T
he climber sits alone in his tent at night, a distracted man on a frozen mountainside, surrounded by death. He knows it’s out there, along the unbeaten path between the snow-covered cliffs hanging overhead, the ones bearing the names of men who’ve died here before. Men like him, driven by ambition and an urge to leave the safety of their homes and test their minds, punish their bodies and risk their souls on Nanga Parbat, the ninth-highest mountain in the world.
He turns on his headlamp and reviews a list of 17 things that might kill him in the morning. Will it be a misplaced step into a crevasse? A momentary loss of concentration followed by a 300-metre fall from the cliff wall he needs to scale to make it to Camp II? He knows what the statistics say. That for every five who reach the summit of this mountain, one won’t survive. He never likes to think of himself among the unfortunate, but right now, his mind is venturing into places he’d rather it didn’t go.

Sheets of lined paper, torn from a pink notebook, rest by the satellite phone at his side. Filled with words for his daughter should he not make it home, they tell the story of their lives spent together and apart. How much he loves her, and explanations for why he did what he did, went where he went and risked what he risked.

Outside, it is cold and quiet. A slow-moving breeze ruffles the black canvas of his tent, but it can’t lull him to sleep as it usually does. Even now, the climber knows he’s not really safe. At any moment, a slab of ice could crack, triggering an avalanche that would bury him alive. But it isn’t the inherent danger of sleeping on a snowy incline 750 metres above base camp that’s keeping him awake. No, his troubles are rooted in a vision that sets in whenever he closes his eyes. There’s a stranger in his head, handing a pink notebook to his daughter. It’s her inheritance, and though he can’t see her face, he suspects she’s crying.

He has seen death many times in the fallen bodies, frozen faces and broken corpses that have lined his many journeys. But he has never been haunted by anything so much as this vision, which seems to be telling him: It’s time to go home.
By 3 a.m., Gabriel Filippi, one of Canada’s foremost mountaineers, begins packing his bag in the dark, dreading the dawn and the moment he will unzip the canvas, look across the two feet of snow that separate his tent from that of his Lithuanian climbing partner—the man with whom he has made a pact to summit this mountain and then move on to K2—and say: “I’m going back down.”

The first sounds of morning come around 5 a.m. in the form of crunching snow as a group of Ukrainians ready their gear and prepare for a day’s push to Camp II. Neither they nor Filippi yet realize that at this particular moment, the surest way to stay alive on this mountain is to stay in their tents and take their chances camping out in an avalanche zone halfway between the meadow that serves as base camp and the cliff-top perch that is Camp II. None yet understands that the probability of death on this climb has increased significantly in the night. That down in the valley, there are men armed with AK-47s preparing to make their way up from the lone road that connects this mountain in northern Pakistan to the world outside. Or that in approximately 65 hours, 11 people will die.

T
hey say no climber returns from a summit the same person as when he began his ascent. Sometimes the alteration is physical, but more often it’s buried within: an injection of confidence; a newfound appreciation of one’s own self; or a satisfaction in having accomplished what humanity was never meant to accomplish. For many, it is as indescribable as the feeling that comes with standing closer to the sun than any other human on earth. For others, it’s spiritual. These are the ones who depart base camp believing in nothing but themselves, only to return feeling indebted to some higher power. To them, the mountains speak in the form of premonitions—brought on by fear, lack of oxygen or who knows what. These are the ones who understand better than most that life is fragile and have cause to ask: What keeps me safe where others die?
Filippi unzips his tent, fires up his camp stove and begins melting snow for his morning coffee. The sleepless night has come to an end, and he’s about to make the most crucial decision of his 52 years on this planet.

He can’t shake the feeling that something terrible will soon happen on this mountain. If only he knew where or when. He finishes his breakfast, grabs his pack and begins the long walk down to the meadow, where, in two days’ time, Taliban gunmen will arrive, pull climbers from their tents and force them to kneel in the grass by the glacier’s tail. There won’t be much chance to run once the shouting begins.

Lac-Mégantic, Que., is and always was Gabriel Filippi’s base camp. Though he moved away at the age of four, he returned before and after his major expeditions abroad. It is here that he prepared his body to tackle the highest peaks of all but one of earth’s continents. And it is here, inside a 101-year-old red-brick Catholic church, that Filippi’s 84-year-old mother, Claire, comes to light candles and pray for her son’s protection.

