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Firefighters take a break from battling the blaze.

Earlier this month, a 20-year-old digging a fireline in the Idaho mountains was killed by a falling tree, making her the around the country this year. When I attended her funeral a few days later, nearly 300 of her fellow U.S. Forest Service firefighters lined up outside Moscow, Idaho’s Church of the Nazarene in their flame-retardant work gear—shirts the color of sunflowers tucked into rugged, jade-green pants—and watched bagpipers and an honor guard lead the family of Anne Veseth into the sanctuary.

I served as a wildland firefighter during the 2003 season and have spent a lot of time around Forest Service crews while writing a book about megafires, so I’m used to seeing firefighters’ eyes tearing from smoke and sweat. But I’ve never seen so many of their stony faces weeping, and I’ve never witnessed as much outrage among them as Veseth’s death has prompted.

That’s because the day before she was killed, a 20-person crew of highly trained “hotshots”—the Forest Service’s equivalent of the Navy SEALS—arrived at the Steep Corner fire where Veseth died but refused to take part in the firefighting operation. They according to a report they later filed explaining their decision. Chief among the crew’s concerns were the number of dead and fire-weakened trees—known as “snags”—that were falling around firefighters. One of those snags knocked over the tree that killed Veseth.

In a that has already proven among the most destructive in U.S. history, Veseth’s death highlights both the human costs of firefighting and a raging debate about the proper policy for managing wildfire in a warming world. With the Forest Service’s $948 million firefighting budget for 2012 nearly exhausted, but months to go in a fire season , the agency——is quickly responding to almost every blaze in an attempt to keep small fires from raging out of control. That’s despite the long-term harm to forest ecosystems and the likelihood that the new policy could prime forests for even more destructive fires in the future. (See OnEarth’s previous coverage of this .)

There’s also a potential human cost to the more aggressive stance: most fireline deaths occur in the early phases of firefighting operations, when small teams or individuals may take on blazes without adequate management, communication, or knowledge of the terrain and weather. “Initial attacks” are often made up of a variety of local, state, and federal firefighters, who can prove difficult to coordinate and may have differing approaches to even the most basic firefighting operations. The hotshots’ report on the fire that killed Veseth describes just such a situation. , which allows Forest Service employees to anonymously report safety concerns, the report claims that the Steep Corner operation was in violation of eight of the 10 Standard Firefighting Orders—the basic safety rules for federal wildland firefighters.

When the hotshots arrived, the firefighting operation was being overseen by the , a private, non-profit organization chartered by the Idaho Department of Lands to fight fires on private lands, most of it controlled by logging companies. The fire was burning in standing timber and debris left from timber harvests. The report by the Flathead Hotshots crew, which is based in Montana, alleges a number of safety concerns, including:

• INADEQUATE SAFETY GEAR: When the hotshots arrived, many of the firefighters on scene, including the incident commander, were wearing jeans instead of the fire-retardant clothes required under government rules, according to the SAFENET report. They also weren’t carrying fire shelters—reflective foil tents that firefighters can deploy and climb underneath for safety. Many were running chainsaws without the appropriate safety gear, the report says.
• POOR COMMUNICATION & COORDINATION: The hotshots described a disjointed effort, with a “hodge-podge” of firefighters working in teams with weak communication and little direction from their commanders. Hazardous areas of fire and falling trees separated the crews, the hotshots said, making escape from a blowup difficult and leaving them isolated from safety zones and assistance. The hotshot leaders encountered a fire crew made up of prison inmates who were repeatedly chased uphill by the flames and forced to dodge trees and boulders that rolled down on them from above.
• MISMANAGED AERIAL ASSISTANCE: The hotshots say they repeatedly asked for helicopters to drop water on the fire threatening the prison crew, but to no avail. “The people directing helicopter drops had no or little experience utilizing helicopters and were having the helicopters drop water without clearing the line of personnel,” the hotshots’ report states.
• UNCLEAR ESCAPE ROUTES & SAFETY ZONES: The hotshots said that leaders of the Steep Corner fire disregarded the standards for posting lookouts, maintaining communications between firefighters, and establishing escape routes and safety zones. These are the most basic procedures that prevent injuries and deaths among wildland firefighters.

Firefighting experts say the specific problems alleged by the hotshots at the Steep Corner fire are indicative of what happens when firefighting resources and expertise are stretched thin, as they have been by this year’s destructive fire season and the Forest Service’s .

