K2: The Savage Mountain | Fredrik Sträng, Pt. 2: On Surviving K2 | 5
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From Wondery, I'm Mike Corey, and this is Against the Odds.

On the evening of August 1st, 2008, Frederik Strang was on K2, the second highest mountain on Earth. He'd reached Camp 4 at 26,000 feet, just below the Death Zone. Earlier that day, he and the other members of his team decided to call off their summit bid when they saw climbers backed up on the rope line. It wasn't an easy decision, but it was one that may have saved their lives. When night fell, most of the climbers who pushed onto the summit still hadn't returned.

In part two of our interview with mountaineer Frederick Strang, Frederick shares his memories of climbing K2 in 2008 and those harrowing days when disaster struck in the death zone. Let's go to July of 2008. So you've trained for a while, like a year, right? You've prepared and you arrive at K2 for the first time.

And what goes on in your head when you see the mountain? You're there. It was, wow, gosh. I get the goosebumps when I think about it. It was almost a religious experience. I remember it so starkly. It was so clear to me. First time ever I see K2. I think I'd said to the camera, my friend Chris Klinke was recording K2.

I say, wow and shit. We have to go to the top of that or try. It's this joyous, childish pull, gravitation towards this immense, humongous piece of rock and ice and snow that is towering above everything else. And at the same time, there is this appall, this repulsive impulse

feeling of fear, real fear in the air and respect like, holy moly, are we going up that thing? But I think what overweight was this neutral

part in me that okay let's take it for what it is one step at a time don't get too overexcited don't get too troubled i mean it's it's a long journey it's a marathon it's not a sprint so i think that it eventually won and you spend some time at base camp and that's to get acclimatized to the altitude right so doing some quick math it's like 16 000 feet what's base camp like

It's like a roller coaster. You go up and down, up and down, up and down all the time, you know, carry stuff, you sleep over, you're acclimatized, and you do that a couple of rounds. Eventually, you get higher and higher up. And hopefully, by the time it's a good weather window, you have acclimatized enough to make it to the final bed up the summit and way back again. What was that like when you were there all waiting for this weather window? Yeah.

During 2008, we had this two-week period where we were waiting. And the weather slowly deteriorated more and more and more. And it was frustrating.

to not know when to have a chance to go up. And then we got a promising weather forecast. And I think that everyone was quite stoked to get the ball rolling. And that's when we sat down all the expeditions because we had a very short weather window. And since we were so many different international teams, we decided that...

the most, I think, equitable thing to do would be doing this together as a team. Everyone was buying into the concept of helping out and giving their best for the success and for the safety of everyone else. So we had this big, huge team meetings and there was this language barrier because

The English wasn't very good at many of the expeditions. So I think that language barrier eventually led to what was coming, and that was miscommunication. Just so I can picture and we can picture together, how many people were there on the mountain with you? I guess that in total, we were probably something around 100 people, a little bit more than 100 people on the mountain. Wow.

So we were an international team and we were eight. And there was a South Korean team. There was a Norwegian team. There was a Dutch team and a couple of other different teams. And there were some individuals and individual teams as well. With that many people and that many languages, there's a saying, too many cooks in the kitchen. I just think it's hard to manage everybody's thoughts and opinions on something so serious.

Yeah, it was because also you have to remember that we come from different cultures and different cultures have different approaches to climb mountains. The different cultures have different risk tolerance. By definition, what happens is that if you have different risk tolerances on the mountain, you naturally...

have different foundation for decision-making. So if you decide, for instance, turnaround time, that necessarily doesn't have to be something that another team favors.

And there was a lot of things that we did not agree upon and that we did not discuss. But perhaps we should have done it, I think. But then again, no one knows even if we had discussed it. I'm not sure if that would have made so much difference anyway. Because once we were on the mountain, everyone came so far and everyone wanted to top out the most prestigious 8,000 meter peak in the world, KTM.