There was a time, years ago, when she had no reason to worry for him. He was a calm little boy who lived in fear of drowning in the family swimming pool. Then, one day, at the age of 34, he told her he’d become a mountaineer. It didn’t make sense to her. He seemed much too risk-averse for any of that, so she reminded him that he had a four-year-old daughter, Alexandra, and encouraged him to find something less dangerous to do in his spare time. But he told her not to worry. That though a great many things could go wrong on the mountain, he would always climb with caution.

The third of 10 children, Filippi wasn’t an adrenalin junkie or an egotist. He’d spent his 20s working in air-traffic control and learning to curl. He’d gotten married, had a daughter and moved to a small town in northern Quebec and then to Iqaluit, where he learned how to live with the cold, just as anyone would while wintering on the tundra. His marriage fell apart along the way. Though he wouldn’t have classified himself as “lost,” he may well have been searching for something when he trekked to the top of an active volcano while vacationing in Colombia. There, he discovered what he called “a passion I never knew I had.” Before long, he learned to use an ice axe and crampons, and to fix a line up the side of a cliff. Then he called his mother and told her he wouldn’t be coming home that Christmas. Instead, he would venture to Argentina to climb Aconcagua, the highest mountain outside of Asia.

Newly widowed, it wasn’t easy for Filippi’s mother to accept that her son was heading out on some adventure from which he might never return. She didn’t let on how worried she was. Knowing her fears would only trouble him, she shared them instead with a priest, who raised a chalice above a tabernacle and gave mass in Filippi’s name for the first of many times.

In the last days of 1995, Filippi and four other Canadians began their ascent of Aconcagua. His friend and fellow mountaineer Patrice Beaudet had taught Filippi how to climb. Beaudet remembers that as the most junior member on the expedition, Filippi was overly concerned about holding anyone back. Though he already possessed the fundamental skills required, Filippi lacked an understanding of how his body might react at high altitudes, where a lack of oxygen can lead to an increase of fluid in the brain and cause headaches that, if ignored, can leave a climber comatose or dead. Purple-faced from the altitude and cold, Filippi continued up the mountain even when Beaudet warned him to turn back. Not generally regarded as a treacherous climb, the slopes of Aconcagua had been battered by bad weather all season. Three people had died on the mountain in recent months, and another was about to fall. Filippi was trudging through snow on his way to the summit when he heard screaming from several metres upslope. “I looked toward the noise and saw a man bouncing down the mountain,” he recalled. “I don’t know if he was conscious when he passed me or not. He fell out of sight very fast. There was lots of screaming coming from people who were following his trail, trying to get down to him.”
Unattached to any ropes and with a photo of his daughter in his pocket, he questioned whether to carry on. Then he looked down toward the dead man and back up to the summit, and before the day was through he stood on the highest peak in the Americas. “I couldn’t believe what I had just done,” he said. “I never thought I could go that high.”
He wasn’t yet home when he started dreaming of scaling other mountains in far-off places. He’d never had a childhood hero, but as he began studying mountaineering, he grew to admire the legends of the past, especially Sir Edmund Hillary, whose words still resonated on summits around the world: “It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” Before long, Filippi was telling Beaudet he wanted to climb Everest. Beaudet, too, had once clung to that dream, but after becoming a father, he’d placed the mountain on his do-not-climb list. For Filippi, though, it had become one of the central goals of his life.

He began using any spare vacation he had climbing in the Rockies, Andes and Himalayas. Leaving his daughter wasn’t easy, but he always promised to return. By January 1998, he was in northern Pakistan standing at the base of Nanga Parbat. It was the highest mountain he’d ever seen. Known as “the Man-Eater” because it rarely gives up the bodies of the dead, Nanga Parbat dominates the western tip of the Himalayan ridge, an 8,126-metre-high mountain left undisturbed until 1895, when the first man set out for its summit. He’s still up there somewhere, along with others.

Filippi had no presumptions of summiting the Man-Eater that winter. Venturing no higher than Camp I, he looked on as a team of Polish climbers tried and failed to complete one of the last great unaccomplished feats in mountaineering: to be the first to scale Nanga Parbat in the winter. Looking up from the meadow, the mountain intimidated him. It would be 15 years before he considered climbing it himself.

