K2 survivor recounts fatal mistakes, numbed panic

By Kamran Haider

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Lying in a hospital cot, a saline drip strapped to his arm, the leader of a Dutch team that lost three of 11 climbers who died on K2, angrily recounted how tragedy unfolded on the world's second highest peak.

"The biggest mistake we made was that we tried to make agreements," Wilco van Rooijen told Reuters, his face reddened by sun and snow burn after days on the unforgiving 8,611 meter (28,240 feet) mountain.

"Everybody had his own responsibility and then some people did not do what they promised," the 40-year-old Dutchman said, singling out another team for only bringing half the length of rope they were supposed to have.

"With such stupid things lives are endangered," Van Rooijen added, by telephone from his hospital bed in the northern Pakistani town of Skardu.

One Serbian climber and a Pakistani high altitude porter fell to their deaths on the ascent. Some teams submitted in darkness after 8.00 p.m., according to Nazir Sabir, president of the Alpine Club of Pakistan.

But calamity hit, as it so often does on K2, on the descent after summiting.

An ice wall above a steep gully known as the Bottleneck sheered off, tearing away the fixed lines the exhausted climbers were relying on to get down.

Three Korean climbers and two Nepalis in the same team were lost, and the avalanche left around a dozen other climbers stranded above the hour glass feature at some 8,200 meters, right in the so-called "Death Zone".

"We wasted precious time by cutting rope from the bottom and bringing it up," van Rooijen recalled bitterly, as his co-climber Cas van de Geval lay in a nearby bed, his frostbitten feet swathed in bandages.

ROCK AND ICE

Van Rooijen, who had scaled Mount Everest without oxygen and attempted K2 twice before, said he slept there "without sleeping bag, food and water" knowing they had to get down before the cold and lack of oxygen took its toll.

A towering pyramid of rock and ice, the steepness of K2's slopes are daunting for the most experienced climbers.

More than 70 people have died climbing the peak, a good many of them at the Bottleneck, where a wrong step can send a man hurtling off the South Face, where his body is unlikely to be ever recovered.

"If you can't go down you have to climb up," van Rooijen said. "So in such a difficult situation, you are taking more risks; you're climbing more technical slopes and finally you make a little mistake and you're gone."

As team leader, he appeared haunted by the panic that gripped some of his fellow climbers.