That policy shift “is putting firefighters at greater risk, and it’s increasing the cost,” said Bob Mutch, who spent 38 years in the Forest Service and is now a wildfire consultant. “We rush people in without all the support.”

Andy Stahl, executive director of the non-profit forestry watchdog group , points out that firefighters are often at the greatest risk when they’re racing to and flying over wildfires. Indeed, six of this year’s firefighting fatalities were caused by plane crashes. “Anytime a firefighter climbs into an airplane, his or her chance of dying goes up tenfold,” Stahl said.

Several agencies are now investigating conditions at the Steep Corner fire, including the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration, the Idaho Lands Board (which oversees state lands), and the Forest Service’s law enforcement division. Leaders of the Clearwater-Potlatch Timber Protection Association and the Nez-Perce Clearwater National Forest have said that .

Through a spokesperson, Veseth’s family members said they are reserving judgment on the circumstances of her death until the investigations are complete. The family is devoted to public service and firefighting. Veseth’s mother is a nurse, her oldest sister is a paramedic, and her brother is a seven-year veteran forest firefighter. In 2010, Veseth asked her brother to help her get a job; last year she joined the fire crew in the North Fork Ranger District of the Clearwater National Forest, just a couple hours drive from her home. She eagerly signed on with teams sent to fight wildfires in Colorado and Arizona earlier this year. When she arrived at the Steep Corner fire, Veseth was 10 days away from starting another degree program at Lewis Clark State College, where she had previously studied auto mechanics.  she wanted to focus on forestry or fire ecology.

şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř the church, after the bagpipes and bells, Veseth’s family walked through two rows of firefighters, climbed into her brother’s forest firefighting truck, and slowly drove away. Firefighters lined the road, then climbed into their trucks to join a short procession.

But they couldn’t stay long. With 95-degree temperatures bringing scores of blazes to Idaho, Washington, and California, they were needed back on the firelines.

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The last time I chased wildfires across Colorado was in 2003, while serving as a seasonal wildland firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service. I was part of a crew of 20, bouncing through the Rocky Mountains in a battered school bus to put out fires with names like Crazy Woman and the Bluebird. It was a war fought with rakes, spades, axes, and chainsaws, in which I extinguished more flames with shovelfuls of dirt than I did with water. The year before, Colorado had lost 133 homes and more than 138,000 acres to the Hayman fire, at the time .

Climate change wasn’t even on the radar of most firefighters I worked with back then, and when the topic did come up, there was a healthy amount of skepticism. This year, it’s hard to find a wildland firefighter who isn’t convinced the warming of the West is making his job more difficult and dangerous.

This year has already surpassed the record breakers of 2002 and 2003, in part because it had a head start—the worst parts of Colorado’s fire season usually hit in early or late summer, but this year a wildfire , and another early blaze .

So now I’m chasing fires across the state again, this time as part of my research for a , due to a combination of factors that include climate change, overdevelopment, and misguided fire and forest management policies. All of those factors are at work in my home state right now as all-time temperature records are smashed, and the hot, dry conditions fuel blaze after blaze, threatening some of Colorado’s fastest-growing cities. Even among skeptical firefighters and usually cautious scientists, there’s little doubt anymore: forest management and development issues have been priming the West for epic fires, but it was this year’s climate-driven drought and heat that lit the fuse.

A quick rundown of my recent tour of destruction: it started on June 23rd as I was rock climbing in Estes Park, the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park. A wind-blown electrical wire frayed against a pine tree three miles south of where I was roped up on Lumpy Ridge and ignited it, touching off a fire that would go on to —making it relatively small for this fire season. While at the cliff, I struck up a conversation with two rangers, one of whom happened to be friends with a “hotshot” that I know—the name for a specially trained firefighter who is basically the firefighting equivalent of a Navy SEAL. As we wondered which of the dozens of wildfires burning across the West our friend was assigned to, the ranger’s radio squawked.

“It’s crowning! There are homes nearby!”

As the rangers packed up their gear, one of their wives called. A friend had just shown up at their house with her arms full of whatever she could grab as the fire spread toward her home. I watched the smoke turn from white to black as the homes went up in flames, then saw an air tanker diverted from the nearby High Park fire paint the hills red with fire retardant. By the time we had hiked out, the blaze had run its course.