W
ith his gear, some Bob Dylan CDs and an audio recorder to chronicle his adventure, Filippi arrived at Everest in April 2000. For nine days, he acclimatized under the guidance of Babu Chiri Sherpa, the Nepali who’d set the record for the fastest ascent of Everest (16 hours and 56 minutes) and the longest stay on the summit (21 hours without oxygen). Filippi had met Babu the previous year at a talk in Montreal. They’d exchanged email addresses, and Babu asked Filippi to join him for one of the first expeditions of the new century.

Filippi missed the puja, the Buddhist ritual in which climbers are blessed by a lama at the base of the mountain. To the Sherpas guiding him, he was tempting fate, though he thought nothing of it at the time. He’d been raised Catholic, but he was no longer practising any religion and didn’t yet fully appreciate the Buddhist connection with the mountain. In his tent at night, he’d call home to Alexandra, by then nine years old. She’d tell him about school. He’d tell her about the snow and the stars and the interesting people he’d met, never worrying her with the dangers of what he was doing.

After sunset one night at Camp II, Filippi’s first attempt to climb Everest came to an end when a faulty zipper on his sleeping bag caused him to go hypothermic. Those who saw him struggling to descend the mountain the next morning said he was so starved of strength and oxygen that he was walking like a drunk, stumbling between crevasses as pulmonary edema set in. His respiratory system failing, two Sherpas carried him the final stretch over the treacherous Khumbu Icefall and got him back to base camp.

Placed in an orange tent with an oxygen mask pressed to his face, Filippi passed in and out of consciousness for 14 hours. When at last he awoke, he crawled outside and lay in the sun. He knew he had no right to be alive, that the mountain owed him nothing. Later, when Babu came to inquire about his health, Filippi told the great Sherpa that he would some day try again for the summit. Babu smiled, pulled a small bag of rice from his jacket and passed it to him. Blessed by the Dalai Lama, the rice was sacred in the Sherpa’s eyes. He carried it everywhere and sprinkled it on the mountain whenever he felt in danger. Now Babu wanted to share it. Filippi placed the rice in his backpack next to the photo of his daughter, and told Babu he’d keep it with him always.

Over the next five years, Filippi climbed the highest mountains in Europe, North America and Africa. He moved back to Quebec and began a tradition of wintering at home with his daughter. But come spring, he would depart for the Himalayas, Caucasus or Alps. Sometimes, he’d make new friends on the mountainside. Other times, he’d lose them. In April 2001, he learned that Babu had stepped into a 60-metre crevasse while taking photos on Everest and fallen to his death. Days later, he gathered with fellow climbers in Montreal at a memorial in the Sherpa’s honour. There, he met a woman named Annie, a mother of three who asked him questions that made him contemplate the direction of his life. For one: “Why do you insist on climbing a rock, putting yourself in danger and risking not seeing your daughter again?”

He couldn’t provide a satisfactory answer in words, so instead he took her to Kilimanjaro, and together they climbed to its peak and looked down on the African countryside. It was a highlight of both their lives, and though she still didn’t quite understand his obsession, it didn’t keep her from falling in love.

Soon, he and his daughter were living with Annie and her three daughters in Montreal. For the moment, he put Everest out of his mind and concentrated instead on leading expeditions to smaller peaks, like Mont Blanc in France and Mt. McKinley in Alaska. Then, one day in 2004, he got a call from Sean Egan, a professor from the University of Ottawa he’d met on Everest four years earlier. Egan had been studying the effects of thin air on the minds of mountaineers, and the two had spent whole days at base camp discussing the philosophy of climbing. Now, Egan was going back. He wanted to become the oldest Canadian to stand atop the highest mountain in the world. Filippi soon opted to join him.

Filippi returned to Everest a superstitious man and made sure not to miss the puja. He was in better condition than ever for the climb. Egan, on the other hand, developed a bad cough at base camp and began suffering from altitude sickness. Filippi encouraged him to descend to the valley and recover. Egan complied, and Filippi pushed on up the mountain, through the Khumbu Icefall, past Camp I, and was nearing the 6,500-metre mark when his radio crackled to life. Egan was dead. Distraught, Filippi went back to base camp.

Egan had suffered a heart attack on his descent into the valley, becoming the third Canadian ever to die on Everest. After he was cremated in Kathmandu, his children placed a portion of his ashes in a white envelope and had them delivered to Filippi along with a request: Should he reach the top of Everest, would he please leave the ashes there to fulfill Egan’s dream?

