couldn’t help it!” Chris said. “Holy crap, I wasn’t sure we were going to make it. The tent flattened on our faces. We had to hold it up with our ski poles. I was sure the tent would rip or the poles would bust.”
A few days later they made a second attempt, much to the shock of the others who watched the couple leave and trudge through waist-deep snow. This time, as they got closer to the summit, Keith’s eyes became blurry and he got a painful headache. They turned back and returned to base camp. Scott’s group had not yet tried for the top, but when they did, Chris intended to be ready.
Despite the deep blackness of the night sky, Keith’s sunglasses covered his eyes as he lay in the tent a couple of days later. He’d been diagnosed with a high-altitude retinal hemorrhage. The lack of oxygen had caused dilation of blood vessels in his retinas, rendering him temporarily unable to see clearly.
Keith had accompanied Chris back up to Camp 2, but his days trying to summit Broad Peak on this expedition were over. At the opposite end of their tent, Chris strapped rope onto the outside of her pack. The steaming cup of sweet tea she was drinking sat next to her. She made sure to take in each sip, eager for the liquid before she started the ascent. Though she knew Scott’s team was capable of leading her to the top, leaving Keith felt foreign. They’d always climbed together. Chris knew he was disappointed, but she had trouble reining in her enthusiasm for a third chance to the top. Keith reached out a gloved hand, pulling her to him and held tight, the gap in their experiences about to widen.
CHRIS CAUGHT UP WITH THE departing climbers, stepping in behind the small group from Scott’s expedition. A stream of headlamps lit the way as the group pushed for the summit well before dawn. At a pitch of fifty degrees, the sharp angle of the mountain surprised her, even on this third attempt. It was the equivalent of climbing a double black diamond ski run. The team was making good time, their bodies rested, while Chris’s legs felt heavy from the two previous attempts. With Scott in the lead, they made it to Camp 3 within a few hours, assessed, and moved on. Chris was thirty minutes behind, each step now requiring several breaths.
Crampons digging into snow and ice, the last stretch of the ascent tested each of them. Snowpack from recent days required breaking more trail than they’d expected. As they cleared the final hundred feet, a hypoxic fog covered Chris’s brain in a way new to her. Channeling Keith, she willed herself forward.
By 10:00 a.m., the climbers stood atop the wide apex of Broad Peak. Chris had summited her first 8,000-meter peak. She looked across at the swath of mountains, which included K2, where Alison Hargreaves and Peter Hillary were climbing at that exact moment. The view also included Gasherbrum I and II, favorites of Keith. Glancing down at the Baltoro Glacier and then to base camp, she hoped Keith was recovered enough to look up at her with the telescope.
“Congrats, Chris!” A member of the expedition offered his hand and she shook it.
“Hell yes, you did it!” Scott added. “How does it feel?”
“It feels awesome, and you were right—there’s nothing like it.”
Scott grinned at her, then checked with the members of his group. “Ready to go down? The weather’s held, but it looks like it might change.” The landscape of the Karakoram could be placid one moment, volatile the next. Competing air masses could strike each other at any time with no regard for who was on these mountains, nor the victories they’d achieved. Chris had suceeded on her first 8,000-meter summit, but all she could think about was how cold she was and getting back to Keith.
“Let’s do it,” she said.
Descending Broad Peak, Chris’s legs ached for rest. Normally fast when moving down, this time she lagged an hour behind the others. High camp had consisted of only a couple of tents, and all of those had been collected by the time she reached that point. The team had decided to retreat all the way to Camp 3. The decision was no doubt a nod to the weather. From the north, the storm Scott had seen gathering was coming to life. Winds gusting up to a hundred miles an hour from China pounded the slopes. Snow kicked up, blinding Chris’s view and covering the tracks she’d been using as a guide.
Though she was relatively new to high-altitude mountaineering, Chris was an expert in engineering and specifically in analyzing data. With a keen eye for following scientific observations, she plotted the contours of the mountain, although she was barely able to see. Remembering the angles of the path the team had taken up the mountain, she knew that if things got desperate, she had a sleeping bag and could hunker down for the night.
With each movement, Chris longed to be lower. The lessons of the past few weeks played in a loop, her mind reciting each one. Patience. Deference to the weather. Listening to those with more experience but finding space to follow one’s inner voice.
As daylight began to fade, her anxiety increased. The path to Camp 3 had been obliterated by wind and snowdrifts. Then a break in the clouds yielded a few seconds of sunlight. Chris scanned her surroundings, terrified to realize she was heading right off an ice cliff. Black spots marked an area far ahead, which she recognized as Camp 3. Chris stumbled forward, darkness and crippling cold engulfing her. Two hours passed until the black spots became the intoxicating sight of tents. Crawling into her tent at Camp 3, she heard the winds screaming. She had made it to safety, as had Scott’s group. Broad Peak’s position had sheltered it from the worst of the storm.
Nearby, the team on K2 wasn’t as lucky, however. Peter Hillary had sensed the danger and retreated, leaving a band of climbers to proceed upward to the summit earlier in the day. At higher altitudes, the unsteady air and winds had initially seemed tame. Lower, the intensity of the storm trapped climbers in their tents. The catastrophic winds raced up the slopes of K2, hitting those still on the mountain’s highest points late in the day.
THE NEXT MORNING, THE SKIES were clear. The weary Mountain Madness climbers arrived at Broad Peak Base Camp, and Chris was reunited with a relieved Keith. There, surrounded by warmth, the climbers tracked the progress of their friends descending K2. By radio, the group listened as Canadian climber Jeff Lakes made his way down from Camp 3, buoyed by the encouragement of his waiting teammates. “You’re almost there, Jeff. You’re almost there,” they called over their radios. After stumbling into his tent at Camp 2 at 1:30 a.m., Lakes died a few hours later, a victim of a combination of altitude sickness and hypothermia.
Scott’s telescope was positioned for a scan of the mountainside, hoping to see signs of life. Alison and several other climbers were still unaccounted for. “I’m looking at something that looks like a slide path,” he said. His sunglasses were off, giving him better vision as he looked through the scope. Lopsang inched forward, then Chris and Keith, who’d walked the short distance from their tent to join the vigil.
“It’s . . . I’m looking at about a fifteen-hundred-foot slide path, and I see something at the very end of it,” said Scott. “Oh god, I think it’s a body.” He stepped away from the telescope, giving others a turn to confirm. One by one, the group verified what they saw. A body was lying in a snowfield, most likely having been picked off the summit of K2 in high winds and tossed down the slope. Another day would pass until the body’s distinctive clothing would be identified by teammates as that of Alison Hargreaves.
Chris squinted into the telescope at two figures digging in the snow at a point lower on the mountain. Her gaze stayed fixed, hoping it was only an illusion. She stepped away, horrified. The climbers were digging a grave for another teammate, further driving home the danger of this sport.
As their Broad Peak expedition closed out, Chris knew several things to be true. Her skills as a climber were exceeding Keith’s, as she noted in journal entries referencing her conflicted desire to begin climbing routes she knew he was incapable of. She realized that,
