Finding Elevation: Fear and Courage on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain

By Lisa Thompson

Near the death zone on K2, the world’s second-highest mountain, Lisa Thompson searched for the strength to continue climbing. Her choices were clear: give in to her doubts and descend or push past her own limits and continue up the mountain’s steep face. 

Defiance had provoked Thompson to enter the male-dominated world of high-altitude mountaineering, but defiance could only take her so far. After a harrowing battle with cancer, Lisa realized she needed to understand what motivated her to take greater and greater risks in the mountains. Finding Elevation chronicles Thompson’s path from novice climber to world-class mountaineer, as she becomes the second American woman to summit K2, which is considered by many to be the most dangerous mountain in the world. 

More than a climbing memoir, Finding Elevation is a deeply personal examination of motivation and the human spirit. It is a story of what can happen when we finally stop letting others define our limits and instead trust that we are capable of more. In this inspiring book, Thompson reaches beyond the mountain to tell a story of heartbreak, resilience, and the discovery that we are responsible for defining our own boundaries, finding our own happiness, and facing our fears head-on. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Girl Friday Books
• Release date: Jan 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781954854680

Lisa Thompson

Lisa Thompson is a children’s novelist and the author of the best-selling The Goldfish Boy and The Light Jar. The Goldfish Boy was a Waterstones Children’s Book of the Month and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal, the Branford Boase Award and the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize.

Book preview

Prologue

Partway up K2’s Black Pyramid, 23,000 feet above sea level, I become aware of how slowly I’m climbing, and I don’t like it. I don’t like the self-doubt it awakens. Now is not the time. My chest heaves as I force frigid air into my lungs twice, then tilt my head down to search for the next logical place to put my clunky boot. Strapped to my boots are crampons, which add to their clunkiness—twelve metal spikes meant to aid my travel on steep ice. When I look down between my legs, I see the striated flow of the Baltoro and Godwin Austen Glaciers, reaching toward Pakistan’s desolate plains. I trace the line where the glaciers converge 7,600 feet below me. Just beyond their meeting point, the earth rises sharply in a twisted mass of rock and ice to this precarious point where I now hang, suspended by the artificial safety of rope and metal, on the side of the second highest mountain in the world.

I scan the rock at my feet again for options. It’s black and slick from melting snow and looks more like a cobble of rock remnants than a solid mountain. The best I can hope for is a chunky protrusion deep enough to support my crampon’s one-inch-long steel front points. I find a small bump of wet stone and trust the narrow points with my body weight. A little at first. Then a committing amount. As my foot moves to the protrusion, I simultaneously slide the ascension device in my right hand higher up the climbing rope. On a 28,251-foot-tall mountain, I’ve just gained four inches. In ten minutes. I consider that maybe I am beyond my limit. In this moment, I do not feel capable of delivering what this deadly mountain demands, and the potential that I am disrespecting her with my impotence smacks in my throat and twists my lips.

Why am I doing this?

I’ve carried this question with me to every mountain I’ve climbed since Everest; searching for the answer both haunts me and pushes me forward.

In retrospect, my decision to climb K2 feels haphazard. Climbing the second highest mountain in the world didn’t start as a distant hypothetical idea or as a childhood dream that percolated into reality. Summiting K2 fell into my consciousness on an icy weekend in 2014 while hiking in the Cascade mountains near my Seattle home.

It was the kind of February day that provokes even the most intrepid Pacific Northwesterners to shield themselves with Gore-Tex and retreat to anyplace warm and dry—the kind of day where we wonder aloud if we will ever feel the sun’s warmth again, if we’ll ever wear tank tops again. Instead of sheltering myself that day, however, I’d intentionally put myself face-to-face with Mother Nature to hike Mailbox Peak. While I carefully descended a steep, rocky trail encased in an inch of new ice, my boots searched for traction underneath me, moving in cartoonish slides and skids as I hiked down. I’d forgotten to bring a trekking pole, which would have created an additional point of contact with the ground, bringing more stabilization to the situation. Without it, I devised a cumbersome method of sliding downward from tree to tree, using each burly trunk to catch my fall before sliding into the next. The trees were mostly Douglas fir, their long, straight trunks rising toward the gray sky with sways and groans—audible protests against the weight of the ice wrapped around their highest branches. Rime ice, it’s called, created when water droplets in the air touch a frozen surface and become locked to it, frozen instantly. The firs’ motion occasionally sent showers of ice pellets down on me, each time bouncing off my jacket and scattering to the frozen ground like tiny crystals.