Three days later, I went back, first checking on the High Park fire, a lightning-sparked blaze that . It destroyed 259 homes in the foothills above Fort Collins. A few of the thousands of evacuees were returning to their homes as I arrived, driving up the mountain canyons past blackened fields and forests, while thousands of other residents who had been out of their homes for two weeks or more were still waiting to return. Then I headed back to Estes Park. As I was stood amid the burned houses, my wife called. Our own neighborhood in Boulder had just been notified to start packing for a possible evacuation.

I sighed. “Just find the cat,” I said.

That same day, 100 miles to the south, Colorado Springs faced Armageddon. The Waldo Canyon fire had already been burning for three days. Its proximity to Colorado’s second-largest city immediately made it the top firefighting priority in the nation. .

The following Tuesday Denver recorded its fifth day of 100-degree temperatures and tied its all-time daily record of 105 degrees. That afternoon a dry thunderstorm—one of dozens that have plagued Colorado this year, bringing lightning without rainfall—descended on Colorado Springs. Winds gusting 65 mph drove the Waldo Canyon fire east across two lines of containment and onto the city. Embers and firebrands rained onto dense subdivisions. As the sun set, churning black plumes of smoke surged down from the mountains and waves of flame bounced from house to house. By the time I arrived, shortly before midnight, entire blocks were burning.

“It was like looking at a military invasion,” Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper . When the smoke cleared, it revealed 346 homes reduced to ash and cinders. In the days that followed, two residents were found dead in their home.

For much of the year, the governor’s description has seemed apt—at times, the nation has seemed to be losing a war with wildfires. On June 3, one heavy air tanker contracted to the U.S. Forest Service cartwheeled into a burning Utah mountain. Both crewmembers perished. That same day, a second airtanker crash landed in Nevada, leaving the crew uninjured but the aircraft crippled.

Even before those crashes, the nation’s fleet of firefighting air tankers was down to a quarter of the size it was a decade earlier, due to crashes in the mid-2000s that led the Forest Service to cancel contracts for planes it deemed unsafe or too old. After the crashes last month, the military stepped in, loaning eight Lockheed C-130 Hercules cargo planes to the firefighting effort. But then . Four of the six crewmembers perished.

Meanwhile, fires across the American West are getting bigger. During 2002 and 2003, wildfires burned nearly 11 million acres and killed more than 50 firefighters. Four states—Colorado, Arizona, Oregon, and California—experienced the largest fires to date during those years. Those massive fire seasons were the culmination of a trend: between 1986 and 2003, , and those fires burned six times the amount of land and lasted five times as long when compared with the previous 16 years. In response, states and the federal government adopted policies and legislation, such as the , which were designed to head off increasingly catastrophic wildfires by thinning forests and reintroducing fire to areas that were overgrown with fuel from a century of fire suppression. Some wildfires would be allowed to burn in hopes of improving overall forest health.

The fires, however, have continued to grow in size, frequency, and intensity, while the policies meant to tame them have sputtered and stalled. Air quality issues increasingly limit the number of days when prescribed burns can be lit, and the public is often resistant to them, particularly after rare incidents in which forest managers lose control, as they did with the prescribed burn that turned into Colorado’s deadly Lower North Fork fire in March. Residents of fire-prone landscapes are often unwilling to cut down the trees they love, even when removing a few trees increases their safety. And building with fire-resistant materials is often more expensive and doesn’t fit with mountain traditions.

In the 1960s, an average of 460 fires each year in Colorado burned about 8,000 acres annually, according to state forest service records. In the past decade that average jumped to about 2,500 fires a year, burning nearly 100,000 acres. Those trends are reflected nationwide. Wildfires burned an average seven million acres a year across the nation during the 2000s—twice the average of the 1990s. In the coming decade, scientists anticipate, 10 to 12 million acres of U.S. forests will burn each year.

The flames also consume budgets. Wildfires nationwide cost the federal government up to $3 billion annually—twice what they cost a decade ago. Today wildfires take up nearly half of the U.S. Forest Service’s budget, up from 13 percent in 1991.