Days passed before Filippi worked up the physical and emotional strength to climb. He placed Egan’s ashes on one end of a silk scarf and knotted it so they wouldn’t fall out. On the other end he did the same with some of the rice he’d been given by Babu. Then, he wrapped the scarf around his neck and made his way up the mountain. For four days he climbed, and when finally he reached the top, he paused in awe. Taking off his scarf, he placed it on the summit and picked up a small rock. “I have given you my friend,” he said. “And I would like this rock.” Then he sat down in the snow, took out a photo of his and Annie’s family, and wept.

A week later, he returned home to Alexandra, then 14. He was ecstatic to see her again and tried to tell her what it had felt like to stand atop the world. She hugged him, and told him she was happy for all that he’d done. But most of all she was just happy he’d come back alive.

H
e had accomplished his dream, but he wanted to do more. Climbing was no longer just Filippi’s passion; it had become his career. By the end of 2006, he’d reached the highest point on every major land mass except Antarctica, shared a drink with Sir Edmund Hillary and was confident in his ability to pull his body up by his fingertips, dangle one-armed from an overhanging cliff and scale a 100-metre wall with 20 kilograms on his back. People started hiring him to talk about the things he’d seen and done, but they’d inevitably want to know why he did what he did. It was never easy for him to explain. He felt an emptiness inside that could only be filled through perseverance and self-discovery on the mountain. There were others who felt the same, many of them eager for him to safely show them to the top of the mountain so they too might find whatever it was they needed to find.

Filippi became an expedition leader on Everest, drawing on his experience and guiding millionaires up the mountain. In 2007, with eight men’s lives in his hands, he found himself turning back just 100 metres from the top. “It was a very difficult decision to make,” he said. “The people in my group had paid a lot of money for me to lead them. We were about an hour from the summit, and I just felt that if we kept going, someone could die. I didn’t want to break their dreams, but it was the right thing to do.”

He was on Everest again in 2009, helping to guide people from base camp. There, he said goodbye to another friend, Frank Ziebarth, a Calgary-based mountaineer who wanted to reach the summit without help from a guide or oxygen. Ziebarth accomplished that goal, but didn’t have the energy to make it back. Fifty metres below the summit, at the base of the Third Step, Ziebarth sat down to catch his breath and never got up. His body became one of the many forever left on the mountain.

Filippi had spent the past decade trekking in and out of the Death Zone, but was still searching for new ways to challenge himself. He would attempt to be one of the few humans to have scaled Everest from both the north and south sides. When Ziebarth’s fiancée learned of his plans, she asked him a favour: Would he mind moving Frank’s body away from the well-worn path to the summit? She didn’t like that people stopped to look at him on their way up the mountain.

On May 24, 2010, Filippi reached Everest’s summit for the second time. He removed his oxygen mask, snapped a picture of himself holding a photo of his family and spent a total of two hours at earth’s highest point. On his way down, he stopped at the base of the Third Step. Exhausted and with limited time and oxygen, he put his arms around Ziebarth and tried to move him, but he couldn’t. Digging out the snow from around the body, Filippi suddenly found himself face to face with the man he knew. He stepped back, left his friend in peace and descended the mountain as quickly as possible. It would be several weeks before he could get the image of Ziebarth’s face out of his head.

In the spring of 2012, he told friends he wouldn’t return to Everest the next season. Instead, he’d decided to climb K2, the second-highest and most dangerous mountain in the world. It was a goal he’d been pondering for years, one he’d discussed with Garry Hartlin, a communications specialist based in Pembroke, Ont., who worked with Filippi on Everest in 2007. Hartlin was always concerned by the plan. “K2 is a young man’s mountain,” Hartlin had told him. “When you’re 25 years old, that’s one thing. You’re getting too old for that.”

Filippi knew people said all climbers eventually look the same. Their eyes deepen with the inherent sadness that permeates their sport, while their skin weathers and betrays the effects of frostbite and numerous sunburns. Hartlin thought Filippi was beginning to look the part and told him, “You should think this one through. That mountain kills a lot of people.”

