The 2008 K2 Disaster — A serac cut the ropes, and eleven did not come down

On 1–2 August 2008, eleven climbers died on K2, the world’s second-highest mountain, in the worst single accident in its history. The disaster unfolded high on the Abruzzi Spur, around and above a steep gully called the Bottleneck at roughly 8,300 metres, when a collapsing ice cliff — a serac hanging over the route — sheared away the fixed ropes that descending climbers depended on and stranded them through the night in the death zone. Most of the dead fell, were swept away by ice, or succumbed to exhaustion and exposure while trying to descend without the ropes they had counted on.

K2, 8,611 metres high on the Pakistan–China border in the Karakoram, is far more technical and dangerous than Everest, and its summit day funnels nearly every climber through the Bottleneck beneath an overhanging serac. On 1 August an unusually large international gathering — Dutch, Italian, French, Norwegian, Serbian, South Korean, Spanish and American climbers, supported by Nepali Sherpas and Pakistani high-altitude porters — set out together for the top. Confusion over fixing the ropes, a bottleneck of bodies in the couloir, and the loss of an early climber all delayed the ascent, so that most who summited did so dangerously late, some not until about 8 p.m., with the descent still ahead of them in failing light.

The toll fell across many nationalities, and especially hard on the support climbers. The dead included the Serbian Dren Mandić and the Pakistani porters Jehan Baig and Meherban Karim; the Norwegian Rolf Bae; the Frenchman Hugues d’Aubarède; the Irishman Gerard “Ger” McDonnell, the first of his nation to summit K2, who died after staying to free three entangled climbers; three South Korean climbers; and the Nepali Sherpas Jumik Bhote and Pasang Bhote, killed in the act of rescue. Survival, where it came, owed much to Sherpas — Pemba Gyalje and Chhiring Dorje among them — whose skill and decisions brought several climbers down alive.

The 2014 Everest Avalanche — Sixteen Nepali workers killed, and a mountain shut down

At about 6:45 on the morning of 18 April 2014, a serac broke from the western shoulder of Mount Everest and crashed into the Khumbu Icefall at roughly 5,800 metres, killing sixteen Nepali mountain workers — the great majority of them Sherpas — in what was then the deadliest single day in the mountain’s history. The dead were not paying clients but the local staff who do the most dangerous work on Everest: ferrying loads, fixing ropes and breaking trail through the icefall before dawn, when the ice is most stable, so that fee-paying foreigners can climb later in the season. No foreign climber was killed. Thirteen bodies were recovered within two days; three were never found, entombed in the moving ice.

The avalanche struck a section of the icefall known to guides as the “popcorn field,” below Camp 1, where a column of climbing Sherpas was carrying gear up the route in the pre-dawn cold. The released serac was enormous — later estimated at tens of metres thick and many thousands of tonnes — and there was no outrunning it. Twenty-five men were caught; sixteen died, several more were injured, and the survivors carried their dead and wounded down through the same lethal ground they had just been climbing.

What followed made 2014 a turning point as much as a tragedy. In the days after the avalanche, Sherpas at Base Camp, grieving and angry, refused to continue working for the rest of the season — partly to honour the dead and partly to protest the pay, insurance and treatment of the men who bore the mountain’s worst risks. The Nepali government’s initial relief offer of about 40,000 rupees (roughly 400 US dollars) per family, barely the cost of a funeral, deepened the outrage. By late April nearly all the season’s expeditions had been abandoned, Base Camp had emptied, and the climbing of Everest from Nepal had, for that year, effectively stopped. The dead are named below; they were the centre of this event, not its background.