I don’t recall exactly when during my icy descent K2 crept into my consciousness that day. I just know that it landed there, not as a question to be contemplated but as a fact. I knew that I would attempt K2 just as clearly as I knew that I would slide into the next tree. But at that point in 2014, I still hadn’t done enough research to understand that for every four people who attempt to summit the world’s second highest mountain, one will die, or that for women, the stats are even grimmer: of the first six to reach the summit, three lost their lives on descent.

Most of what I knew about K2 consisted of details from a 2008 Seattle Times article that described the deaths of eleven climbers in a tragic accident. When I read and reread the article from my patio that summer, I wondered what it was like for those climbers to realize they were stuck in the dark at 27,000 feet on a precarious slope in Pakistan without the means to safely descend. I was a neophyte climber in 2008, and though their perseverance and strength fascinated me, I didn’t want a personal experience with such a deadly mountain. Yet I’d folded the article into quarters, slid it into a manila folder labeled Mountains, and tucked it away in a desk drawer. K2 would remain dormant in my consciousness after that, like a seed waiting for the right conditions to sprout and take root.

Something about that wintry descent in 2014, on a mountain I’d hiked for years, cultivated that seed. In the following months, I casually studied K2’s routes, history, and risks. Studying a mountain brings it to life for me, gives it character, forging a relationship between us and making me feel like I am getting to know it and its challenges. Most importantly, studying my next climbing objective allows me to determine whether my ability and ambition are aligned with the mountain. As I devoured books and blogs during the summer of 2014, a persona of K2 quickly formed. It’s not fun and approachable Mount Rainier, easily summited in a day or two if you’re up for it. It’s not austere and icy Denali, which demands a slow, steady uphill slog. Not even close. Although K2 is 778 feet shorter than Mount Everest, it is not even in the same league as the highest mountain in the world in terms of danger or difficulty.

K2 is 28,251 feet of unforgiving rock and ice on the Pakistan-China border that dares humans to fuck with it. It is treacherous exposure. It is unrelenting steepness from the first step beyond Advanced Base Camp. It is untrustworthy rock holds and unpredictable storms that snatch climbers off the mountain in the blink of an eye. Unlike on Everest, there is no tent at base camp acting as an emergency room; there are no commercial helicopters available to whisk injured climbers to safety. I knew that K2 would ask more of me than I could imagine. But still, that tiny seed nudged me to devise a hypothetical timeline of mountains to climb and skills to attain to meet K2’s demands.

My timeline for climbing K2 was private. In my circle of mountaineering friends, we dreamed of and discussed the possibility of climbing Mount Everest and other Himalayan peaks, but our public ambition stopped there. I was also uneasy when it came to sharing mountaineering goals because I didn’t want to risk the embarrassment of reeling it back in once it was out there. And I’d rather privately plan and surprise my fellow climbers with success than disappoint all of us with failure.

It was 2015 when I summoned enough courage to share my plans with a climbing partner while we slogged up Mailbox Peak, the same mountain where K2 had first planted itself into my awareness a year earlier. It wasn’t icy this time, but the steep, meandering trail was slick with mud and loose rock that had dislodged itself in a recent rainstorm. My climbing partner was updating me on the first solo winter summit of Denali. I liked these training hikes together because his stories distracted me from the hours of uphill torture and my backpack’s unforgiving weight. We were so comfortable with each other from years of climbing and training together that we could also let our conversations pause and move together in quiet mindlessness for hours, communicating only with grunts and hand gestures.

You see he tied a tree trunk to his waist so he wouldn’t fall in a crevasse?

Yeah, seems brutal, I said, economizing my words and breath as I struggled up the rocky hillside, trying to imagine climbing a mountain with a tree trunk strung to my waist.

He’s tried like four times.

