A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Eleven climbers died on K-2 in a three-day stretch the summer of 2008. Amidst the tragedy were some extraordinary feats of heroism. The two most impressive ones, in my mind, were performed by a Sherpa who rescued another Sherpa, and a Pakistani cook who rescued a Pakistani climber/expedition organizer. Neither of those heroes were recognized by the American, European, and South Korean climbers, most of whom ignored the Sherpas and one of whom publicly disparaged the Pakistanis who struggled and died on the mountain. (Seriously, fuck that guy.)

This book is partly the story of those converging and ill-fated expeditions, but mostly of those two Sherpas, Chhiring Dorje Sherpa and Pasang Lama. It also gives a lot of eye-opening background on Sherpas, their ethnic and class divisions, the social and economic forces that lead so many of them to climb mountains, and the cultural forces that affect them when they do so.

(It also explains why so many Sherpas have the same name. Traditionally, they are named after the day of the week that they were born, and don't have last names so they mostly use "Sherpa" for outsiders who demand one. This is fine in a village of 100, where there will only, statistically, be 14.28 people named Pasang so you can easily distinguish Old Grandpa Pasang from Teenage Yak Herder Pasang from Pasang With The Missing Finger. Then you get to Kathmandu, where there's 350 Pasang Sherpas who are all 25 years old and are porters on mountain climbing expeditions so if you want to identify one of them you have to resort to naming what expeditions they were on and what village they come from and then you will still probably need to use a nickname as that could easily be five different people.)

Until I read this book, I had completely forgotten that the crown prince of Nepal had massacred the entire royal family in 2001. To be fair, there was a lot going on in 2001. Still, what a bizarre incident that was. It also caused a lot of political and economic chaos which, as always, drove people to move in search of safety and better living conditions.

The Sherpas almost all started climbing because the pay was good. But some of them, like Chhiring, got a taste for the risk as well. But even they seem, overall, vastly more level-headed than the paying climbers, who mostly don't come across particularly well in this book. This may be because whatever sort of person climbs Mt. Everest, you have to be fifty times more like that to climb the notoriously bloodthirsty K-2.

Between that, a very narrow window of good weather, the inevitable breaking of vows to turn around if you're not on track to summit at 2:00 PM, the one person who could translate between the multiple language groups having to be medevaced out, and some plain bad luck, it's not surprising that so many people died. It's actually surprising that so many survived.

This book is both excellent in its own right and a great antidote to all the books that don't focus on the Sherpas. Every time you read one of those, just remember that the Sherpas are doing everything the paying climbers are doing, but carrying heavy packs, with shoddy gear, without fame or glory, and often against the wishes of their families. They're like Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire does, but backwards and in high heels.