But critics called her “a woman on the Go.” They dismissed her as reckless, swept up in a
publicity stunt
. Only a handful of mountaineers had managed to climb every 8,000-meter peak, and it had taken Reinhold Messner, widely considered the greatest of all, more than sixteen years to do it. Kolon Sport couldn’t wait that long, so the sportswear giant paid Go to replicate the feat in a quarter of the time. Unlike Messner, however, she was using support climbers and bottled oxygen—and simultaneously modeling a clothing line.

Setting aside his crush on Ms. Go, Pasang tried to evaluate a K2 attempt on its own merits. He sought out his father for advice. To Pasang’s surprise, Phurbu Ridar saw the climb as a lucky break. True, Pasang could be killed, but Phurbu thought that was unlikely, especially if a beautiful woman were involved. And how could Pasang go into commerce when the Maoists were still halting commerce? If mountaineering was to be his career, he should make it his career, especially while he had no wife or children to hold him back. Pasang should not only load-carry on K2, Phurbu advised, but also shoot for the summit. When Phurbu had attempted K2’s North Ridge in 1994, he’d put his clients’ success above his own, staying in camp and boiling water as other men climbed to the top. He regretted being passed over. Pasang should have no regrets. A K2 conquest would make the family proud, and it would pay the bills for a year.

Furthermore, Phurbu noted, four of Pasang’s cousins would be on the Korean team. Tsering Lama was like Pasang—in his twenties and unmarried. His other cousins were leaving families behind. Jumik Bhote had a wife who was eight months pregnant and expecting to give birth while he was away. “Big” Pasang Bhote had two toddlers. Ngawang Bhote, the team cook, also had a wife and daughter, but K2 was too profitable for any of them to pass up.

Nearly convinced, Pasang went to Big Pasang’s house to see what his older cousin had to say. Big Pasang endorsed the expedition, reminding Pasang that K2 meant $3,000 for each of them, plus tips and a summit bonus. As Big Pasang spoke, his wife Lahmu boiled tea. She remained quiet but kept glancing up at the summit certificates proudly fastened above the rice sacks in the kitchen. Mountaineering had provided her children with a good home. Its walls were plywood and the floor was dirt, but a tarp and corrugated tin roof
kept rain out
, and her toddlers, Dawa and Nima Yangzom, always had enough to eat. Pasang could tell she was supportive of the plan.

He found himself nodding in support of it, too. “Everyone was saying I should go,” Pasang recalled. “They said I’d lose my chance, and it meant so much money.”

If Pasang doubted whether he had made the right choice, his concerns evaporated when he and his cousins met the rest of the Korean team in the lobby of the five-star Hotel de l’Annapurna in Kathmandu. The hotel features a massage parlor, four restaurants, a casino, and an underground shopping center. It promises in its brochure to “treat guests like gods.”