Intense.

When he and I had summited Denali together three years prior, we’d experienced the summer version of North America’s tallest mountain, which pinned us down for six days in an endless white expanse of blowing snow at 17,200 feet before conditions became safe enough to venture from our tents and climb higher. I tried to comprehend the brutality of a Denali January.

No way I’d do that in winter, he confirmed. You think you’ll ever climb Everest?

I don’t know, maybe. I feel like I need to summit another Himalayan peak first, I said, giving him a glimpse into my plans.

I didn’t tell him that technically this hike was training for climbing my first Himalayan peak—that I’d stuffed fifteen extra pounds of lead bricks in my backpack.

He shifted the conversation. Jesus, what do you do after summiting Denali in winter?

K2.

Yeah, right, he said with a huff.

I kept trudging up the steep mud behind him in silence—until he planted his trekking pole, stopped, whipped his head around, and looked at me with wide eyes and raised eyebrows. I looked up at him, deadpan, and shrugged my shoulders casually. We shared the type of bond that develops from mutual struggle toward a common goal. He knew me well enough to correctly interpret my silence as a plan. But he mercifully said nothing, not forcing me to justify or explain my scheme.

I hadn’t told anyone about my future climbing objectives even though I had carefully constructed a two-year climbing plan in a pink notebook with shimmery purple ink and butterfly stickers. Connecting the dots between each goal seemed straightforward within the safe realm of my notebook’s lines, but verbalizing my plan—especially to male climbing partners—stymied me. I wanted to shield myself from their doubt, which I knew would follow. I wasn’t ready for their curious stares and raised eyebrows, wanting to prolong the comfort of secrecy. I wasn’t ready to defend myself, to prove that I knew what I was doing, that I wasn’t reckless. I didn’t know whether the goal of climbing K2 positioned my ambition above my ability. Maybe it did—but that was how I’d started climbing big mountains in the beginning: blind ambition. And a lot of defiance.

Chapter 1

75 feet

When I had sat cross-legged and scattered the bright, glossy catalogs from colleges like Stanford and the University of Illinois across my twin bed in high school, I’d had zero idea where to focus my studies. I liked science, mostly struggled with math, and primarily desired a high-paying job that would take me far away from the tiny farm town in central Illinois that had raised me. For some reason, I chose to major in biomedical engineering, based on an illogical appraisal that it was a balanced combination of my mom’s profession as a nurse and my dad’s as a janitor and therefore the best major for their eldest daughter. I recall thoughtfully explaining the inept rationale behind my choice during my college entrance interview. The interviewer sitting across the table looked back at me blankly with tight, pursed lips, glanced down at my application, and asked why I didn’t want to study English.

When I arrived at the Milwaukee School of Engineering in the fall of 1991, it became swiftly and painfully obvious that I was no longer one of the smartest kids in the class. I’d never heard of differential calculus, or integral calculus—or even plain old calculus. And, in a continuation of my overachieving tendencies, I thought it’d be a good idea to study Japanese, too. As the entrance interviewer likely knew, I was in over my head—way over. A scene that would repeat emerged for the first time that autumn: I’d reach too high, which would lead to overwhelm, and my only remedy for the impending embarrassment of failure would be hard work. I hoped that I could study my way to decent grades; I could not abide the shame of quitting or lessening my major (though I would drop Japanese when I couldn’t fathom verbs at the ends of sentences).

My college roommates seemed to effortlessly comprehend complex lecture material, apply it in labs, sum it all up in a tidy double-spaced paper at the end of the week, and still have time to test their fake IDs at the bars that surrounded MSOE’s urban campus. I, on the other hand, would stare at exotic equations and hope I could apply them cleverly enough to earn Bs when it mattered. Feeling guilty about considering blowing off studying to join my roommates one Thursday night, I sat instead at my dorm-room desk, ate three giant chocolate-chip cookies, and created a schedule that allowed only for study, classes, and sleeping.

