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

will be long but beautiful.”
    In the twenty-four hours since then, however, things had gone less well. D’Aubarède was feeling the effects of the altitude and heat. He told the climbers who passed him that, like Bae, he was also thinking of going down.
    â€œMy oxygen bottle has run out,” he said, shaking his head sadly.
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    Farther along the rope, the Dutch expedition was making better progress. For Wilco van Rooijen, climbing was an obsession. When he first met the woman who would become his wife, Heleen, he told her his ambition was to climb Everest without using supplementary oxygen, a feat he considered one of the most difficult in the sport.
    She replied that she would never marry him while he was trying to do it, or have his children.
    In 2004, when Van Rooijen finally sat on the summit of Everest, he called Heleen on his satellite phone—“Will you marry me now?”—and they wed the following year. But as soon as their honeymoon was over, he began to dream of the next challenge, which was K2. Just seven months before he left for Pakistan in 2008, his son Teun had been born.
    Van Rooijen complained there was never enough money in the Netherlands for mountaineering. Not the sponsorship available for football players or skaters or sailors. But he was sponsored in the Netherlands by Bad Boys, a Dutch clothing line, and for K2 he managed to raise money from Norit. The company manufactured water purification systems, and so the K2 expedition adopted the slogan “In Search of the Source of Clean Drinking Water,” the source in question being the pure water glacier on top of K2. From North Face he got tents and sleeping bags; from Canon the team received high-definition cameras.
    Van Rooijen tried to climb K2 in 2006 but had turned back in storms. However, there he had met a an Irishman named Gerard McDonnell, who worked as an engineer in Alaska, and the two men vowed to return with an expedition this year that would be assured of success.
    While Van Rooijen had focused on the financing, the thirty-seven-year-old McDonnell had assembled more of the equipment for the mountain from his home in Anchorage. The Irishman hailed from a dairy farm in County Limerick, southwest Ireland, but in 1994 he had won a visa for the United States and moved to Baltimore. After trying to settle for three years, he took a motorcycle trip across the country to Alaska and liked what he saw. He realized he could be near wild places and the mountains. He found a job as an electronic engineer in the Alaskan oil industry on the North Slope. He made a new life, met a girl, Annie, and played the bodhran, the Irish drum, in an Irish band, Last Night’s Fun. One day, he said, he would return to Ireland. He dreamed of starting a mussel farm in County Kerry. After the big Himalayan climbs he went back home. His family was waiting for him now, in the green fields beneath the gray skies: Margaret, or Gertie, his mother; his three sisters, Martha, Stephanie, Denise; his brother, J.J.
    He had visited Ireland after he conquered Everest. He was treated like a hero and later met the Irish president. When he drove into Kilcornan and stopped near the church, hundreds of well-wishers greeted him. He had walked along the main road, accompanied by the parade and a bagpiper, past the shrine to the Virgin Mary, to the Kilcornan school and community hall where McDonnell gave a speech and everyone tried to understand why their Ger was so intent on leaving them to climb into the clouds. He didn’t climb to be famous. He normally preferred not to talk much about what he achieved in the mountains. But later, at a big hurling game in Munster, the announcer declared on the loudspeaker that Ireland’s climbing hero was in the stadium and thirty thousand people applauded.
    His father, Denis, had died when McDonnell was twenty. McDonnell had told his mother that his father was one of the reasons heclimbed to the top of the