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Of course, there's a few camps between Base Camp and the summit. So what's it like between Base Camp and Camp 4? It's very, I'd say it's quite stimulus climbing. First, you have this ramp of snow and ice that leads up to Camp 1. Then you get into cross sections, which goes over rocks and ridges and some quite steep rock faces.

and you get to camp two. Once you cross that outcropping and go over that crest, you enter something called the Black Pyramid. The Black Pyramid is a combination of different rocks and gullies. You have a long tedious snow plowing glacier until you reach camp three.

and above that it's just snow to a ridge and a saddle, that is camp 4. You are at probably 7-850 meters altitude and to get to the summit itself you get into a very narrow bottleneck that steepens quite a bit and gets very steep and it's mostly ice and then you have this overhanging 80 meter tall serac

And I think that's perhaps the most scariest part of the entire climb. I have never been there because I turned around earlier, but I've seen it up close. And if you haven't been scared in life, that's not a good place to be scared. But I think it's a good place to be very quick and effective because being there too long time increases your chance of being hit by ice.

And then it goes around and last but not least, more of a ridge tends to get to the summit itself. And the summit's quite wide. From the top, if you top out in the afternoon, you can see the shadow of K2 like a perfect triangle back shining over the jagged peaks in the Karakorum. And it is quite jaw-dropping.

Well, I mean, a lot of tall mountains have that iconic Egyptian pyramid style shadow when you're on them and you see this. It doesn't even look real when you're there. You look back at the sun's behind the mountain and you're climbing the opposite face and you see this giant pyramid shadow and it gives me goosebumps too. Yeah, it feels like you're in an out-of-body experience. When I think about it, I get sucked into this

divine state where everything is so beautiful. I long for those moments. And it's also so intoxicating because if you do not get your senses, you are being sucked down into this abyss where you feel, "It's fine. I can stay longer. It's okay. It's fine up here. I can stay probably a couple of days." And that's dangerous.

That's where you have to smack your face and get up and start going down because it's downward spiral from there. That's like the mountain spell or something, right? I can't even imagine. 28,000 feet is as high as airplanes fly. And especially after Camp 4, that's just right on the edge of the death zone, right? So from there...

things get even more complicated. So tell us about what the death zone is like. Well, first of all, we have to understand what the death zone is. And basically, it's the place about 8,000 meters when something physiological happens to the body. And that is basically the cells start to break down. You don't reproduce any cells. You don't actually...

recover and you're basically being broken down and deteriorate for every single minute. So you can't sustain life about 8,000 meter per hour. You can only stay there for a certain amount of time. So it's important, I would say paramount that you stay as little time as possible at those altitudes and just go out, do your business and go down. And being up there, you know, putting on

a shoe putting on your big boots, it feels like it's a mission.

And going to the toilet, we shouldn't even talk about that. Everything takes so much time. Everything takes so much effort. Thinking is not effortless. And being decisive is very difficult. I mean, just should I sit up now and take a sip from my thermos or my platypus?

And you have to think about it to gather strength and establish enough courage and momentum to raise yourself up, take the freaking platypus, open up and drinking it, and then lay down. So I think that 8,000 meter peak is trying to reduce you to your most primitive state. It's all about survival. It's all about living or dying, basically.

You're up that high and every decision you make feels hard, everything to move, to react, the mountains trying to entrance you to do all these silly things. How do you plan for that? How do you prepare for that element?

You can only read so much. You can only listen to so much of the recommendations and the insights that climbers have had from pre-climbs in the past. You cannot read in a book about it. You actually have to feel it. But I think that

Just being very open-minded, not exaggerating your sentiments or your feelings or jumping to any conclusions or having wish thinking or worst scenario case is thinking. If you just relax, like meditation, you just observe what's happening.

you say hello and then defaults pass hopefully if you approach it with that kind of an oven tactics i think that you can be quite successful but of course when you

race yourself too fast or you do something in a rush your heart will start pounding you're going to feel as if you're suffocating and you have to grasp for air so you have to just be relaxed and observe and take it easy it's um it's quite fascinating being up there yeah i imagine and take us back to the the morning of august 1st 2008 you have

People from all over the world. And they've had this giant meeting and everyone speaks different languages, has different risk tolerances, all these different things. What was the plan? The plan was solid. It was a first party and a second party. I was part of the second party and my task was to carry 800 meters of fishing line that I was supposed to fix in between the highest camp

and the base of the bottleneck. And I was supposed to fix it around bamboo sticks that was supposed to be pre-placed by some other people. And the reason why we have fishing line is if we get down from the summit in blackness, how do we find our way back to our camp? That could be the difference between life and death.