Somehow, after the requisite four years, I made it out with an above-average GPA, a degree in biomedical engineering, and a job as an engineer with the Hewlett-Packard Company. I spent my twenties and early thirties in Saint Louis, Missouri, fumbling to figure myself out, desperately trying to keep up with some imaginary ideal of what a young professional woman should do, act like, and be. Would a young professional woman wear business suits or dresses? Pantyhose? Should she live in Clayton or University City? Drink merlot? Smoke menthols? Learn golf? I amassed embarrassing piles of credit-card debt in an attempt to prove that I was successful and independent, even though that meant using cash advances from credit cards to pay rent.

I did not, in my twenties or thirties, dabble much in the outdoors, though when I was twenty-six I did eagerly agree to a multiday backpacking trip with my adventure-seeking redheaded boyfriend. Traveling together from infinitely flat Saint Louis to the Hoh River trail in the westernmost thumb of Washington State felt like blasting into adulthood. There, we would navigate, cook our own food, and ward off wild bears.

This being my first backpacking experience, shopping for gear was required. I studied the summer 1998 Campmor catalog for sleeping bags, backpacks, socks, bear vaults (whatever those were), and fancy pants with zippers that circumnavigated my thighs. When the giant box arrived, large enough for me to sleep in, it was missing only one key item: footwear. For that, I visited a local discount shoe warehouse, the kind that carried past-season styles that weren’t sold at department stores.

As I wandered through the towering aisles in the industrial, perfectly square building, the platform mules and flip-flops quickly distracted me. But, on the highest shelf, I spied what I was looking for: hiking boots. The leather kind with green laces and lug soles beefy enough to tromp through the Hoh River trail. These hiking boots, though, were specially equipped with an added feature: steel toes. Even better, I thought, rationalizing that my toes wouldn’t get squished if a rock or tree rolled on them. Most importantly, my toes would still look cute in those platform flip-flops after the trip. I reached up to grab them from the top shelf before someone else did. The kit for my first backpacking trip was complete.

I made a pit stop in eastern Washington to visit my aunt Carol and uncle Mike before venturing into the forest. My aunt and uncle had always been examples of stability in my life. As a kid, I’d escaped a chaotic home in Illinois for summers at theirs in the mountains, and I’d cried at the airport each time I left them. My aunt bought me fancy face creams at the Bon Marché, and my uncle taught me to drive, with important tips like: Don’t touch the radio for the first six months. So I arrived at their house now proud of my hefty backpack and specially equipped hiking boots. My uncle Mike took one look at the purple backpack hulking above my head, snickered, and said, That thing weighs more than you.

In a whirl of gear and chuckles, he immediately halved the contents of my backpack. No consultation, just surgical elimination.

You’ll thank me next week, he said with confidence and admonishment as I tallied the exiled pile: wool sweaters, books, a hunting knife, travel-sized shampoo bottles.

Do you actually know what to do with a hunting knife, city girl?

Whatever, I thought. Normally I played along with his sardonic humor. But I didn’t have time now. I was going to cook my own food. In the wild. With bears.

I failed to understand that the Hoh River trail is in the Hoh Rainforest. And that rainforests are . . . wet. Always.

Aside from leaky tents, pervasive mud, and rare glimpses of sunshine, one memory stands out: barely one day into the seventeen-mile trek, I realized the error in my boot purchase. Steel, it turns out, should be reserved for boots worn in environments where your foot might actually get squished. Like construction or logging. Those protective steel plates wore blisters into my tender city toes. As I stood at the side of the trail, leaning on a giant mossy tree while popping the blisters on my shriveled feet, a blur of men passed by on the trail. They moved nimbly, confidently, barely noticing my discomfort and unwieldy backpack. Their packs, curiously smaller than my purple behemoth, were hung with helmets and strange metal axes with sleek, curved heads and pointy, glistening picks, along with neat coils of rope draped over the tops.

Are they mining coal somewhere? I asked, half serious, between blister pops.

They’re climbing Mount Olympus, my boyfriend explained.

"Like, a mountain? Why?"

I hadn’t grown up with stories of Sir Edmund Hillary or Maurice Herzog. I’d grown up with Abraham Lincoln and sports heroes like William Perry. Not only had mountain climbing not been in my lexicon, but I also hadn’t known it was a thing people did. For fun.

