Travel & Tourism III

Hey everyone. Once again 1 MA/3 & 4 will be having different classes this week. 1 MA/3 will have me talking about the article posted a few weeks ago about the travelogue, while 1 MA/4 will have a presentation based on the following article:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/travel/17K2.html?pagewanted=all&gwh=AAB6805EBCDB498B5E3F6946010D8728&_r=2& 

Here's the copy and pasted version:

K2: A Trek to Danger’s Doorstep

Andrew Ensslen

K2, in the Karakoram Mountain range of the Himalayas, is the second-tallest mountain in the world. More Photos »

By GRAHAM BOWLEY

Published: January 13, 2010

ONE day last June, I roped up to a porter and we leaped over crevasses until we reached the side of K2, the second-tallest mountain on earth and one of its deadliest. We scrambled up a few hundred yards to the Gilkey Memorial, a rocky, sandy promontory at K2 Base Camp that commemorates climbers who have died on K2’s dangerous slopes.

The air was loud with the sound of ravens. Metal mess plates, punched with the names of some of the fallen climbers, tinkled gently in the breeze. About 12,000 feet above us, the top of the mountain was hidden by cloud; only its vast toes of black and brown rock were visible, stretching down onto the frigid boulder-strewn rubble of the Godwin-Austen Glacier a few hundred feet below.
It was just below freezing. Descending quickly, I tried not to look at the warren of rocks around me where some of the bodies, blasted by storms down K2’s slopes, were buried. Parts of some of the bodies were visible, and occasionally I glimpsed a piece of ripped climbing suit or an old boot, or smelled something sickly on the air.
The experience must have affected one of my Balti porters, Abbas. Later, around midnight, he ran barefoot over the dangerous crevasses back toward the memorial, my porters told me, screaming to the dead that he belonged with them. A couple of the other porters held him down and brought him back to the tent. Believing he was possessed, they read the Koran to soothe him, but he bolted again.
At 5 a.m. when I lifted the flap of the mess tent, Abbas was asleep on a mat on the cold, stony floor, his hands and feet trussed. When he awoke, he was untied, and he rubbed his wrists groggily. He shook his head no when I offered porridge and green tea. He staggered outside to the porters’ shelter, a circle of blue-tarpaulin-covered stones where half a dozen porters were throwing down gasoline, lighting wisps of purple flames to warm themselves in the clear, freezing dawn.
I had finally realized my goal of reaching the base camp at K2, in the heart of the Karakoram Mountain range in northern Pakistan. Situated on the western edge of the Himalayas, the range contains one of the highest concentrations of the world’s tallest peaks. My purpose was to research a book about the climbers who challenge these slopes, and in particular an accident on K2 in 2008 when 11 people died, one of the worst disasters in Himalayan mountaineering history.
At 28,251 feet, K2 is almost 800 feet shorter than Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain. But while Everest has been largely demythologized by a seemingly constant stream of films, books and magazine articles, K2 — distant and reclusive — has retained an aura of mystery and danger. Among hard-core mountaineers its ascent is considered a far greater achievement than Everest.
The statistics support this. In the 2009 season, some 450 climbers reached the top of Everest while none summited K2. But K2 is not just more challenging; it is also more deadly. By the end of the 2009 climbing season, only 296 people had ever conquered K2, and at least 77 had died trying, a much higher casualty rate than for Everest.
I thought about this as I stood awestruck that cold morning, staring up at K2’s stark face, and contemplated whether Abbas, in his frenzy, understood something intrinsic about this mountain and its reputation for death.
MY journey to K2 had begun two weeks earlier in Islamabad, the hot, tumultuous Pakistani capital. It was a time of escalating insurgency in the Swat Valley, and tensions were high. The capital was locked down by roadblocks and terrorist threats.
Our hotel was the Islamabad Regency, a dark, unfinished structure along the main highway from the Benazir Bhutto International Airport, with mold growing up the shower curtains. It was situated in a row of apparently empty villas whose boarded-up windows signified the unfulfilled promise of a city conjured from the wilderness five decades ago. Whenever we tried to leave the hotel, we were turned back by a guard with a gun swinging from his shoulder. “Unsafe,” he would say. It was sobering to realize that climbing K2 these days meant traveling through a country at war.
Our one main foray in Islamabad was to the Alpine Club of Pakistan, in a sunless room beneath the hot, empty terraces of the Jinnah Sports Stadium. There we met Javaid Iqbal, the honorary secretary, a kindly man with white hair and a moustache, who interrogated us about our plans and lamented the fact that the number of visitors had dropped precipitously this year because of Pakistan’s political problems.
In a normal season, he said, more than 80 full-fledged mountaineering expeditions and 200 trekkers came to the Karakoram, but so far in 2009 there were only 60 expeditions and 40 trekkers. The modern tribe of globe-trotting mountaineers willingly paid tens of thousands of dollars to brave the natural dangers of the world’s highest peaks, but shrank in the face of the more sinister threat of the Taliban. Who could blame them?