The root of America’s wildfire crisis goes back a century, to the “Big Blowup” of 1910, which burned three million acres in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana and Idaho. After the Big Blowup, American philosopher William James wrote of extinguishing wildfires as “the moral equivalent of war,” suggesting that American youth be conscripted into an “army enlisted against nature.” The U.S. Forest Service complied, eventually implementing an “out by 10 a.m.” policy toward all wildland fires. But in snuffing out every wildfire, managers interrupted one of the forest’s most important processes for maintaining its own health—the regular, small fires that clear out dead timber and fire-prone vegetation from woodlands. In some forests, this suppression of the natural fire cycle effectively stockpiled a century's worth of fuel, creating explosive forests prone to burn big, fast, and hot. We’re seeing the results right now in Colorado and across the West.

Homebuilding at the edge of the forest has also exploded in recent decades, providing wildfires with new and volatile ignition sources. Census data I analyzed with the I-News Network showed that between 2000 and 2010, , as marked on the state’s “red zone” map.

But the greatest impact on the most recent wildfires may well be the changing climate. “What we’re seeing really is a window into what global warming really looks like,” said Princeton University geosciences professor Michael Oppenheimer during a conference call with reporters in the days after the Colorado firestorms. “It looks like heat. It looks like fires.”

And it looks like drought. By June, Colorado’s mountains had just two percent of their normal snowpack for that time of year; with snow, streams, and forests drying up early, fires ignite weeks or months earlier.

“Looking back historically, spring was not considered part of fire season in Colorado until the very recent past,” said Elk Creek Fire Chief Bill McLaughlin, one of the chiefs who led the fight against the Lower North Fork fire that killed three people in March. “It's been largely the last decade that they've seen those spring fires occurring.” McLaughlin told me he saw fire behavior he had never witnessed before during the Lower North Fork fire: flames that burned intensely through the night or traveled downhill, rather than up. In one instance, McLaughlin watched flames that were predicted to take two hours to climb a slope cover that distance in less than 14 minutes. Virtually every commander I encountered during this year’s fire plague in Colorado echoed McLaughlin’s comment about unusual fire behavior.

Part of the reason for the change, says University of Montana professor Steve Running, is that climate change has disrupted the daily temperature cycle. When nighttime temperatures don’t drop, neither do the flames. “Night temperatures above 60 or even 70 degrees gives the fire energy through the night,” he said.

Higher temperatures also enable pests, like the mountain pine beetle, to kill more trees. Even at high altitudes, the freezing temperatures required to kill the insects are increasingly rare, while warmer temperatures may . The current infestation, stretching from the Yukon Territory south to New Mexico, and from the Front Range of Colorado west to the Pacific, has killed an area of forest the size of Washington State and is 10 times larger than the biggest previous outbreak.

The buildup of fuel, reduced precipitation, increased temperatures, and volatile weather patterns—all predicted results of global warming—set the stage for a perfect firestorm.

“These wildfires, especially when they become wind driven, are like a nuclear bomb going off,” Running said. “Humans aren't going to stop them any more than they stop the hurricanes on the Gulf Coast.”

Fortunately for me, the fire that threatened my Boulder neighborhood proved little more than a nuisance. No homes burned. But this year, hundreds of Colorado residents have not been so lucky, and hundreds of thousands of more across the West face a future in which fire will be an ever-increasing threat—one we’ve yet to accept or adequately prepare for. All the rakes, spades, axes, and chainsaws in the West can’t stop it.

The post How Global Warming Lit America’s Forest Fires appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

THERE MAY BE NO MORE DANGEROUS PLACE to watch a sunset than the top of K2. But on August 1, before all hell broke loose on the world’s second-highest mountain, the weather was so calm and clear that some of the 18 climbers who’d summitted that day spent up to an hour and a half taking it in.

K2

Wilco van Rooijen entering the Bottleneck on August 1.

K2

Climbers reach the summit.

K2

The savage mountain, K2.

K2

Wilco van Rooijen after arriving in the triage tent.

On the summit was Wilco van Rooijen, the leader of a Dutch expedition, who survived the ensuing ordeal and who remembers seeing tears in the eyes of a teammate who ultimately did not: Gerard McDonnell, an Irishman whoÂ’d lived and climbed in Alaska for the past decade. Both men had been seriously injured by rockfall on previous K2 attempts, but now they’d made it together. Celebrating with them, taking photographs and calling loved ones from their sat phones, were Dutchman Cas van de Gevel; Pemba Gyalje Sherpa, of Nepal, who had accompanied McDonnell up Everest in 2003; and Hugues d’Aubarede and his Pakistani porter, Karim Meherban, both members of a French team. Between 7:30 and 8 P.M., Marco Confortola, the leader of an Italian team, also reached the top.

