HOW I CONQUERED THE SAVAGE BEAST!
The last Irishman to summit the hellish K2 died heroically on his descent, so when Jason Black – who watched his sherpa die on Everest – made it to the top, he knew it was just the beginning for him and his family back home, who are getting used to living
BILLY Black raises one of his eyebrows and fixes me with a blue-eyed stare. I’ve just asked the 14-year-old whether he might follow in his dad’s footsteps one day. ‘No way,’ comes Billy’s reply. ‘I’m not a madman.’ And few could argue with Billy — his daddy Jason Black must be a madman. How else can you justify trying to climb the most dangerous mountain in the world, where one in four dies trying — not once, but twice?
In the summer of 2015, Jason was forced off K2 in Pakistan after massive avalanches wiped out camps. But the Letterkenny man — a global endurance athlete — vowed to return. And on July 22, at 3am Irish time on a pitch black morning, Jason became the second Irishman in history to reach the summit of K2 — and the first to make it off alive.
So it was eerily poignant that on Thursday, as the father-of-four stood surrounded by family and friends at his hero’s homecoming in Letterkenny, down in Limerick, the family of Ger McDonnell was also gathered together — to pray at his tenth anniversary Mass.
Ger made history when he flew the tricolour on K2’s summit in August 2008 but died on the way back down, after he heroically stopped to help three climbers who got into trouble.
In Jason’s pocket was Ger’s ascender device, given to him by Ger’s mother, Gertie.
‘They’re so proud I kept my promise,’ says an emotional and clearly adrenaline-filled Jason, having just spoke to the McDonnell family on the phone. It’s less than 24 hours since he arrived back in Dublin Airport after an epic journey home.
‘Ger started this journey and got to the summit so for me to close the circle and bring his flag home safely, it was as if it was meant to be,’ says Jason. ‘As a proud Irishman I marked him paying the ultimate sacrifice by putting a plate at the base in his honour. Ger will never be forgotten.’
Deep in the Himalayas of Pakistan, the ice-capped peak of K2 rears up at 8,611 metres, a staggering 13km vertical climb. Although 237m shorter than Everest, K2 is far more dangerous. Extreme snowstorms, crushing avalanches and rockfalls are common. High winds suddenly blow up, sweeping climbers off high ridges. Heavy snowfalls destroy fixed lines and even climbers attached to ropes have plunged to their deaths down icy ravines.
It’s not without reason mountaineers call it the ‘Savage Beast’ — and the statistics are utterly chilling.
For every 100 climbers who attempt Everest, four die. Yet out of every 100 climbers who attempt to summit K2, 29 never see their families and friends again. Just 307 people have stood on K2’s summit, compared with more than 5,600 Everest summiteers.
Before Jason even reached K2 base camp to begin his climb, he had trekked 120kms, carrying tents, kerosene cookers, sleeping bags and food, along with his nine co-climbers, 90 porters, three live cows and several flocks of hens, killed for food en route.
Jason — who does a lot of work with young people, and focuses a lot on mental health in teenage boys in particular, encouraging them to follow their dreams — gave a moving speech in Letterkenny’s town square, next to a sculpture erected after he stood on the roof of the world, Everest, on May 19, 2013. It’s inscribed with the words: ‘No mountain is too high to climb or no problem too big to conquer.’
What many gathered on Thursday night didn’t know is that when Jason summited Everest, he did so alone after enduring the horror of the death of his sherpa, a friend and climbing companion.
‘Myself and my sherpa spent two months together on my climb up, drinking tea together and talking and sharing this goal,’ recalls Jason. ‘But at the 11th hour he took a stroke on his left hand side. I put the oxygen tank on him and turned his body towards the sun. I knew the sun would shine into his face forever. He died there and was cast into the mountain forever. I pushed on and summited on my own at 7am. That’s all part of it.’
And as dangerous as Everest is, K2 is another beast entirely. As Jason says himself: ‘Everest felt like a blip compared to this...’
For it’s a cold fact any climber brave or crazy enough to attempt K2 must be ready to die — and their families must be ready to say goodbye.
At home waiting for Jason were his wife — who stitched a surprise 21st anniversary card into his jacket, and told him about it on the day, July 19 — and his children, Laura, 19, Kate, 18, Billy, 14, and 12-year-old Ella, as well as his dad Billy and his extended family.
‘Yes, there’s an element of guilt and an element of selfishness,’ admits Jason.
‘But then if I don’t do what is right for me, then I’m not living my life. Does that mean I’m reckless? No. I’m not being flippant but I could be killed by a bus.
‘I encourage people to live life to the best of their ability. I practise a lot and train so very hard and hone my craft. I promised Sharon if I ever get to a point in the mountain that’s not making sense, I will turn around and I hang my hat on that peg. She knows I’ll make the good judgement.’
Jason describes his failed K2 bid and unrealised dream as ‘like walking around with a stone in my shoe — it’s always there’.
