Linked to a rope they’d fixed to the ice, Purja and the other climbers stepped around such unspoken truths like so many shattered ice houses. When pulmonary edema is ignored, breathing becomes more difficult, and soon blood and fluid might leak into the brain, an often fatal syndrome known as cerebral edema. The only cure is to head down the mountain for more oxygen. That’s when pulmonary blood vessels constrict, ratcheting up pressure in the lungs, causing fluid to leak into the air sacs. High-altitude pulmonary edema is the biggest threat. And though any climber caught in the Bottleneck at the wrong time faces certain injury and likely death, getting spooked and moving too fast at that altitude could bring a slow death. Elevations above 26,000 feet are in the so-called death zone. This time we needed passage, and the mountain allowed us permission.” “Some pieces were the size of a house,” Purja said from base camp on Monday. Even before they reached the Bottleneck, the climbers saw foreboding debris fields. The serac routinely sheds enormous blocks of ice. The tragedy occurred hours after the Nepalese funneled through the Bottleneck, an hourglass-shaped gully that runs beneath an unstable overhanging ice cliff, called a serac.
That thin margin for error was underlined on Saturday, when Sergi Mingote, a Spanish climber who had reached 10 of the world’s highest peaks without supplemental oxygen, fell to his death much lower on the mountain. By comparison, on Mount Everest, the ratio is about one to 34. The ratio of deaths to ascents on K2 is nearly one to six. Since the 1950s, it has also been known as Savage Mountain for its deadly reputation.
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