Beneath them all, bathed in twilight, sprawled Pakistan’s Karakoram Range—including Gasherbrum I and II, the world’s eleventh- and thirteenth-highest mountains, and Broad Peak, the twelfth-highest. Below the 28,250-foot summit of K2, a team of three Norwegians were on their way down, moving slowly into a treacherous portion of the upper slope known as the Traverse. The Traverse is a wildly steep slope with an unstable 200-foot-tall glacier towering above it and thousands of feet of certain-death falls yawning below. After it plays out, the route descends into the Bottleneck, a narrow, 60-degree couloir. Both the Traverse and the Bottleneck are exposed to icefall from the glacier’s hanging seracs.

At the front of the Norwegian group was mountaineer and polar explorer Rolf Bae, who’d turned around just shy of the top because of altitude sickness. Behind him on the rope were his wife, Cecilie Skog, and teammate Lars Naesse, who’d both reached the summit. Skog was several yards behind Bae when she heard a loud crack, followed by a palpable rumble from the darkness above. In an instant, her husband’s headlamp vanished under a massive icefall. She and Naesse played their own thin beams over the debris but saw nothing but shredded ropes. They knew that Bae was gone.

Behind the Norwegians, 14 others found themselves stranded on the wrong side of the Traverse. Their fixed lines were badly damaged and their supplemental oxygen—which nine of the 14 relied on—was already running low. Things were bad, but they were about to get a lot worse. By the next day, a third of the nearly three dozen mountaineers who’d started toward the summit on August 1 would be dead.

In the immediate aftermath, news outlets and commentators quickly made comparisons to the infamous 1996 Everest disaster, chronicled by Jon Krakauer in şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř and later in his bestselling book Into Thin Air, which brought to light a growing industry of commercial guides and underexperienced climbers at the top of the world. The New York Times wrote of the K2 tragedy that “the presence of hired high-altitude porters on some of the teams raised questions about whether some of the expeditions might have been commercial, guided efforts.” The insider newsletter Expedition News published a story headlined, “The Everestification of K2.” And Tyrolean climbing legend Reinhold Messner scorned the victims’ “pure stupidity” in the German media.

Meanwhile, ExplorersWeb.com countered that such statements weren’t warranted, and that all of the dead on K2 were, in fact, experienced mountaineers with substantial high-altitude rĂ©sumĂ©s. None of the climbers caught up in the disaster were on commercially guided expeditions.

Who was right? Two months after the debacle, it seems clear that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Direct comparisons between Everest and K2 are a mistake—the mountains are just too different—but it’s obvious that grave mistakes were made in both instances: on Everest by experienced guides leading guided groups, on K2 by groups of experienced climbers. And though K2 is too difficult and dangerous a mountain ever to see Everest-size crowds—which these days can mean hundreds vying for the summit on a single day—the world’s second-highest peak is suddenly facing its own crowding problem. The difference is that on K2, a few dozen climbers is all it takes to create a murderous traffic jam.

THERE ARE ABOUT TEN ROUTES to the top from K2Â’s 16,750-foot base camp, but most expeditions make their way up the Abruzzi Spur, a series of steep ridgelines on the southeast flank. Several dozen successful teams have also taken a more direct ridgeline, the Cesen Route, on the south side of the peak. Both approaches stop at three camps en route to a shared camp four, situated at 25,000 feet on the mountainÂ’s prominent shoulder. In August, the seven teams were divided between the two routes, with most ascending the Abruzzi. Above camp four, some three dozen climbers merged into a single narrow column.

Everest also has two main routes with four standard camps, but K2 is 20 degrees steeper on average and is located 545 miles farther north. It’s 785 feet shorter than Everest, but the climbing is more technical, more exposed to falling rock and ice, and the peak is subject to harsher weather. The result is a mountain that claims many more lives for each successful summit bid. Everest has been climbed roughly 3,000 times, with hundreds of new names added to the list every year. K2 has seen only 299 ascents—and in many years, nobody summits. According to logs compiled by ExplorersWeb, 10.3 percent of K2 summiters have died on the descent. ThatÂ’s more than five times EverestÂ’s fatality rate for summiters, 1.82 percent. Among elite climbers, K2 is known as “the mountaineer’s mountain.” It’s also called “the savage mountain.”

