Gerard had tears in his eyes, recalls climber who survived K2 ice fall
But despite the huge loss of life, van Rooijen, who began climbing in the Alps at 16, intends to go back climbing 8,000 metre mountains if and when his feet, which are badly frostbitten, recover.
“People do think we [mountain climbers] are crazy, but we also think a lot of people around us are spoiling their lives by doing nothing,” he said in an interview with the Guardian newspaper.
Husband to Halaan and father of a 10-month-old boy van Rooijen’s team reached the summit of K2, known as the Savage Mountain, on August 2.
“It was the most beautiful thing. At the top you’re looking over maybe 100 mountains. The earth is not horizontal anymore. It makes a curve. You see this beautiful round planet. Gerard had tears in his eyes,” says van Rooijen.
“You see Gerard standing there, this huge man with a big smile on his face. There was not a moment when we were thinking of this tragedy. Everything was according to plan,” he says.
Two of van Rooijen’s four-member team (a fifth turned back earlier in the expedition) descended to lower altitude at camp 4. However by the time van Rooijen was ready to go, the avalanche had cut the ropes, leaving him, McDonnell and three other climbers stranded.
The next day van Rooijen managed to descend the “bottleneck” where so many of the others died when hit by ice and two days later he managed to escape through a gully to base camp.
He witnessed his first death on the way up to the summit when a Serb climber detached himself from the rope to pass to another climber and fell. “First he slips, then he tumbles over, then he’s gone. It’s some kind of slow motion. You think, just give me your hands, then he’s gone.”
He says the enormity of the catastrophe will never hit him because, as a mountain climber, “you know these things can happen”.
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