Before he could realize his dream and stand atop the world's second-highest mountain, Chris Warner watched a man fall to his death.
In a voice thick with exhaustion and broken by spells of coughing, Warner said yesterday that the physical and mental pounding it took to climb Pakistan's K2 "were definitely worth it."
But in the next breath, the Annapolis resident and Mount Everest veteran admitted it will take some time to process all that happened during the more than 15 hours it took to push the last 1,800 vertical feet to the top.
Just three hours into the summit bid on Friday, Nima Nurbu, a Sherpa working for the Korean team, slipped and tumbled thousands of feet in the darkness down K2, nicknamed the "Savage Mountain."
The accident happened at the Bottleneck, a notorious feature and the site of numerous mishaps. The narrow passageway slants at 80 degrees, making progress difficult.
"We all saw it," Warner said by satellite phone from Camp 3 at 24,114 feet. "He wasn't clipped into the rope. He was about 100 feet away from me. He went down a 35-degree slope and then a 15-degree slope and then off the south face. It looked like he could stop himself, but he didn't."
Stunned, the 10 international climbers leading the pack stopped and wondered whether they should press on.
"Listen," Warner said he told the group, "if you came here and didn't know this could happen, you're foolish."
Then, he gave his condolences to the Koreans and other Sherpas and went back to laying line again.
K2 has a reputation as a killer. Four Russians died last year, seven climbers died in 2004 and eight died in 1995. Warner watched a friend fall to his death on an earlier expedition.
AdventureStats, an online record of mountaineering feats, notes that there have now been 269 successful summit bids and 65 deaths.
Despite another tragedy, the climber's Web site, K2climb.net called Friday's event "a magic summit night," with 17 people reaching the 28,251-foot peak:
"CNN wasn't there. Discovery wasn't there. Instead, in secret almost - mails flew through the night between home teams, webmasters, and climbers. In perfect or broken English, and confusing Babblefish translations, people needing each other reached out - from America to Korea, over Iran and Russia, to France, Italy, Czech [Republic], Slovakia and Portugal."
Warner, 42, praised the cohesiveness of the patchwork expedition. Using bottled oxygen, the Russians and Koreans were strong and had reserve energy. They took on some of the most difficult tasks.
"If we didn't have 10 people pushing, we wouldn't have made it," he said. "We didn't need heroes; we needed a lot of people out front."
When he stepped up on the summit with teammate Bruce Normand, "it was gorgeous. It's virtually a knife edge. You could see forever."
They were joined by Don Bowie and spent 45 minutes soaking it all in and taking pictures. Retracing their steps to Camp 4 took all the mental control they could muster.
"It was dark and snow was falling, but we stuck together," he said.
Back at Camp 4, the three Americans and Czech climber Libor Uher shared three sleeping bags in a three-person tent. Word came later that an Italian climber had not returned from the summit and was presumed dead.
"It was a lot of giving," Warner said. "The mountain demanded a lot to get people to the top."
The owner of three Earth Treks Climbing Centers in the Baltimore-Washington area expects to be home in about 10 days.
Before hanging up, Warner laughed when asked what he craved the most.
"I'm dying for a cup of coffee and a shower," he replied. "All the things mortals take for granted."
candy.thomson@baltsun.com