“K2 is the holy grail,” says American Ed Viesturs, who’s climbed all of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks, including K2, without supplemental oxygen. “A climb of K2 is more important than a climb of Everest. People are willing to push longer and harder for it.”The mountain’s prestige beckons mountaineers, as does its relative affordability. Since 2003, the Pakistani government has attempted to boost tourism by cutting prices on Himalayan-climbing permits by up to 95 percent. It now costs a mere $6,000 for a team of seven to attempt the mountain.

Still, there’s no evidence to suggest that inexperienced mountaineers are suddenly flocking to K2. The use of hired Nepalese and Pakistani porters—aberrant a decade ago—is becoming more common, but guided expeditions are still rare. (One was there this year, although none of those climbers were involved in the August mayhem.) Everest, by comparison, is dominated by commercial expeditions.

“Commercial climbing has no place on K2 like on easier mountains like Broad Peak, Gasherbrum II, or even Everest,” wrote Nazir Sabir, president of the Alpine Club of Pakistan, in an open letter after the disaster.

Which raises an obvious question: How did a group of veteran mountaineers get themselves into so much trouble?

THE SUMMIT BID BEGAN with a meeting in base camp in late July, after forecasts had predicted a good weather window on August 1. On crowded peaks, climbers generally work together to improve everyone’s chances of reaching the top safely. This year, with ten expeditions on the mountain—including teams from Singapore, Korea, Spain, Serbia, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Norway, and the U.S., as well as a multinational group—communication was especially important.

Van Rooijen, who’d arrived with his Dutch squad several weeks before the other teams, organized the communal effort. Each expedition would be tasked with carrying ropes and other shared gear up the mountain, piling it up at camp four in preparation for the final push. At 10 P.M. on July 31, an advance team—comprising the strongest climber from each expedition—would leave camp four to fix the ropes through the Bottleneck and Traverse. The team would be led by Korean climber Kim Jae Soo, and it included Pakistani porter Shaheen Baig, the only climber on the mountain whoÂ’d been through the Bottleneck and knew where to set the ropes.

Shaheen Baig never made it to camp four, however. He turned back sick at camp two. According to Chhiring Dorje Sherpa and Chris Klinke, of the American expedition, when the time came for the rope-fixing team to start working, they discovered that they were short-handed and that some teams hadn’t brought enough line. The search for more equipment and manpower delayed the advance team for more than two hours, the first of a series of setbacks that would keep all but one climber out well past dark.

With Shaheen Baig out of the picture, fixing the ropes fell to half a dozen other loosely organized climbers whoÂ’d learned their skills on Everest, where the presence of so many less-experienced climbers requires fixing ropes on every inch of the mountain. At some point, after they’d begun setting the route at the Bottleneck, they were joined by Spaniard Alberto Zerain—the fastest climber on the mountain, but not part of the advance team—whoÂ’d climbed straight through from camp three. Without Baig to direct them, the group wasted line on the low-angle slopes below the Bottleneck and ran out of gear well before the crux. When van Rooijen, who’d set out with the other climbers on their summit bid, arrived around sunrise, he and the others were astonished to find Zerain already there, directing the route setting.

“We had discussed this so many times,” he recalls, “what had to be done and who had to take care of this job.”

The Bottleneck soon lived up to its name.

Klinke, stuck behind at least 20 climbers, began removing ropes from the lower slopes and passing them up the line. “There was no way we were moving fast enough to summit and get down before dark” he says. “Accidents on K2 happen when people spend too long on their ascent.”

Most climbers aim for a time of 10 to 12 hours between camp four and the summit. This year, nobody reached the top in less than 16 hours. Klinke and his teammates, Eric Meyer and Fredrik Sträng, turned back for camp four at about 10 A.M.

The first fatality occurred shortly thereafter, in the Bottleneck. Dren Mandic, a Serbian climber who unclipped from the rope to adjust his oxygen equipment and pass another climber, lost his footing and fell onto Cecilie Skog. The rope stopped Skog, but Mandic tumbled hundreds of feet.