So by adding fishing line, we can always find our way and retrace back to the camp. The first party was supposed to climb and set up the fixed ropes. And when we wake up prior midnight, there's very little activity and we are getting a little bit worried and anxious. So we step out and there are hardly any people out.

the people who are out there are desperately trying to relocate where the ropes are and where the anchors are. They are magically disappeared. And without the ropes, we reduce our safety nets significantly. And I think I was very dismayed and I was very anxious and worried

And I was surprised to find that there was very little communication. But what we found out later was that several climbers, supposedly people who had the task to bring up the extra ropes, etc., they had dropped out the day before without telling anyone else.

And now we were facing a dilemma where we had less ropes, less anchors, and we lost two hours, two precious hours in our highest camp. And when you lose two hours, you cannot... Speed it up or something. No, you can't. You can't. There's no way you can... We don't have a time machine.

So we just have to face it. And somehow I think that everyone just, well, we are here. I mean, the weather is good, so we might as well go up and try. And collectively, we did that without even talking. So I was on my feet. I had a huge camera. I was supposed to film K2 in full HD. My friend, Dr. Eric Meyer, was coming along and

We got to a point slightly below 8,000 meters and it's a day in a million. There's not a cloud. The sunrise is just so magnificent, memorable. It was warm and we see this huge line of traffic up the mountain and I'm devastated because when I stop and I look up,

How on earth can they be so low on the mountain? At this point in time, they should have been much higher up. Secondly, there are no bamboo sticks, so I can't tie the fishing line around it. We're two hours late and then they start shouting, "No rope, no rope!"

It surprises me to find that they put up the few meters of rope that we have on complete unnecessary slopes. You know, slopes where we easily can walk by ourselves with an ice axe, it's completely safe. It's just a waste of that precious rope. Rope that we need for the bottleneck, which is very steep, golly. And they start going back down, cutting the rope and bringing it up higher.

And for me and Dr. Egmeyer, we sit down in the snow and all the bits and pieces fall together and we just look at each other and we don't speak. It's just this consensus. We understand, we look in our faces and we understand that hope is lost. You know, all these preparations for nothing. This beautiful day, one day in a million,

with all these human mistakes, human errors, makes it unwise and unsafe to continue. And we just decided to go down to the highest camp, camp four. We talked about being prepared. We talked about the perfect climbing window. Things go wrong, but some people continue, some people didn't continue.

This is all summit fever, right? This disregarding some of these omens or some of these events and still pushing, pushing, pushing no matter what. Can you talk about summit fever? You do things in haste and you do things that is not according to plan and you do rational things. It's so obvious and straight in front of your eyes that you

You know that you shouldn't continue, but still you do it. You have all the signs, but you just keep on going. Because it's so easy to think that the person in front of you know what he's doing. So you rely on the first and the second and the third person in front of you. And so everyone gets into this state where it's this perpetual cycle.

fight towards the top and no one start to question what if something goes wrong. And something I've learned is that if you program yourself that the summit is the goal, you've probably done your homework wrong. Instead, me, when I train and when I do my mountaineering trips, you know, summit is halfway. It's 50%.

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Head over to symbiotica.com and use code odds for 20% off and free shipping on your subscription order. When did you start to realize something had gone wrong on the mountain? Well, it all started out in the night when we were delayed by two hours. And all these things stacked on top of each other grew this feeling that something can go wrong. And I remember when we turned around, me and Dr. Aikmeyer, that in the camera,

I spoke about perhaps we have to go down and be prepared for the worst. And it was almost like a premonition of what is up next. And we sat in the tent, we had a breather, we drank some, we ate some.

