Early in the morning, van Rooijen had passed the dangling Koreans, who'd waved him off. He'd clipped in to their rope, but it soon ran out. He meandered up and down steep terrain until he found remnants of the fixed ropes hanging straight down over cliffs. He'd clipped into them and worked sideways, like a pendulum, from rope to rope across the Traverse to the Bottleneck. Then he'd down-climbed until cliffs blocked his path.

"It was so steep, and I just sat down," says van Rooijen. "I was too tired to climb up again. I was coming to the end of my strength."

After van Rooijen had called his wife, the team's webmaster, in Holland, arranged a GPS trace of the signal from the sat phone and located the climber between camps three and four on the Cesen Route. He'd overshot camp four altogether.

Van Rooijen hung up with his wife and slept for a few hours, waking to find his sight improved and the clouds parting to reveal a couloir where he could continue his descent. Through the same break in the whiteout, spotters down in base camp saw a man in an orange suit wandering the mountain. They called up to Pemba and van de Gevel, who descended to intercept van Rooijen.

But the sun set again before they could reach him, and van Rooijen hunkered down for his second night out on K2. In camp three, Pemba could hear van Rooijen's sat phone ringing nearby, but avalanche-prone slopes kept him from searching for his teammate. The next morning, van Rooijen followed a ridgeline until he saw tents and climbers, although he didn't recognize the scene as his own camp. Van de Gevel, Pemba, and van Rooijen made it off the mountain that evening and were air-lifted to a hospital in Skardu the next morning. On August 5, aided by rescuers, Marco Confortola hobbled into base camp on badly frostbitten feet. He was the last survivor off the mountain.

TWO WEEKS LATER, half a dozen members of the Dutch team sat up front at Gerard McDonnell's memorial service, in County Limerick, Ireland. More than 2,000 mourners had shown up to honor the first climber from their country to summit K2. Musicians played, and doves were released into the cold drizzle. Friends presented the family with gifts, and speakers noted that McDonnell most likely would've survived if he hadn't tried to rescue the dying Koreans.

"It's not just because he wore a beard that he was called Jesus," said Father Joe Noonan in his sermon.

But van de Gevel, emaciated by his ordeal and crushed by the sorrow of his teammate's family, saw things differently. "On the mountain there were no heroes," he said, "just an unspoken agreement that you help as much as you can."

Back on K2, it's likely that little will change. If the trend following the Everest 1996 disaster is any indication, the mountain will become only more popular. On Everest, better forecasting and route setting have staved off another day as catastrophic as the one 12 years ago—though not the annual parade of stunts, films, and record attempts. But on a mountain as unrelenting as K2, little can be done to lessen the danger of 30 climbers rushing the summit. That much is simple.