Meyer and Sträng left camp to help but, on the way, received radio communication that Mandic was dead. When they reached Mandic’s corpse, hours later, his teammates were trying to lower the body back to camp four. The recovery went wrong almost immediately. Jehan Baig, a Pakistani porter working for the Serbs, toppled onto Sträng before sliding headfirst down the slope. He made no attempt to arrest his fall with his ice ax and tumbled off the mountain. The remaining climbers left Mandic’s body and returned to camp four.

Up in the Bottleneck, Pemba Gyalje Sherpa, from the Dutch team, was spooked by the accident and the late hour. He advised the climbers to descend, but Marco Confortola gave a pep talk, noting that the first climbers to summit K2, in 1954—Italians, like him—did so at 6 P.M. They all continued up.

Zerain, climbing solo ahead of the pack, topped out around 3 P.M. and descended so quickly to camp three that he didn’t learn of the disaster until the next day. At 5:30 P.M., Lars Naesse summitted with the Norwegians, followed within half an hour by Skog and Chhiring. Five Koreans and two Sherpas working for them reached the top at 5:40 and, according to Pakistani officials, spent 90 minutes there. Just after 7 P.M., about an hour before sunset, Van Rooijen, McDonnell, and the rest arrived. All but Cas van de Gevel, of the Dutch team, had started down when Confortola arrived between 7:30 and 8 P.M.

ROLF BAE WAS DEAD. The icefall that killed him also took out crucial fixed ropes on the upper mountain. Skog, Naesse, and the 14 others strung out behind them would have to descend the Traverse and Bottleneck in the dark, with only fragments of ropes to clip into.

After the disaster, several news stories noted that the climbers were “stranded” above the Bottleneck. In reality, the Traverse and the Bottleneck are entirely navigable by an experienced climber with the right equipment. Many earlier expeditions to K2 didn’t rely on fixed ropes at all. Instead, climbers tackled the peak alpine-style, ascending and descending while roped only to their teammates. But alpine-style climbing on terrain this steep requires two ice axes, in the same way ice-climbing does. Most of the climbers in August had only one tool each, which made climbing down the dark, debris-strewn slope that much more insecure.

After the initial accident, Naesse removed a short rope he carried in his pack, and he and Skog crept over the icy rubble and descended into the Bottleneck. Higher up, the climbers were still unaware of the icefall. Above the Traverse, Cas van de Gevel came upon Hugues d’Aubarede, sitting in the snow, exhausted. The porter Karim Meherban was missing and would not be found. Van de Gevel passed the Frenchman; soon after, he heard a crash and turned to see d’Aubarede falling into the void.

Elsewhere, at the point where the ropes vanished, Chhiring found “Little” Pasang Bhote, who’d been working for the Koreans. HeÂ’d lost his ice axe, leaving him unable to continue without the ropes. Chirring tied in with Pasang and the two men kicked steps downward with only Chhiring’s axe to anchor them. “Either we live together or we die together,” said Chhiring.

Skog and Naesse, meanwhile, had made it through the Bottleneck and reached camp four around 11 P.M. Chhiring, Pasang, Pemba, van de Gevel, and two of the Koreans made it back to camp sometime after midnight. Those in camp could still count nine headlamps above the Bottleneck.

The highest three of those lights belonged to van Rooijen, McDonnell, and Confortola. They’d lost the route above the Traverse because the bamboo wands that should’ve marked the line—like breadcrumbs—had never been planted. Confortola used his sat phone to call the president of an Italian mountaineering club, who advised him to bivouac rather than risk walking off the edge of the glacier in the dark. Then the phone battery died.

Van Rooijen was determined to keep descending, so Confortola dug only two seats in the snow—one for McDonnell, a jovial, bearded climber heÂ’d taken to calling Jesus, and one for himself. “Stick with me,” he told McDonnell.They shouted at one another to stay awake, fearing that if they fell asleep, they’d fall off the mountain. Van Rooijen continued looking for a way down but eventually planted himself nearby.

By the time the sky lightened at dawn, van Rooijen was gone. Confortola and McDonnell began making their way down but soon came upon three Korean climbers—Park Kyeong-Hyo, Kim Hyo-Gyeong, and Hwang Dong-Jin—all dangling from the same rope.

“All three of them were upside down, hanging,” recalls Confortola. “They were still alive, but two of them were in very critical condition.”

