Because the Olympic Video games happen, mountaineering timidly embraces the precepts of excessive efficiency, pretends to mimic sport, however the deaths of its protagonists remind us with cussed abruptness that climbing distant mountains is a wild gesture, with out guidelines, referees, or spectators. It isn’t a sport, and will by no means be. In Paris, folks can watch the weeping of women and men who fall in need of their medal goals stay or on demand. Nobody witnesses the failure of a mountaineer, no digital camera captures the horrible second of an accident, of a fall, of an avalanche that determines the sport is over and that loss of life will forestall a repechage. This summer season K2 has resembled an Olympic stadium. On the one hand, nobody had ever climbed the second-highest mountain on the planet (8,611 m) so rapidly: 11 hours was invested by the French magician Benjamin Védrines from base camp, by the identical route from which its large summit was conquered in 1954. Not like the pioneers Lacedelli and Compagnoni, Védrines is a machine skilled with the severity of a bike owner. The place everybody experiences the agony of hypoxia and fears the target risks (falling rocks, ice lots), Védrines flies as if dressed for a stroll up Mont Blanc. He might put on a observe athlete’s quantity and nobody can be shocked.
On the opposite facet, on the darkish western slope of K2, removed from the brand new mountain vacationers, removed from all the things, even from life itself, Japanese climbers Kazuya Hiraide (45) and Kenro Nakajima (39) had been dealing with the problem of their careers: they thought-about their trajectory permitted them to strive one final large dream — a fearsome one, actually — one final journey earlier than returning to being like everybody else. The west face of K2 is definitely a rock face rising virtually 3,000 meters and has solely been climbed as soon as, in 2007, by a Russian platoon of 23 devoted climbers. The 2 Japanese mountaineers have twice received the celebrated Piolet d’Or, the award that distinguishes essentially the most revolutionary and daring climbers. However the pair had by no means been rock climbers, nor had been they significantly adept at high-difficulty combined terrain, so nobody knew fairly what route they deliberate to sort out in alpine fashion.
images of the western slope as if it had been a jigsaw puzzle, one can see on the left facet a succession of snowfields interrupted right here and there by rock partitions: it’s the best route, though it’s clearly uncovered to the autumn of snow and rocks. It was the route chosen in 1988 by the Pole Wojcieck Kurtyka and the Swiss Jean Troillet, two climbers who wished to measure themselves in opposition to the formidable problem in alpine fashion. Identical to this summer season, the climate then turned out to be horrendous and the pair spent 56 days on the foot of the mountain with out seeing a single day of sunshine. Ultimately, Kurtyka and Troillet launched two assaults on the mountain however in each instances they didn’t get past 6,400 meters, seen off by the avalanches that swept throughout a route they christened the Sickle, given the form of the hall alongside which they supposed to progress.
After weeks of ready, the long-awaited window of excellent climate reached K2 on July 24: all of the climbers set off up the slope, none as quick as Védrines, in fact. Two days later, a few Pakistani military helicopters had been looking for one thing on the west face. They instantly came across two figures within the snow, immobile. Hiraide and Nakajima had been nonetheless in the identical place two days later: one thing had brought on them to fall from an altitude of round 7,000 meters. Because it was unimaginable to get to them from the air (military plane usually are not geared up for such a troublesome rescue), there was hypothesis about organizing a rescue from the bottom, an concept that quickly light away, leaving the Japanese couple for lifeless. Kazuya Hiraide might have tried Védrines’ report: he was all the time a bodily prodigy. However he wasn’t : “Regular mountain routes don’t give me the expertise I’m searching for,” he admitted final December throughout a go to to San Sebastián.
Way more than a sport, Hiraide and Nakajima’s mountaineering was a sport of exploration, of crafty, of unknowns, of compromise dotted with uncontrollable parameters the place fortune had an necessary particular weight. Outsmarting the vagaries of the terrain. To be fast when vital. To not make errors. To not underestimate the mountain or overestimate your individual talents. The extra Hiraide grew as a climber, the higher he bought to know the mountains and the extra concern they instilled in him: “Now that I’ve had so many experiences, I do know precisely how horrible the excessive mountains may be, I do know their traps higher and that’s why I concern them. I want somebody sturdy by my facet like Nakajima to have faith in my talents,” he defined a number of months in the past in a disconcerting speech devoid of the ego of mountaineers. Finally, elite mountaineering is a everlasting wrestle in opposition to the concern of the unknown, in opposition to inside demons.
In latest days, a crew of mountaineers from Pakistan was in a position to recuperate the physique of the high-altitude porter Muhammad Hassan, sadly well-known after struggling a fall final summer season on the bottleneck of K2, at about 8,450 meters, and dying earlier than the eyes of all those that thought-about it extra necessary to succeed in the summit than to assist him. Nearly on the similar time, a Russian group went to Gasherbrum IV to seek for and accumulate the physique of Dmitry Golovchenko, who disappeared when he fell into the void attempting to open a brand new route within the firm of Sergey Nilov. Gathering the our bodies of fallen climbers within the Himalayas is a final gesture of respect, of empathy with their family members. It’s the symbolic awarding of medals that celebrates not a particular success, however a approach of understanding life, nevertheless incomprehensible it could be for atypical mortals.
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