Free No Way Down, Life and Death On K2 (2010) by Graham Bowley

Jump climbers were struggling in the Traverse.
    The painstaking maneuver with the oxygen bottles caused anotherbackup down the rope. The climbers waiting behind found places to perch and catch their breath. They expected the Koreans would resume climbing any moment, but it was as if they were moving in slow motion. The minutes dragged.
    Eventually the South Koreans hung the empty orange oxygen bottles on an ice screw and moved on up. The other teams climbed past the bottles, which dangled delicately and precariously on the side of the mountain.
    They were climbing once more but it was still slow going, and the delay allowed resentments to simmer, repeating the frictions that had arisen during the months at Base Camp. The truth was that climbing attracted strong characters, egos, oddballs, and they rubbed up against one another. Some of the climbers cursed the tardiness of other foreign expeditions. Outwardly they had respect for each other but in truth each considered the others slightly ridiculous—inferior, unprofessional, ignorant of the kind of monster K2 could be.
    Now, they cursed the state of the ice screws, or the condition of the rope or the way it had been tied. Some in the big groups resented the small teams for parachuting in at the last moment on their weeks of preparations, while some in the smaller independent teams resented the space the larger expeditions occupied on the mountain and the way they had tried to dominate the slopes.
    Some had brought only one ice axe, rather than the usual two, because they knew the fixed ropes would be in place to help them descend. This practice earned the scorn of other climbers, who believed two axes were essential, not least because you might drop one.
    Those climbing without the help of supplementary oxygen quietly looked down on those who were relying on it; and the teams that climbed alone without Sherpas or HAPs believed they were purer climbers than those who were paying thousands of dollars for help. The HAPs could have a bad day. The oxygen could run out. A person who relied on aides like that, some thought, should not be tackling K2.
    As they continued to wait, most of the climbers on the Traverse realized that the cooperation agreement, which had filled everyone with hope about teamwork and sharing, had in reality reduced them to the lowest common denominator. The ones waiting behind could pass the slower climbers but the ice made it dangerous. If one person stopped for a drink, or to adjust a backpack, they all stopped. Yet despite these misgivings, a kind of groupthink had set in. They continued anyway—because everyone else was still going on. They resented the other teams and at the same time felt protection in numbers. There was a manifest lack of leadership, no one to tell them to go back.
    Â 
    Rolf Bae had been more shaken than Cecilie Skog by her collision with Dren Mandic when the Serb fell.
    The fair-skinned, red-bearded Bae was a good rock climber and experienced polar explorer. Yet, today on the Traverse, for all of his prowess, he was having a difficult time. Sweat glistened on his red beard and he looked pained.
    â€œNot a good day for me,” he said to the others around him on the line, wincing. “I am having problems.”
    Like his wife, he was breathing supplementary oxygen. The thin pipes from a new British-made system—it released oxygen on demand rather than piping it constantly—curled like transparent straws around the side of his face to his nose.
    He had spent the early summer rock climbing on Great Trango Tower, a 20,500-foot spire of rock about twenty miles down the Baltoro glacier from K2, and so he had arrived at Base Camp a few weeks after Skog. Maybe Trango had taken it out of him or maybe he hadn’t given himself enough time to get used to the height on K2, though Skog knew he was never really comfortable at extreme altitudes.
    He and Skog had tried to summit K2 once before, in 2005 on theCesen route,