One of the Koreans could speak but had lost his boot. Confortola put one of his gloves over the climber’s exposed foot, and McDonnell held the man up while Confortola tried to lift his teammates. They spent three and half hours trying to free the Koreans but gave up when the glacier let loose nearby and reminded them of their perilous location.McDonnell, perhaps confused by the lack of oxygen, climbed back up the slope toward the summit. Confortola shouted to his friend but couldn’t get his attention. Then he heard an avalanche and recognized two yellow boots in the slide.

“They were Jesus’s boots,” says Confortola. “He was in pieces.” Confortola continued down the mountain alone.

Hours later, Pemba, climbing up from camp four, found Confortola asleep in the snow below the Bottleneck and woke him. The Italian was barely on his feet when the serac calved again. An oxygen bottle, knocked loose from above, whacked Confortola’s head, nearly knocking him off the mountain.

“But Pemba covered me like I was his baby,” recalls Confortola.

Whether in the same icefall or in one just before, Jumich Bhote and “Big” Pasang Bhote, Sherpas and brothers working for the Korean team, were both killed. Jumich had summitted the night before but had been delayed by the icefall. Pasang, who had not been part of the summit party, had climbed up to help with the rescue. Confortola and Pemba could see body parts protruding from the debris on their way back to camp four.

WILCO VAN ROOIJEN WAS ALIVE. He’d gotten up while it was still dark and somehow survived his solo descent. It was light out, but he was snowblind and had no idea where he was. He didn’t have a radio and his stricken eyes couldn’t read the display of his sat phone to call for help, though he could trace the pattern of his home phone number on the keyboard. His wife, Heleen, who was caring for their nine-month-old son, picked up back in Holland. She then called base camp, where the message was relayed up to Pemba and van de Gevel in camp four: Van Rooijen was still out there—somewhere.

Early in the morning, van Rooijen had passed the dangling Koreans, who’d waved him off. He’d clipped in to their rope, but it soon ran out. He meandered up and down steep terrain until he found remnants of the fixed ropes hanging straight down over cliffs. He’d clipped into them and worked sideways, like a pendulum, from rope to rope across the Traverse to the Bottleneck. Then he’d down-climbed until cliffs blocked his path.

“It was so steep, and I just sat down,” says van Rooijen. “I was too tired to climb up again. I was coming to the end of my strength.”

After van Rooijen had called his wife, the team’s webmaster, in Holland, arranged a GPS trace of the signal from the sat phone and located the climber between camps three and four on the Cesen Route. He’d overshot camp four altogether.

Van Rooijen hung up with his wife and slept for a few hours, waking to find his sight improved and the clouds parting to reveal a couloir where he could continue his descent. Through the same break in the whiteout, spotters down in base camp saw a man in an orange suit wandering the mountain. They called up to Pemba and van de Gevel, who descended to intercept van Rooijen.

But the sun set again before they could reach him, and van Rooijen hunkered down for his second night out on K2. In camp three, Pemba could hear van Rooijen’s sat phone ringing nearby, but avalanche-prone slopes kept him from searching for his teammate. The next morning, van Rooijen followed a ridgeline until he saw tents and climbers, although he didn’t recognize the scene as his own camp. Van de Gevel, Pemba, and van Rooijen made it off the mountain that evening and were air-lifted to a hospital in Skardu the next morning. On August 5, aided by rescuers, Marco Confortola hobbled into base camp on badly frostbitten feet. He was the last survivor off the mountain.

TWO WEEKS LATER, half a dozen members of the Dutch team sat up front at Gerard McDonnell’s memorial service, in County Limerick, Ireland. More than 2,000 mourners had shown up to honor the first climber from their country to summit K2. Musicians played, and doves were released into the cold drizzle. Friends presented the family with gifts, and speakers noted that McDonnell most likely would’ve survived if he hadn’t tried to rescue the dying Koreans.

“It’s not just because he wore a beard that he was called Jesus,” said Father Joe Noonan in his sermon.

But van de Gevel, emaciated by his ordeal and crushed by the sorrow of his teammate’s family, saw things differently. “On the mountain there were no heroes,” he said, “just an unspoken agreement that you help as much as you can.”

Back on K2, it’s likely that little will change. If the trend following the Everest 1996 disaster is any indication, the mountain will become only more popular. On Everest, better forecasting and route setting have staved off another day as catastrophic as the one 12 years ago—though not the annual parade of stunts, films, and record attempts. But on a mountain as unrelenting as K2, little can be done to lessen the danger of 30 climbers rushing the summit. That much is simple.

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