Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award and the Banff Mountain Book Award for Mountain Literature
"Gripping, intense…Buried in the Sky will satisfy anyone who loved [Into Thin Air]." —Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe
When eleven climbers died on K2 in 2008, two Sherpas survived. Their astonishing tale became the stuff of mountaineering legend. This white-knuckle adventure follows the Sherpas from their remote villages in Nepal to the peak of the world’s most dangerous mountain, recounting one of the most dramatic disasters in alpine history from a fascinating new perspective.
Winner of the NCTE George Orwell Award and an official selection of the American Alpine Club Book Club.
Peter Zuckerman is a non-fiction writer. He has received some of the most prestigious recognitions in American journalism. At age 26 he won the Livingston Award, the largest, all-media, general reporting prize in America. His writing has also received is the National Journalism Award and the Blethan Award. Amanda Padoan is a historian who writes about communities affected by armed conflict. She holds degrees from Harvard and University of Cambridge. Her first book, Buried in the Sky, received the National Outdoor Book Award.
Table of Contents
List of Maps ix
List of Characters xi
Author's Note xv
Prologue: The Death Zone 1
Part I Ambition
1 Summit Fever 11
2 Doorway to Heaven 28
3 The Prince and the Porter 48
4 The Celebrity Ethnicity 64
5 Insha' Allah 77
Part II Conquest
6 The Approach 95
7 Weather Gods 107
8 Ghost Winds 124
9 Through the Bottleneck 142
Part III Descent
10 Escape from the Summit 163
11 Sonam 175
12 Survival 185
13 Buried in the Sky 193
14 The Fearless Five 204
15 The Next Life 217
Acknowledgments 231
Background Notes 235
Selected Bibliography 259
Index 261
Interviews
Comment from co-author Peter Zuckerman What initially made me want to write this book was the story itself. Buried in the Sky is a true adventure about one of the most dramatic disasters in alpine history, the 2008 tragedy on K2 that left eleven people dead. In this book, you will see photos of people just before they died. You will find out what people do when they have been broken by oxygen deprivation and exhaustion and must make life-or-death decisions. You will see what people are like at their most elemental level. I also found the characters compelling. These are not the kind of people you bump into every day. It takes a unique personality to risk everything to climb the world's most dangerous mountain. These men and women, trapped inside the same tents, clash when their lives depend upon them getting along. You think you know who they are, and then—right when the stakes are highest—they’re revealed to be something else. These are people who capture you, who make you examine yourself, who make you ask what you would do under similar circumstances. Are you someone who would save yourself? Or would you try to save another? What if you barely knew that person? But the story and the characters aren’t what finally got me to chase this book down with my cousin Amanda. There are plenty of narratives about death-defying struggles up fixed ropes to a summit. What really appealed to me was that Buried in the Sky illustrates a much more universal problem—one we all face, nearly every day, nearly everywhere. Among mountaineers, Sherpas hold a nearly-mythical status. They have a seemingly superhuman ability to do some of the most dangerous and difficult climbing. They scout routes, break trail, fix ropes, carry gear, establish camps, pitch tents, escort climbers to the summit, snap summit photos, rescue climbers when they slip. This is their job: To safely get their often-more-celebrated clients up and down a mountain. But their stories get buried, and mountaineering shows that this kind of omission can lead to a disaster. When your life hangs from a knot, you need to know who tied it. When you're relying on a team to lead you up a mountain, you need to know whether the members of this team speak the same language and can communicate; whether they’re business or ethnic rivals; whether they can and will work together well. These were the major issues on K2 in 2008. History is usually told through the eyes of the kings and the Columbus’s, not through the eyes of the help. But we all hang from knots that other people have tied. We all have mountains to summit. We are all surrounded by people we never notice. This book shows why unseen people matter. When you tell an incomplete story that omits them, what you fail to learn can have disastrous consequences. Worse yet, you might not even find out what these consequences are, and others may repeat your errors. The Sherpas of every story—the unseen people all around us—must be seen for who they are. Our lives depend on them.