When he got a call from a friend in 2016 asking him to join a handpicked world-class team of professional mountaineers on another K2 bid, he turned to Sharon.
‘The minute I said it, she said she knew I wanted to go back,’ says Jason.
What Jason returns to again and again, is how it wasn’t just him who made it to the top of K2, but his entire family. His father Billy had lost Jason’s mother Freda to cancer when Jason was 17 and Jason’s brother Billy died in a motorbike accident 20 years ago.
Jason says: ‘They’d been taken from him and here I was going off and he didn’t know if I would make it back either.’
Sharon and the children tracked their father’s every perilous move, through regular phone calls and his blog and web dispatches.
Then news filtered home in early July that a friend of Jason’s, Canadian Serge Dessureault — a firefighter who was on his 2015 expedition — slipped and plunged to his death above Camp Two. Then, as Jason ascended the notorious Bottleneck section of K2, a Japanese acquaintance, Kojiro Watanabe, fell to his death as he climbed behind him.
Sharon explains how she coped.
‘My wife knew I wanted to go back up’
‘I kept myself so busy cleaning the house and doing stuff with the kids — I put it to the back of my mind and parked it up, and tried to continue on as normal as possible,’ says Sharon, an accountant, who is a bit of a ‘madwoman’ herself. She’s a runner but hasn’t been training since hurting her ankle last year in a 48-hour endurance race called The Beast.
‘Yes, it’s scary to think he may not come back but you don’t dwell on it. They’re all dangerous but K2 is the worst so I found it very difficult to settle. One of the kids was in the middle of the Leaving when he left but now she has her prom next week and her Leaving results and it’s amazing to have Jason home for all that as he wasn’t booked home until August 18.’
As it turned out, the night Jason reached K2’s peak, Sharon was also thousands of metres above sea level — on a flight to Dubai with her sisters to visit a niece.
‘Of all the nights, he reaches the top on the only night I can’t take a call and I’m up in the air,’ she laughs. ‘Thank God I had WiFi on the plane so I could log in and the kids told me he had summited.’
Jason’s eldest daughter Laura, 19, was the first person to speak to her daddy when he reached the summit.
‘The phone rang around 3am and I saw it was Dad’s satellite phone so I called everyone around and we had the TV on so we all ran into the hot press as it’s the quietest place in the house,’ she reveals, with a big, proud smile. ‘We huddled around and put Daddy on loudspeaker. The connection was bad and it was so windy but then we heard him saying he loved us and he was on the summit. We spoke for five minutes and we played him a recording Mum did before she left, just in case, saying “I know you’re on the summit, we’re so proud of you”.
‘We chatted away and told him “please get down safely” as Ger got to that same place and he phoned home too and his family didn’t expect to hear the news they heard. We knew we couldn’t celebrate yet — it’s most dangerous coming down.’
The next day the whole family gathered at Jason’s sister’s house with his father Billy.
‘We were waiting all day and around 10pm we heard he was at Base Camp so we knew he was out of the dangerous parts.’
Did Laura at any point think that she might never see her dad again?
‘‘We knew he could do it as he’s trained so hard and he’s well able but it’s the weather conditions and Mother Nature,’ she says.
‘We heard about those climbers who died and it’s devastating for their families. That man Serge had two young kids who were the same as us, waiting for their daddy to come home.’
She also laughingly recalls one particular phone call she had with Jason during his trek back to Base Camp.
‘Dad rang me one day and said, “I just walked a marathon”. I told him, “Dad, I’m still in bed!”.’
Jason often speaks of how the mountains saved him. Throughout secondary school he was bullied badly. Then when he was 17, his mother died from cancer, and a few years later, he lost his brother Billy.
‘When you go to a place of silence the demons in your mind come alive and you’ve to deal with a reality of life,’ he says. ‘As a young man, like a lot of young men, I didn’t have the mechanisms to deal with tough times.
‘I’m religious now but for years I couldn’t comprehend why God did this to our family. I was angry but that changed through my journeys on the mountains.
‘Noise takes you away from the pain but in a world with no noise or radio or TV, my past came to me. I had never dealt with my mum or my loss.
‘Only through the mountain’s interventions, I could deal with the loss. Walking away from the mountain, I felt cleansed.’
And as well as life’s trials, having the love of his life and ‘best teammate’ Sharon standing shoulder to shoulder with Jason, has given him the edge.
But Sharon doesn’t think she’s special. She has a very simple take on things.
‘Life is short, that’s my motto. Yes, Jason has responsibilities to me and the kids as I do to him but you get one crack at these things. He was so disappointed in 2015.
‘We were so proud of him, that he came home but he was fierce disappointed.
‘Now he’s back to tell the tale. What’s for you won’t pass you. Your script is written and it’s up to us to make the most of the lives we have.’
‘We heard of the climbers who died’