The Karakoram region had long attracted outsiders. Alexander the Great passed through in the fourth century B.C. It was part of the Silk Road. The first modern adventurers arrived in the 19th century when the British mapped out the boundaries of their empire and named K2 — K for Karakoram and 2 because of its place in a series of mountains noted by an assiduous surveyor named Thomas Montgomerie.
Back then the explorers traveled overland from Kashmir, but that route became more complicated with the partition of India. Today, the chief approach by car or bus is up the winding Karakoram Highway to Skardu, one of the principal cities in Baltistan.
We left just after midnight, creeping out of Islamabad in a white Toyota minivan, on a journey that would take us close to the Swat Valley. Our guide from Jasmine Tours, Sajjad Shah, said the unusual starting time was to ensure that we passed through the most dangerous areas at dawn, when the militants would be praying and less interested in looking for kidnap victims on the road. It was small reassurance.
I had come with a cousin, Andrew Ensslen, a 29-year-old architect who would act as my photographer. A Canadian who lived in London, he was the only person I could find willing to give up a month of his life to share the expense and dangers of traveling to K2. While we intended to trek only to the K2 Base Camp and not a foot farther, the six others in the bus were the real deal — serious mountaineers bedecked in the latest North Face equipment, wrists heavy with altimeters, their food barrels strapped to the roof. There were a German, three Poles and two Portuguese. They were planning a three-month campaign to Gasherbrum I and II, two peaks slightly over 26,000 feet near K2.
We stopped once at a gas station, where an armed guard sat sleepily; his job was to defend against militants. We stopped again at a truck stop where our own driver knelt with others in prayer. Fortunately, we left Swat unscathed.
When the sun rose, we paused for breakfast at Besham, a small town on the highway opposite a steep canyon where goats clambered on the hillside. After that, we continued up the Karakoram, on pencil-thin roads high above the lonely Indus River as Chinese trucks barreled past heading south. The bigger villages fell behind us, and the scenery became increasingly sparse: vast, open valleys strewn with massive boulders and scree, looking something like God’s building site.
After 27 cramped hours in the minibus, we reached Skardu, a dusty fort town of bazaars, stores and waterlogged polo fields grazed by cows. It is the main stop-off before the mountains, with hotels and second-hand shops for climbers, and it usually fills with mountaineers during the summer climbing season. The Indus flows past the town in a wide, flat valley; snow-topped peaks in the distance give a tantalizing hint of the heights to come.
We rested for a day, then left in jeeps for a seven-hour journey into the mountains. We drove through narrow green villages, passing beneath apricot and apple trees as scores of schoolchildren waved. Eventually, we drove up onto bleak, washed-out roads where, through the scratched plastic windows, we anxiously watched the steep mountainsides for rock slides. High up on the hillsides were caves, like black eyes watching us, where the local Baltis scratched out livings mining gems.
The poverty of the mountains was underlined the next morning at dawn in Askole, a small village of mud huts and bare-footed children. Our guide, Sajjad, selected 40 porters for us out of the hundreds who turned up eager — at $5 a day — for the work of carrying our backpacks and supplies as we set out on foot for the eight-day journey up the valley and onto the Baltoro Glacier.
Throughout our journey, I had been observing the culture of the climbers, noting their obsessive care for their expensive tents, boots and other equipment, their technical jargon and their personal goals. They had come to throw themselves at these peaks for a variety of compelling reasons — among them to explore nature and, in this lonely vastness, to explore themselves and their limits.
I had expected a collegial, communal, even romantic atmosphere on the trail. But climbers lead a mechanistic existence. They live by blisters and the grace of their stomachs, applying sun cream and drinking water like metronomes to stave off dehydration and to protect against the altitude. Each evening Dirk, the German, trooped off to his tent with an armful of water bottles, some filled with boiled water, some empty, and in the morning declared loudly with pride how much he had drunk and showed how many were brimming with urine. “Two liters again last night!” he said. How could I compete with that?
Beside the climbers, I got to know the other group of people traveling with us — our local Balti porters, drawn from the mud-brick shacks in the Karakoram foothills. There was the sirdar, or chief porter, our cook and his assistant, and then the troop of basic carriers and luggers. They looked thin and frail, dressed in dirty shirts, wearing too-short pants and sneakers or flip-flops. Some were teenagers, some as old as 60. There was no way, I thought, they could lift our belongings. But of course soon they were outrunning us, picking their way expertly over rocks and up slippery passes, carrying the tents, kitchen chairs, even our smelly gas stove, and stopping to help me as I took a wrong path or floundered numbly up the most difficult ascents. Come sunrise, they dismantled our tents. We had only to carry our day packs.
