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

but they had turned back, and they were eager this time to reach the top. Still, Bae said he was thinking of turning around, although he would try to go as far as he could with Skog.
    The two climbers had been husband and wife for little over a year. They had met in Russia in 2003 after an expedition to Mount Elberus. She had trained as a nurse and guide and Bae was working as a professional guide. He was a well-traveled man. He had lived in the United States; when he was seventeen, he had spent a year in Amherst, Massachusetts, living with a local family and studying. Between 1999 and 2001, he had spent seventeen months in the Antarctic in a naval base on Queen Maud Land.
    Skog had soon learned that this was the sort of thing Rolf Bae did. He was also a serious bird-watcher; he knew the Latin names and most springs took the train to northern Norway on special bird-watching trips. When they were on an expedition, he loved to sing Bob Dylan songs as he walked along the trail. In the camp at night, he sat and played his guitar or his harmonica.
    A week after they had got to know each other, Skog and Bae flew to the Himalayas and spent three months climbing in Tibet and Nepal. When they returned to Norway, they moved in together and started their own travel company, Fram Expeditions, named after the ship that took Norwegian explorers to the Arctic and Antarctic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They began a life of guiding, writing books, and giving talks about their expeditions in the wilderness. It was a wonderful way of making a living, doing what they loved. They had a little apartment in Stavanger but they were rarely at home. In 2005, they traveled together to the South Pole. In 2006, they reached the North Pole.
    Skog, dubbed the Polar Princess in the European media, had become the first woman to stand at both poles and on the tallest peaks of every continent, including Everest. She had wanted the achievement of climbing Everest; Rolf hated the crowds on Everest thesedays and had chosen not to go with her. Their fame at home in Norway was just taking off, Cecilie’s especially.
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    Ahead of Bae and Skog on the line, the dark-haired Frenchman Hugues d’Aubarède crouched on an ice ledge beside his Pakistani HAP, Karim Meherban. Both men were concerned about d’Aubarède’s condition.
    D’Aubarède, who was wearing a dark yellow climbing suit, was getting tired. The sixty-one-year-old was a stubborn, proud, noble man, neat and cultured, and he had invested a lot in his expedition to get to K2. He had left behind his partner, two daughters, and a grandchild in France to pursue his dream in the Himalayas. It was his third attempt to reach the summit of K2, and he thought it would probably be his last try. He was not the oldest to climb on K2, but he was close—a sixty-five-year-old Spaniard had summitted in 2004.
    It had been a long climb up from Base Camp. When the storm hit around the night of July 29, some of the other expeditions had waited at an intermediate camp, forcing d’Aubarède to wait, too. He had used up valuable energy, food, and also gas for melting snow for water. The wind had whistled up inside his glasses, the slopes too steep even to stop to put on his goggles. He had had to wade through snow that drifted around his knees, by carving a corridor with his hands.
    But then finally, at Camp Four, after the long ascent up the Cesen, he had climbed onto a flat space on the Shoulder on the afternoon of July 31, pitched his tent, and gazed down on the gallery of peaks around him. Taking out his satellite phone, he had sent a text message to his family in Lyon. He had been keeping a blog of his days on the mountain so that all his friends could follow his progress.
    â€œI wish everyone could contemplate this ocean of mountains and glaciers,” he had written, impressed by the beauty of what lay below him. “I drooled it was so beautiful. The night