Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day Read Online Free Page A

the time he turned fourteen, Chhiring’s aunts and uncles told him he had no choice: He was a man now, old enough to marry, and he had to find a faster way to pay off his father’s debts. Some suggested he leave the village to carry fuel and equipment for European climbers and trekkers. Chhiring was reluctant. He had never wandered far from the sacred valley. At that time, few Sherpas had left Rolwaling, and those who had entered the climbing industry described it as miserable and speculative. “Chhiring seemed too young to be a porter, too small to carry loads for foreigners,” recalled his uncle, Ang Tenzing Sherpa. “I told him it was a bad idea.”
    Furthermore, Chhiring worried about the deities who lived on the mountains; the glaciers were their embodiment. Climbing the spine of a goddess or trespassing into her home amounted to insolence, even blasphemy. Chhiring’s grandfather, Pem Phutar , had carried loads for a 1955 British expedition to Gauri Shankar, the sacred peak where Tseringma resides, but the family rarely spoke of it. Many villagers looked down on mountaineers and told disparaging stories about them.
    These tales had the same theme and usually ended with a broken man from Germany. Fifteen sherpas were infamously killed on German expeditions to Nanga Parbat in 1934 and 1937. Even Hitler’s Reichssportführer had condemned two members of the 1934 expedition who abandoned their team in a storm, and a strange stereotype evidently developed among the Sherpas. For example, villagers in Beding spoke of a once-successful German businessman who tried to climb Gauri Shankar. He failed, of course, and the mountain goddess punished him. Within a year, the German lost his teeth, contracted leprosy, and was robbed of everything but his wife. When she left him, he died of despair.
    Although that story must be apocryphal, another one isn’t. In 1979, American mountaineer John Roskelley decided to conquer Gauri Shankar. Pitch after pitch, conditions on the peak were so frustrating that Roskelley found the experience vaguely erotic. The “goddess of love,” he surmised, wanted to “ remain a virgin .” Approaching the summit, he had nearly seduced her when his climbing partner—“a young and upcoming Sherpa ‘tiger’ ” named Dorje—begged him to stop. Roskelley, nonetheless, “hugged [the peak] like a fat lady’s bottom and shimmied up,” Dorje in tow. “Gauri Shankar was ours,” he gloated. “We were the first non-deities to reach its 23,405-foot summit.”
    Although Roskelley didn’t suffer any ill effects from the climb , residents of Rolwaling believe they did. Soon after Roskelley’s summit, a glacial lake on the flanks of Gauri Shankar burst through a natural dam, triggering a flash flood. Icemelt and debris submerged three women working at a water-powered gristmill. Two were fished out alive. The third died .
    Chhiring didn’t want to end up like the German or cause a flash flood as John Roskelley had. He considered it risky even to speak to mountaineers and figured they all were crackpots. Why would anyone spend so much money to climb without any practical purpose? And why weren’t they strong enough to carry their own food and gear, as the rest of the world did?
    But necessity and curiosity got the best of him. His family needed money, and Chhiring couldn’t make enough gathering firewood. His uncle Sonam Tsering, a mountaineer, told him that portering was the solution. The gods would overlook the offense, given his circumstances, and Chhiring could return home rich. So at the age of fourteen, Chhiring left for the city, walking most of the way.
    When he arrived in Kathmandu, Chhiring discovered that the elders weren’t exaggerating. The apocalypse, predicted to occur outside Rolwaling, was known to the general public. Even the U.S. Embassy was issuing survival kits. The capital was doomed.

    Kathmandu is still waiting for the Big One, an earthquake that could flatten the city. The