By late morning, halfway through our daily eight-hour slog, they would be waiting beneath willow trees or in the shelter of a rock, the stove lighted, chicken soup and green tea boiling, offering raisins and walnuts on a silvery tray. Usually, we were at the next campsite by 1 or 2 p.m., when the porters would put up our tents and the mess tent. We had the remainder of the afternoon to rest, read, recuperate and adjust to the new altitude, all the while gazing at the wondrous peaks around us. Ashok, our cook, a good-natured man in his late 30s, prepared excellent Balti dishes, slaughtering the three white chickens the porters had carried for us in a cardboard box.
THE first days of the trek were hot and lush. We passed through a series of campsites. At one of them, Paiju, beside a broad glacial river, we caught the first real glimpse of the big peaks ahead of us. Here, before the big push into the mountains, we stopped for a rest day for the porters, who celebrated by slitting the throats of three goats and preparing them for cooking, then dancing in the night outside our tents.
The next morning, we climbed up onto the Baltoro Glacier and from then on the days were colder and harder. The ice cracked beneath our boots, and we entered an avenue of immense mountains. Descending a hill, I slipped in the snow and dislocated a finger; it stuck out at a crazy angle and had to be rammed back into place and bandaged. At Urdukas, another campsite, we picked our way past the icy graves of three porters. It struck me that we were there for pleasure; the porters were putting themselves in danger for different reasons.
Here, even in June, the world around us was formed from deep snow and ice. At night, the water froze in my drinking bottle, and I slept wrapped in as many layers of clothes as I could put on, my head pressed against the creaking glacier.
There was beauty everywhere, though. One morning, when the sky cleared, we rushed from our tents to glimpse the shining face of Gasherbrum IV, a spectacularly beautiful mountain, at the head of the snowy valley. Often, we rushed out when we heard the roar of an avalanche and watched it pour down a nearby mountainside, frothing and bubbling.
Gradually, as we climbed higher, the air became thinner, and it was harder to breathe. My chest was pounding when, on Day 6, we reached Concordia, an amphitheater of mountains and a major crossroads where two glaciers and several trekking routes meet.
It was here that the mountaineers in our group split off, heading east to the Gasherbrums. Andrew and I took a difficult fork north for the punishing day-and-a-half journey up the Godwin-Austen Glacier to K2.
At about 16,400 feet above sea level, the base camp at K2 is a collection of multicolored tents on a long, gray spine of rocks beneath the southern face of the mountain. In the same month in 2008, it was packed with more than 10 expeditions, but now there were just two (at least while I was there). I roamed around.
In one kitchen tent, five Swiss climbers huddled together in big, puffy climbing suits, watching a film on a laptop. One of them, Olivier Roduit, 43, talked to me about the attractions of the mountains. When I asked him about their dangers, and about the Gilkey Memorial, less than half a mile from where we were sitting, he said: “I don’t like to think about it.”
He was used to death, though; in the mountains, he said, people die all the time. Nearly every climber I met knew some climber who had died, and all had had close calls themselves. A Spanish climber I spoke to later died on Gasherbrum II, and a South Korean woman I interviewed in Islamabad for my book died a week or so later on another mountain, Nanga Parbat.
But while the climbers understood the risks, I got the impression that clear-eyed realization extended only up to a point. I don’t think they really ever believed that they were going to die; otherwise they would never have come to the wilderness.
“Why do I do it?” Mr. Roduit said. “Because it’s beautiful. Sometimes I ask myself why I am here. In the morning I wake up and understand.”
Among the mountaineers I spoke to, there seemed to be a sliding scale: at one end were those who had a proper understanding of the risks (Mr. Roduit seemed ultra-careful), while at the other end were blithe thrill-seekers. While we were at K2 base camp, an Italian was high up on the mountain planning to ski down; a day or two later, he fell and died.
MR. RODUIT and his team were waiting for the rolling clouds to clear from their route to the summit, which they did on the morning after Abbas’s fright at the Gilkey Memorial. Andrew and I got our first good look at K2, and we could see some of the features that make it so dangerous.
K2 is 500 miles more northerly than Everest, and it is far more susceptible to sudden, unpredictable storms, which over the years have blown dozens of climbers from its ridges. Its sides are steep, even at the lower altitudes. On the ascent, there are tough sections like House’s Chimney and the Black Pyramid. Then, right near the summit, climbers have to ascend a steep ice gully called the Bottleneck and cross a horizontal ice face named the Traverse. All this while they are directly below a serac, a menacing ice cliff that protrudes over the edge of the mountain and through the years has occasionally crumbled, sending blocks of killer ice over the Traverse or down the Bottleneck. I thought I could see the serac’s distant, jagged outline against the blue sky from where I was peering up.
