Dutch K2 survivor describes chaos after avalanche
'Everybody was fighting for himself,' says Wilco van Rooijen. Eleven climbers are reported dead on the Pakistan peak.
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN — A Dutch survivor of an ice avalanche that killed nine climbers atop the world's second-tallest mountain over the weekend described a desperate scramble for self-preservation, with panicked mountaineers abandoning one another in the search for a way down the steep rock face.
Some of the victims were swept away by a column of ice that snapped near the summit of K2 -- widely regarded as the world's most treacherous peak -- in northern Pakistan near the Chinese border. The falling pane of ice severed fixed ropes used mostly for descending the near-vertical portions of slopes, leaving other climbers cut off at an oxygen-thin elevation known as the Dead Zone.
"People were running down but didn't know where to go, so a lot of people were lost on the mountain on the wrong side, wrong route, and then you have a big problem and then things like that happen," said Wilco van Rooijen, the leader of one expedition, in an interview with Reuters news agency from his cot in a Pakistani military hospital.
Along with the nine killed by the avalanche, two other climbers fell to their deaths on the way up the mountain, making this the deadliest year on K2 since 1986, Pakistani officials said.
Van Rooijen was one of two Dutch climbers rescued after the accident. He slept two nights on K2 without a sleeping bag, food or water, but was plucked from the mountain by a rescue helicopter after making his way down from the icy upper reaches of the pyramid-shaped peak.
He described passing three South Korean climbers who chose to wait for rescuers and who are believed to have been among the dead. Other climbers fell to their deaths while trying to cross the gully where the safety ropes had been severed, according to a spokesman for the Dutch expedition who had been in contact with Van Rooijen by satellite phone.
News reports also said that at least some of the trapped climbers froze to death after being forced to spend the night near the top of a peak that rises more than 28,250 feet.
The avalanche occurred after nightfall Friday in a perilous gorge known as the Bottleneck, the last major obstacle on the way to the summit. Climbers became scattered and scrambled to save themselves, Van Rooijen said, a scene reminiscent of the 1996 catastrophe on Mt. Everest that killed eight climbers in a tragedy described in Jon Krakauer's bestselling book "Into Thin Air."