Filippi nodded in silence, but didn’t change his mind. Together with Martin and Denali Schmidt, a father-and-son duo from New Zealand, he made plans to travel to northern Pakistan in July 2013 to take on K2. Theirs would be an alpine-style push, a quick drive for the summit. None of them wanted to spend more time than necessary on K2’s slopes. Everest was dangerous, but at least it was relatively solid. K2 was covered in loose shale and had a reputation for dropping chunks of rock and ice from its sides. Soon, Filippi began thinking of ways to acclimatize somewhere other than K2. He needed a mountain almost as high, but with a lower death rate. He decided on Nanga Parbat. It didn’t matter that its two nicknames were the Man-Eater and “Killer Mountain.” Likewise, it didn’t concern him that Nanga Parbat was situated in a part of the world the Canadian government advised its citizens to avoid due to “the unpredictable security situation and the threat of terrorist attacks.”

T
he meadow was lush and green and beautiful, the perfect place to pitch a tent and catch one’s breath. Filippi was tired but exhilarated, dropping his bag in the grass after a two-day trek from the gravel highway that snaked deep through the valley below. It was June 9, 2013. He’d spent the previous three months communicating by email with a 44-year-old Lithuanian climber named Ernestas Marksaitis. The two hadn’t met, but they shared friends and a common goal. Marksaitis had completed a solo climb of Broad Peak, the world’s 12th-highest mountain, the previous summer, and then moved eight kilometres down the Pakistani-Chinese border for an attempt at K2. But he’d given up after his tent went missing some 7,000 metres above sea level. Now, along with Filippi, he planned to stand atop Nanga Parbat and then move on to K2. They rationed 30 days of food for the first climb and 10 for the second.

Filippi’s journey to the meadow had officially begun a week earlier, when he said goodbye to Alexandra at her new home in Montreal. It had been harder to leave her than ever before because now she was a 22-year-old mother of one and he a 52-year-old grandfather. He’d updated his will before he left, just as he always did. But this time, when he handed it to the notary, she advised that he think of something other than money and property to leave for his daughter in the event of his death. He took the advice, bought a pink notebook and in it started writing to his daughter. If he were to die on this journey, he hoped the book would find its way back to her. He put it in the top of his knapsack, next to the sacred rice and dog-eared family portraits he’d carried with him for years. Th en he headed for the airport. There, he kissed Annie and took off for Islamabad, where he and Marksaitis met and struck up an instant friendship.

The two men arrived at base camp not long after a drone attack killed the Pakistani Taliban’s second-in-command a few hundred kilometres away in Miranshah. Down in the valley, angry men had begun concocting ways to extract revenge for the killing. But Filippi and Marksaitis didn’t know any of that. All they knew was that the climb ahead would be rife with danger.

They had chosen to ascend Nanga Parbat from its western side, known to the locals as the Diamir face. Getting to the peak would require weeks of acclimatization and see them follow in the footsteps of Toni Kinshofer, a German mountaineer who lost all his toes and one of his climbing partners on his way to the top in 1962.

They would have to scale a glacier to reach Camp I, watching their every step in order to avoid hidden crevasses, before entering a corridor prone to avalanches. There they would pitch their tents next to an overhanging cliff and hope it would protect them should snow begin to slide down the corridor. Then they would climb until they reached a 300-metre, vertical wall, atop which they would find Camp II. They would likely begin to suffer from altitude sickness and be forced to return to base camp to acclimatize before climbing back up and moving on for Camp III, which was a further 1,100 metres up the mountain at a 40-degree incline. From there, they would look forward to a scenic yet treacherous trek through another avalanche zone to Camp IV. With their brains and bodies starving for oxygen, their digestive systems shutting down and their heart rates speeding up, they would strike out for the top. On the summit, with temperatures dipping to -20 C, they would be able to look to the north and see K2 waiting for them in the distance. Then they would have to turn around and get back down via the same route before they ran out of oxygen.

For the next 10 days, Filippi and Marksaitis made their way up and down between base camp and the Kinshofer Wall, breaking the trail to Camp I and working their way toward Camp II, turning back numerous times due to bad weather, illness and avalanches. By Monday, June 17, they could sense a midsummer snowstorm moving in. That night, they were back in the meadow, accompanied by more than 40 other climbers seeking refuge from the storm. All through the night, the mountain roared with avalanches burying their lines, demolishing Camp I and negating their every effort to secure the route to Camp II. Alone in his tent, Filippi wrote feverishly to Alexandra. He told her how much she meant to him and tried to address any lingering questions that might cause her pain if he were gone. He also began preparing a list of “red flags” that might kill him on this mountain. He stopped when he reached 17.

