No Way Down

No Way Down is the New York Times bestselling book about the 2008 climbing tragedy on K2, the second tallest mountain on earth.

One of the Financial Times’ most notable books of 2010 and called “this year’s best adventure book” by the Times of London, No Way Down recounts one of the most dramatic tales of death and survival in mountaineering history.

New York Times reporter Graham Bowley traveled to seven countries, conducting hundreds of interviews with the survivors of the tragedy and the families of the 11 climbers who died, to write what the Associated Press called a “fascinating tour de force of a book.”

Here, Bowley explains how No Way Down grew out of his original story for The New York Times:

I first wrote about the tragedy on K2 for the front page of the New York Times in August 2008 (article here).

Initially, I was skeptical of the value of writing about people who had put themselves and others at risk by apparently indulging a private passion for their expensive sport.

But I took a trip abroad from New York to the memorial service of one of the climbers, interviewed survivors from the accident, and began to be inspired by the charisma of the adventurers who had stepped into a faraway world I could not understand and had faced down death.

Why had they done it? What exactly had gone wrong?

K2 is the world’s second tallest mountain, after Everest. Located in remote northern Pakistan, on the border with China, it is far more dangerous than Everest. Among the climbing community, it is considered
a much greater challenge – if not the great challenge in world mountaineering.

I set about interviewing as many climbers as I could from the 2008 tragedy, their families, and other experts who had spent time on K2.

I traveled to Italy, Colorado, the Basque country in northern Spain, France, the Netherlands, Norway. By telephone, I spoke to survivors in Nepal and Serbia, and had researchers talk to climbers in South Korea.

As I spoke to them, I found the stories often disturbing, painful, and occasionally incomprehensible. By then, however, I was hooked. In my imagination, I had stepped with these men and women into a foreign world somewhere deep within the Karakoram mountain range and I could not turn back.

One day in June 2009, I flew to Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, and followed the trail of the climbers hundreds of miles north to K2.

I stood for a few hours in the cold sunshine on the Godwin-Austen glacier. Seeing up close the peak, I started to understand why those brave men and women would risk their lives to climb it. I am grateful
to them for helping me see the way.

Graham Bowley