And then suddenly we hear some screams and we hear some people outside their tent. And we started looking up the mountain, I'm looking through the lens on my camera and we spot that someone has probably fallen all the way down through the bottleneck and ended up at the base.

and we can see the figure is moving. We don't know who it is. We eventually get hold of our fellow comrade, Shirin Dorje Sherpa, who's in our team. And he tells about a Serbian person who was supposed to overtake a Norwegian climber, stepped out and clipped out from the rope and took one step wrong and fell backwards and started tumbling down their mountain slope. And

I decided that, okay, we have to do something. We have to run up there. So I took some oxygen with me and I took some first aid kit and started scooting up like wolves were chasing my back. It was like the race against the time. But when I came up, sadly enough, the serpent climber, Dren Mandryk, had died from his internal bleedings and injuries.

And his Serbian team was there as well, yeah? And there was a decision that had to be made what to do with his body, right? Yeah, it was very sad. I mean, I was so raged inside of me to come up there prepared to evacuate him and give him first aid and to learn that he's died.

And I can't describe it. It felt so pointless. And I felt so powerless. There I was. I was like prepared to move mountains to help him. And I could do nothing now. And the Serbians who had gone down and tried to help him, they were telling me that, please, if we could just bring him down.

And then, you know, carrying a body on 8000 meters, it's not doable. It's beyond what a person is capable of doing. So instead we decided, let's give him a burial at the highest camp instead of just leaving him on the slopes. We tied him in and into a survival bag made of aluminum. So there was four of us lowering him down.

But on the descent, there was a Pakistani climber behind me, Gihan Beg, and he started acting strange. I mean, when I met him, he was probably the most sharp guy of them all. So I did not think that he was in a bad state or anything.

But he started stepping on my shoes with crampons and he was too close to me. And then suddenly I feel this huge load

that bangs into my back and from my right shoulder and the periphery of my eyes I see Giambègue is tumbling down on my right side holding on to the rope the rope goes around my legs and is about to pull me down together with other people so it's me and a Serbian climber holding three bodies now and I'm desperately trying to tell Giambègue to

put down his ice axe and chuck it into the ice and try to stabilize with his crampons so he doesn't start falling down. And it is just this scene that rushes through my eyes in hyper speed. I see all these different possible endings and one of them is that if I do not get

of this rope that is twined around my legs soon, I'm gonna fall down and I'm gonna start rushing down the slope and I have to self-arrest with my ice axe and pray to God that it will hold. Suddenly, he loses the grip of the rope, but he doesn't put down his ice axe. Instead, he starts

sliding down the slope, gathering traction and speed, and nothing seems to stop him. And it goes like a parable, and he goes and he flies straight into the abyss, and he disappears. So after that, you return to Camp 4, and I'm sure there's a lot on your mind, and you can see people on the mountain and all this unfolding.

and then later Rolf was hit by the avalanche and a few others got to the summit and they came back down. When Cecilia and Lars came back to camp 4, what was that like? Cecilia Skog was the wife to Rolf Bae, a Norwegian climber who I got acquainted with on K2.

You know, we were always teasing with each other because I'm Swedish, he's Norwegian. I mean, we're neighbor countries. And I was always cracking Norwegian jokes to him and he was cracking Swedish jokes to me. So he was this genuine, friendly guy that you just love. He had this aura of kindness. There was no ego. And you also have to remember that

What Rolf did was he stopped just very, very close to the summit. He didn't go up the summit. Instead, he waited there until his wife and Lars got to the summit. And he waited to help them way back to the high camp. So he was a true gentleman. He was a true climber and a very inspirational one. When Lars and Resilia come back to the high camp,

I could just look at Lars face. I knew directly that something bad had happened. I mean, there was bad things happening all the time. Now people were reported being lost and people reported that they seen people falling to their deaths, et cetera. So we didn't have a complete list and complete understanding of the severity of what happened and through whom would it happen. But when I was looking at Lars face, I knew immediately something had happened to Rolf.

