The Peak of Doom

“Bodies shut down,” Graham Bowley writes in No Way Down: Life & Death on K2. “You could no longer trust your own mind.”

Bowley’s book is an account of the first weekend of August 2008 on K2, the infamous peak on the border of Pakistan and China, during which the ‘Savage Mountain’ claimed 11 lives. One of those killed was Irish climber Gerard McDonnell, among those stranded after an unstable glacier gave way, cutting off fixed ropes and leaving several climbers in the Death Zone. What followed was a story of heroism and foolishness, but most of all, an abject lesson in nature’s cold-heartedness.