On the evening of Aug. 1, 2008, the serac collapsed, killing one climber outright and trapping 17 others above 28,000 feet in the darkness without ropes and — for those who were depending on tanks of supplementary oxygen — with failing oxygen supplies.
Some climbed down successfully. Others fell or wandered off the mountain to their deaths, or were killed in further avalanches.
Standing at base camp, I studied K2 in a reverie until I was shaken back to reality. There were dangers even here. Altitude sickness is a constant risk at this height, and Andrew had developed a severe headache. He was vomiting and could barely stand up. We were warned to get to lower altitudes quickly.
But Andrew could not walk out of these mountains — it would take another five or six days — and after a few hours we realized we had to call on my satellite phone for an emergency rescue by helicopter. It was a frightening and sudden end to our journey. A mile or so down the glacier at Broad Peak base camp, the climbers came out of their tents to help us clear a space for a helicopter landing, and set an orange H with plastic strips on the rocks.
We tipped our expectant porters, who lined up to bid us farewell. After four hours, two Pakistani helicopters appeared in the sky. We climbed in and were plucked off the ice. Three hundred feet below us the porters began the long trek home to pick up their next paying customers in Askole. The climbers in base camp turned back to their tents and continued their siege of the mountain. Andrew and I flew for an hour back down the Baltoro Glacier, swinging in our helicopter past some of the most startling peaks in the world — Masherbrum, Trango Towers. Eventually we reached the bare military hospital in Skardu, and then took a flight back to another hospital in Islamabad.
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
PLANNING YOUR TRIP
The main Karakoram trekking season is late May to August and sometimes September. Most tours begin in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. The trip takes planning and needs to be arranged through a tour company. Obviously there are risks involved in traveling through a country with so much conflict, so before you book, consult the State Department (state.gov/travel) for travel advisories.
The first order of business is a tourist visa, required of all United States citizens and costing $120. You can apply for one at the Pakistani Consulate (12 East 65 Street, New York; 212-879-5800; www.pakistanconsulateny.org). You will also need permission to travel to the northern areas in Pakistan, but the tour company will usually arrange this. It will also arrange for you to attend a briefing in Islamabad at the Alpine Club of Pakistan.
For a fee, tour companies will greet trekkers at the airport in Islamabad; provide hotel accommodation in the few places needed; transport trekkers to the Karakoram and back to the capital; and provide guides and porters for the trip into the mountains. All food is usually included. The tour companies accept individual trekkers, but traveling with a group cuts down the cost per traveler. Expect to pay $3,500 to $6,000 total for airfare and tour arrangements, not including the cost of gear and other travel-related expenses.
GETTING THERE
There are few nonstop flights from New York to Islamabad. Most connect in Abu Dhabi or Dubai, for a journey of 19 hours or more. A recent Web search on Kayak.com showed flights in late January on Etihad Airways, the airline of the United Arab Emirates, starting at $1,182. Other flights on multiple airlines ran closer to $3,000.
The journey from Islamabad to the mountains is usually made via the Karakoram Highway to Skardu, the chief northern staging point; the trip takes 27 hours. An alternative is a Pakistan International Airline flight from Islamabad to Skardu. Your trekking company can usually book this for you, sometimes for an extra charge, though flight schedules are often busy and depend on the weather.
TREKKING COMPANIES
There are several companies based in Islamabad that will handle arrangements, offering different levels of comfort and service. Prices are for traveling from Islamabad to the K2 base camp.
Adventure Tours Pakistan (92-51-226-0820; atp.com.pk) is one of the larger tour companies. It charges $4,992 — prices are set in U.S. dollars — for one person and $3,262 a person for a two-person trek.
Jasmine Tours (92-51-2615368 or 92-333-510-9753; jasminetours.com) charges about $2,500 for one person, $2,400 a person for a two-person trek.
Nazir Sabir Expeditions (92-51 225-2553; nazirsabir.com) charges $4,520 a person for a single-person trek and $3,400 a person for two.
Saltoro Summits (92-51-582-1775 or 92-333-517-6672; www.saltorosummits.com) charges $1,985 for single-person trek.
Shams Alpine (92-58-215-5218; shamsalpine.com) offers a two-person trek for $3,150 a person.
WHAT TO BRING
The trekking company provides tents and food. You should bring a sleeping bag good for extreme cold, and several changes of clothes, a main rucksack and also a day pack to carry water bottles and other day equipment. Your rucksack will be carried by a porter, but check the weight limit; you will be charged extra if you exceed it. Bring a sun hat, warm-weather clothes and lots of sunscreen; the going is hot and dusty at the beginning of the trail. Sunglasses are important. But also pack heavy coats and other clothes suitable for the subzero temperatures later. A satellite phone is a good idea. Also important: strong, waterproof hiking boots. Consult your trekking company for a full list of necessary equipment.