and Larf cracked up and he talked about how they descended along the traverse before the bottleneck and the ropes were missing. Rolf decided to go first and this was in the middle of the night so you can only see the headlamps. Cecilia and Lars waited and then suddenly Cecilia said that she saw Rolf's headlamp fall down the mountain slopes

That's a waste, she thought. But the headlamp was still sitting on Rold's head. How could anyone not emotionally crack up after something like that? I mean, these people had come down in the dark, across the bottleneck with broken ropes, and some even spent some terrible long cold nights up in the death zone. And fortunately, with some decision-making on your end, you were at camp four, but you

Can you try to explain to us what it would be like to spend a night up there, uncertain of what's happening next in the death zone? It must have been terrible. I mean, there's not much you can do because when it's dark, it's important that you stop wandering around because you can't see far. And perhaps you're walking over a cliff and you're a go-go, you're a bye-bye.

So the best way to do is just to wait and wait until the morning. But what comes with that is this hypothermia. It's hypoxia, problems, you know, moving, you're coordinating your limbs and your hands. And so it makes it even more arduous and more delicate trying to traverse on the few ropes that still existed.

And it's so cold and it's so hard without oxygen up there that very few people ever have survived those circumstances. But when you survive that horrendous night, the sun comes out and you probably don't have any more water or if the water you have is probably frozen, then you're still trying to

move around your body again and trying to get circulation and trying to move. And that's hard because you're frigid. You're like, you're frozen like a rock. And then you have to start trying to get down.

And every single step down is actually then harder than going upwards the day before, because now you're so cold to the bone. You have lost so much energy trying to stay warm during the night. And the thin air has just sucked out the vitality from your body. It's like the battery. It's like a drainage battery. And, um,

The body's shutting down slowly and you're conscious about what's going on, but you can't move your limbs. - Hypoxia is when you don't have enough oxygen. - Exactly. It's just a terrible state to be in.

And also your cognitive ability is starting to shut down. All these weird things are starting to happen. You hallucinate and you start to doubt. You start to doubt if this is the right way down. And even if you have a compass and the compass needle points at north and it's straight ahead of you, you start to doubt if that's really true. All these crazy things start to happen.

And you can't do anything about it instead just trying to do one thing, get down, get down and get the hell down. And on that summit day, how many set off in the morning and how many did make it down? Well, depends on how you count, but there was 27 people going up and 11 people lost their lives.

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Wilco survived for two nights in the death zone. So you were there with Chris Klinke, and I think he spotted Wilco first and then helped guide Pemba and Cass to him with a radio, right? What was that like when you saw a man who had survived against these odds, these crazy odds?

all of the odds against him on this mountain in the death zone for so long. Well, some, I mean, we never gave up hope. I mean, we knew there was a chance to actually find him, but the chance of success was growing thinner and thinner for every hour. And we knew that he had been out for two nights already, but eventually Pemba was up on the mountain and helped Vilko back to the tent. And I remember clearly that,

that night when we were treating him for the frostbites in the tent, in the very almost war zone mess tent that we built up this clinic. And he started asking questions about where are the others. We had to tell him that we know how many now was most likely unaccounted for. We said 11.

And he said like 11 missing or no dead. And that is so difficult for him to sink in. He had been climbing with Jared McDonald and he was this Irish, you know. He seemed like a beautiful human actually. Yeah, yeah. He really did. He was a very happy chap and always happy.

wanted to entertain and what came afterwards was probably the most devastating shock for everyone of us when we learned that most likely Jer was up there on the mountain in the mist when we couldn't see anything trying to help South Koreans back to the Heise camp and most likely on the way down

they all fell together because later on they were found on the slopes of the shoulder all dead and he'd gone out of his way to help others yeah so what was it like going back home to Sweden after all this it was terrible I mean there's sometimes I

regret that I didn't stand up for myself and told the people go down and trying to encourage the people to come down because they were at the summit very late in the afternoon. But you can't put that poison on yourself. You can't say I should have done, I would have done. Well, there's all these thoughts that pops up. And I think that was the natural process of trying to become sane after this tragedy. And there's a lot of

things that happened afterwards, post-traumatic stress and those symptoms. I could wake up in the middle of the night sweating and crawling to the toilet puking. I was in Sweden, I was in safe custody, I mean in my home, and still I had these panic attacks where I was fearing for my own safety. It was very, you know, ironic. And at the same time,

When the most fearful events happened on K2, I felt not in control, but I felt that it didn't occur to me at the time that I should fear for my life. I knew that I was doing the right decisions and I was very focused on the job that were at hand. Were you scared to climb again?

