I read an article yesterday about this year's climbing disaster on K-2, from Men's Journal magazine. One of the climbers who survived, Wilco Van Rooijen, a Dutch climber, walked away from his two partners after they had summited K-2 very late in the day and had been forced to bivouac at 27,000' overnight. In the morning, there was some confusion amongst the 3 climbers as to the way down and where the ropes were. Van Rooijen, who was badly dehydrated, said to his partners that he didn't want to discuss anything anymore and started down by himself. He got lost on the way down which, in a way, saved his life because it kept him out of the Bottleneck where people were getting killed by falling ice and being tangled up in shoddy ropes and left to dangle and die.
It disturbs me, though, that Van Rooijen abandoned his teammates. Just " See you later - I gotta go save my own butt!" One of his teammates, the first Irishman to summit K-2, Gerard McDonnell, was killed by ice fall on the way down. Since Van Rooijen had such an obviously well developed sense of self-survival, could he perhaps have somehow altered circumstances and prevented McDonnell's death if he had stuck with his teammates? The third teammate, Marco Confortola, an Italian, stuck with McDonnell on the way down.
It's true that I'm engaging in armchair mountain climbing and I don't know what I would have done in the same circumstances. The article has a photo of Van Rooijen, his frostbitten feet still healing from K-2, dandling his 9 month old son on his lap. He had a lot to live for but so did his teammate, McDonnell.