The next morning, he trudged through the freshly fallen snow on the meadow, sipping tea and making friends with the other climbers. Among them was Peter Sperka, a 57-year-old Slovakian who’d recently arrived with three Ukrainians and another Slovakian. A group of four from China were also present that day, as were several Nepalese Sherpas and a handful of local cooks, guides and base-camp managers.

Wednesday came, and Filippi and Marksaitis pushed up for Camp I. It was warm as they climbed, the sun melting the previous day’s snow. Marksaitis was in good form, tricking Filippi into downing a mouthful of vodka instead of water during a mid-morning break. They reached Camp I well before lunch, but found it destroyed by yet another avalanche. For eight hours, they dug out the camp. By suppertime, Filippi was exhausted and dehydrated. Sitting in his tent, he began heating up a package of vegetable soup. Then, Marksaitis shouted from outside. “Avalanche!”

Filippi leapt from his tent, pressed his back against the nearby cliff wall and watched as snow wiped out every tent but his.

That evening, after helping to dig out the other tents yet again, he crawled into his sleeping bag, turned on his headlamp and again wrote to his daughter. Five hours later, he put down his pen, closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep. That’s when the vision set in. Over and over he watched in his head as a stranger handed his daughter the pink notebook he’d been writing in. He turned his headlamp back on, grabbed his satellite phone and dialed Annie in Montreal. “I think I need to get off this mountain,” he said. Minutes later, he began packing his bag.

Over coffee at dawn, he told Marksaitis he was going home and apologized that he wouldn’t be able to accompany him to K2 after all. Marksaitis had fallen ill in the night, reeling from a stomach ache. He asked Filippi if he might reconsider after a few days at base camp, but Filippi said no. Together they headed back to the meadow. Marksaitis opted to help Filippi carry his belongings, a fateful gesture ensuring the Canadian wouldn’t have to spend another two days transporting his gear down from Camp I.

At base camp, Filippi told the local staff he needed to get back to Islamabad. They said it would take until the next morning to get him out. That afternoon, he noticed four men in traditional Pakistani clothing wandering around the meadow. One of them said he was a teacher from a distant town and asked Filippi about his nationality, faith and views on Islam. He told them he was Canadian. He didn’t tell them he was raised Catholic by his mother, that there was probably a candle burning halfway around the world to protect him, or that there was rice in the bag by his feet that he might be reaching for right now if he knew how dangerous these men might be. No, he shared none of this. And yet he was suspicious of them all the same. It didn’t make sense for anyone to trek two days to this place just to ask a group of foreigners for their views on faith. He watched them from a distance. He took note that they approached the other climbers and that at sunset they kneeled toward Mecca to pray.

That night, after supper, Filippi and Marksaitis sipped vodka, gave a toast to the future and vowed to climb together again someday. Then they hugged and said goodbye.

F
ilippi was gone before breakfast the next morning. Opting for the earliest possible start on the eight-hour trek down the only path to the road below, he moved as fast as he could, stopping only to catch his breath and drink water. It was 40 C in the valley. He had no idea that he might be passing a Taliban camp—or that, up in the meadow, those strangers from the day before had woken up, noticed he was missing and begun asking the other climbers, “What happened to the Canadian?” They disappeared from camp with no explanation after they learned where he’d gone.

Filippi moved down the mountain as if something inside was pushing him forward. When he realized he was about to arrive at the road two and a half hours ahead of schedule, he began to worry that he’d soon be stuck standing there in the valley. When he got there, he was surprised to find that his ride, a topless, battered old jeep, was already waiting for him. Wasting no time, he got in and got out of there.

He didn’t realize how close he’d come to death until 61 hours later, when his plane touched down in Montreal. He was still inside the cabin, standing in the aisle when he checked his email on his phone. The last message was an urgent inquiry from a friend: “Are you all right?” Attached was an article published just hours earlier by the Washington Post. He opened the link and began shaking as he read how members of the Pakistani Taliban had stormed the meadow he’d so recently left.

Investigators shortly began piecing together what had happened, and yet many of the details remain unclear. At 10:30 p.m. on June 22, around the same time Filippi was in an Islamabad taxi making his way to the airport, 15 gunmen, some of them teenagers, arrived in the meadow. Marksaitis and 10 other foreign climbers were nestled in their tents. Sperka and his fellow Slovakian had arrived just a few hours earlier, seeking refuge in the grass because one of them was ill from the altitude at Camp II. Three Ukrainians, four Chinese, one Sherpa and a Pakistani cook who was about to die because of his Shia faith were all asleep when the gun barrels started poking through the doors of their tents. That’s when the shouting began.