No, well, I wasn't scared of climbing. I was more scared about what my parents and my family would think. And they had to go through this difficult time, not knowing whether or not I was alive and who was missing.

Well, looking at your Wikipedia page or your list of summits, you continued to climb and have done some very impressive stuff, including returning to K2. So when you did eventually return to K2, what was it like being back after being on your mind for so long? I think for me, when I returned in 2017, it was...

very happy occasion. I had a previous fantastic year with some great training and I was very self-confident and I did several summit attempts and everything felt fine. It was almost like meeting an old friend again. There was no

blame game, there was no baggage, there was no worst case scenario thinking or I wasn't occupied with any mental distress. I felt fine. I felt like I was coming back home and I loved it. It was like a holiday.

But unfortunately, I didn't get to the top. I was trying to climb without supplemental oxygen and it was really only a couple of days with promising weather. And I did two summit attempts. I came down and I felt I could do another third attempt. The weather was great.

but everyone was leaving the mountain despite that it was perfect conditions and that bothered me quite a bit because you don't get these chances so often on these majestical peaks especially K2

Well, the most important things, A, you're still here and B, I'm still there too. So I'm sure people who listen to this podcast, uh, are, could be, some of them definitely would be maybe aspiring mountaineers, maybe thinking about getting into climbing and, uh, maybe some of them even going on and doing some of these, these giant mountains later after all of this and not just the, the K2, uh,

event in 2008, but everything. What's some advice you would give to people listening now who are thinking about getting into the sport of high altitude mountaineering?

Well, first of all, let me draw you a story. I often get emails and I happily answer emails. I try to answer all of them. But people ask me, how do you train? How do you prepare? How do you finance expeditions to Everest? Can you help me, Frederick? Please help me out. And I always give the advice that, you know, start climbing. Take an indoor climbing course.

Go outdoor. Take a leading course. Traditional climbing. Learn rescue climbing. Learn ice climbing. Tent outside on the mountain when it's cold, wet, and dark.

If you still like it two years afterwards and you've climbed 4,000 meter peaks, you maybe been to the South Americas or the Alaskas, climbing Denali or whatever, me being to the Pamirs or something like that. Then, fine. Then perhaps you are ready to talk about the giant peaks. But don't be a gym rat and come to me and say, hey, I want to climb Everest. I want the plan now.

be prepared to do the work and enjoy your enjoy the progress because that is also part of it I remember when I started every time I climbed the peak

I got to the peak and I said, "I'm on the top of the world." And it didn't matter if it was a 6,000-meter peak in Peru, if it was a 7,000-meter peak in the Pamirs or wherever it was. I always said, "I'm on the top of the world." And I always said that if I can't enjoy the progress and the process, how can I possibly assume that anything's going to be different when I reach Mount Everest? And you have to enjoy the journey.

Well, Frederick Strang, you are a man of much wisdom and a man of incredible stories. And I want to say thank you for being here today. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

This was part two of our interview with high altitude mountaineer, Frederick Strang. If you'd like to learn more about this event, we highly recommend the book, The Summit, How Triumph Turned to Tragedy on K2's Deadliest Days by Pat Falvey and Pemba Giljay-Sherpa and No Way Down by Graham Bowley. We also recommend the documentary, The Summit, directed by Nick Ryan.

I'm your host, Mike Corey. Peter Arcuni produced this episode. Brian White is our associate producer. Our audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Our executive producers are Stephanie Jentz and Marshall Louis for Wondery.

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