Free Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day by Peter Zuckerman, Amanda Padoan Page B

rutted track, joining vehicles from other expeditions. Eight hours after leaving Skardu, Karim stopped at a dirt patch in Askole, the village at the end of the road. As the driver switched off the engine, local men mobbed the vehicle. Shouting welcomes and stirring a dust storm with their feet, they pulled supplies to the ground, unloading the cargo into snaking rows of stoves, tables, lawn chairs, blue plastic barrels, and duffels crammed with mountaineering gear.
    These laborers are called low-altitude porters , or LAPs . Less expensive than mules, they ferry supplies across terrain too treacherous for jeeps. Pakistan’s Ministry of Tourism estimated that, in 2008, low-altitude porters were hired to carry 5,600 loads from Askole to peaks such as K2, Broad Peak, Trango Towers, and Gasherbrums I and II. A seven-member expedition to K2 might hire 120 LAPs a season, spending $10,000. Low-altitude porters “are your umbilical cord during a climb,” said Rehmat Ali, a porter coordinator for Nazir Sabir Expeditions. “Mountaineers don’t have a shot at the summit without them.”
    In 2008, the low-altitude porters carried all kinds of things to K2: ropes, tents, orthopedic pillows, Cajun popcorn, chickens, skin mags, hand warmers, raspberry liqueur—whatever their clients paid for. The Flying Jump had its porters bring in a jug of pickled seaweed; Nick Rice, a climber from California, had porters shoulder a seventy-pound generator so he could power his laptop and access his blog—which, by the end of the climb, would receive two million hits. The porters weighed the loads on a hand scale and, when possible, divided them into fifty-four-pound piles, the limit established by their union. With strips of fabric, they bound the loads onto wooden frames and hoisted them onto their backs, beginning the sixty-mile slog to K2.
    As the low-altitude porters weighed in and left, the climbers exchanged satellite-phone numbers and audited each other, counting the peaks they’d bagged and the friends they’d lost. They told each other to quit climbing, but not yet. Some Serbians who had been soldiers compared leaving Askole with marching off to war. Beyond this outpost, there would be no more orchards, no more children, no more laws.
    The hundreds of porters, trudging one behind the other, formed human trains stretching for miles. At noon, nearly everyone stopped while the Muslims dropped their packs to perform salat. Turning southwest toward Mecca, they pressed their foreheads to cloth laid on the scree, bowing to praise Allah. Then the work continued.
    Thrashing through an undergrowth of scrub and wild rose, the porters brushed against spines as long as sewing needles. When temperatures scorched to 115 degrees, the men doused their heads in the side creeks and balanced along tracks cut in the cliffs. After two days, the poplars vanished, then the grass. The Baltoro Glacier, a thirty-five-mile tongue of ancient ice, rippled ahead. To the north stood the earth’s tallest rock walls, the Trango Towers. Beneath the ice, a rush of subglacial melt could be heard, feeding the Braldu River. Sometimes the sun punched through the clouds, and from a single point in the sky, amber beams radiated downward in columns.
    Within a week, the climbers had reached Concordia, where the Baltoro Glacier collides with the smaller Godwin-Austen Glacier. As the buckling ice cracked like rifle shots, K2 stood before them, a dusty carpet of ice and scree rolling off its slopes. Framed by lesser peaks, the pyramid seemed to prop up the weight of the sky.

    The Approach to K2: The week-long trek from Askole to K2 runs up the icy tongue of the Baltoro Glacier. Near Base Camp, 18,000 feet above sea level, a makeshift cairn known as the Gilkey Memorial commemorates those claimed by the mountain.
    On this, his third attempt of the mountain, Karim must have admired K2’s symmetry and dreamed of the summit. At Concordia, still a day and a half’s walk from K2, he