“Taliban! Al Qaeda! Surrender!”

Pulled out onto the frost-covered grass, the climbers were poorly dressed for the cold. One of the Chinese gripped a coat in front of his bare waist. They were beaten and robbed, their satellite phones smashed or shot to pieces. Marksaitis was still reeling from his stomach ache, but it’s believed he tried to reason with the gunmen because he spoke Urdu and somehow became separated from the other captives, who were all ordered to stay on the grass. The rest of the local Pakistani hires were told to stay in a tent.

Among the last words anyone heard Marksaitis say was: “I’m not American.” They broke his nose and shot him twice in the chest in front of the others. Frightened and cold, they were told to kneel and turn their heads away from the guns. Then they were shot, their bodies dropping one by one in the grass.

“Today, these people are revenge for Osama bin Laden,” said a gunman.

Only one of the foreigners managed to survive. Dragged out of his tent in his underwear, Zhang Jingchuan did exactly as he was told and knelt in the grass like the others. But when the first bullet meant for his head missed its mark, he started to run, zigzagging across the meadow until he reached a nearby trench and dived out of sight. Concealed by the dark, he waited as the Taliban ransacked the camp. Freezing, he eventually snuck back to his tent to grab clothes, crampons and an ice axe. Then he took off onto the mountain and hid until morning. It was after midnight before the gunmen turned off their headlamps and disappeared into the night.

By dawn, those climbers fortunate enough to have slept higher up on the mountain awoke and looked down into the meadow. They could see their friends lying in the grass. It would be hours until a helicopter arrived. Before long, 11 bodies would be placed in pine coffins and returned to their homelands.

Back in Montreal, survivor’s guilt was setting in. When he closed his eyes, Marksaitis and the others appeared in his head. They were lying in the grass, shadows hovering over them.

Soon, Annie was recommending that they take a vacation. Go somewhere to clear his mind. That week, they jumped in their car and drove to Lac-Mégantic, where Filippi visited his mother, who’d been praying for him all along. She told him she’d been praying for him. He was grateful. Then he returned to Montreal. Days later, his hometown exploded in the night.

Forty-seven people were missing. He struggled to reach his mother, but eventually found she was OK. Three weeks later, he opened up Facebook and learned that Martin and Denali Schmidt, the father and son he and Marksaitis were meant to join on K2, had died in an avalanche during the night.

It was becoming difficult to sleep. Sometimes it still is.

T
he climber sits alone at his dining-room table, a disquieted man struggling to make sense of all that’s happened, unsure whether it’s truly behind him. There’s a fear now that wasn’t there before. That maybe he has escaped death one too many times. But it’s a fear he keeps checked in a corner of his mind because if he lets it out it will consume him.

He has heard about other men and women, adventurers like him, who have been guided away from danger by some inexplicable phenomenon. He knows that Ernest Shackleton, Charles Lindbergh and even Sir Edmund Hillary’s son, an explorer in his own right, all felt they were pulled at one point or another by some unseen presence that helped them survive.

He doesn’t know what to make of his own story. Whether it’s the rice, his mother’s prayers, his own subconscious or just luck that keeps bringing him home safely. But he suspects, now more than ever, that there is a place on this earth where he is someday destined to die, and there’s nothing he or anyone else can do to change that. It could be here, in his dining room, or halfway around the world. Wherever it is, he hopes not to find it anytime soon.

Part of him wonders if maybe it’s time to stop. He, more than most, knows how fragile life is. He’ll never climb just for the challenge again. No, he’ll do it because he is still the climber—because there’s a need inside. He knows there are those who’ll think he has a death wish. If only he could make them understand: He doesn’t want to die, but he must get back to the Death Zone.

And so he sits at his table with a map of the Himalayas, preparing notes about an 8,156-metre peak in northern Nepal that the Sherpa call “the Mountain of the Spirit.” It won’t be long now before his mother goes back to that church and lights another candle for her son. He’ll grab the sacred rice a friend once gave him, the photos of his family and the pink notebook. He’ll put them in his bag. Kiss his family goodbye, head back to the airport and set out yet again.

Portrait by Thomas Dagg. Other photographs courtesy Gabriel Filippi, Wojtek Flaczynski. www.gabrielfilippi.com