None of it made sense to me. But, from my damp spot against the mossy tree, I was drawn to those men. They resonated blithesome strength and capability—in their non-steel-toed boots.

Waterlogged backpacking trips aside, my outdoor forays revolved around drunken camping trips with friends from work. When one skinny-legged, fine-haired guy with round lips offered to share his tent, I felt the flush of friendship bloom into more. I hadn’t been treated with admiration or respect by a guy before. At the office I was used to being overlooked, ogled, or treated like one of the guys. Reverence was new. He didn’t flinch when I couldn’t sleep because the laundry wasn’t folded and put away. You let me be me, I told him months later, snuggling under a pile of sleeping bags, watching a Midwest sunset fade into night. Plus, there was a hint of sadness behind his blue eyes that I wanted to ease.

We wrote long, achy love notes to each other and slipped them into pockets or books for the other to find later. We reconfigured work trips to be together, spending long, lazy weekends in the backwoods of Maine. I even baked. Finally, we painfully and abruptly ended other relationships, and he and his dogs drove to my house, which eventually became our house. Our life was simple then, in our twenties. I’d only just signed my first mortgage. Our only responsibilities were our dogs and staying true to our yearning to explore.

My professional responsibilities at Hewlett-Packard grew, and, through mergers and spin-offs, I landed my first management job at Philips Healthcare in 2007. With my soon-to-be husband, I moved to Seattle. Though I’d visited the Pacific Northwest many times as a kid, it felt unknown and unexplored. And now, I had a partner to discover it with. Together we attended orienteering seminars, studied maps of lost mining towns, attended avalanche-awareness courses, and spent every weekend in the mountains.

On my first hike on Mount Rainier’s Muir Snowfield—still unaware of the importance of proper fueling—I became so calorie depleted that after the hike I collapsed in the snow near the Paradise parking lot, my electrolyte-starved legs jackhammering.

Come on, I know you can make it to the car, he encouraged.

I don’t know if I can, I said, staring at my twitchy legs through half-open eyelids.

We’ve got this. I’ll help.

Together, we trudged down the last bit of snow, and he drove as fast as Rainier’s windy roads would allow to the first open restaurant, where he coaxed me into eating a whole plate of french fries. I felt cared for then, looked after, like I had a partner in this world who wasn’t canine.

The Philips office where I worked in Seattle was drab. An oily-looking trail meandered up the center of the matted gray carpet that defined each aisle. Industrial furniture panels interlocked at hard right angles to create small cubes that failed at creating privacy. Which was why, on a particular June morning, I already knew that my cube neighbor Derek and his girlfriend had just gotten a German shepherd puppy, and that she was sweet but also systematically destroying their furniture, room by room, like a furry tornado, and that they therefore needed to TiVo Dancing with the Stars that night so they could go to IKEA for a replacement dining room table before Derek’s sister arrived on Thursday.

While privacy was superficial at the office, hierarchy was not. The vice presidents—all men—sat in cookie-cutter square rooms along the building’s perimeter, their offices dank, too, despite windows. Rippled inward toward the center of the building from the VPs were rows of subordinates of decreasing rank. I was situated one row in from the VPs, directly across from the one I reported to. The configuration was convenient for me because I could spring from my chair when he yelled "Liiisssaaa!"

My official job title was field operations manager, and I was the first to hold this newly created position. My days were filled, like a bottomless garbage can, with orphaned projects and chronically broken processes that no one else wanted to fix.

One Monday morning, I sat at my desk, fighting to morph data into meaningful conclusions before the first Liiisssaaa! of the day summoned me to recite the current status of our team’s metrics. But a hallway conversation between three guys distracted me.

Dude, I don’t believe we pulled that off, said the skinny one.

"You didn’t pull anything off, loser; it wasn’t supposed to be epic," the tall one reminded him, breaking into laughter and snide snorts with his friend at the skinny one’s expense. Their camaraderie sparked a column of envy to rise from my core.

The mean one jumped in. Maybe if you learned how to walk in crampons you could keep up next time.

Not my fault, man, we don’t have mountains in Minnesota, said the skinny one in a squeaky voice, defending himself with a puffed chest.

In recent months, from my dingy cube, I’d listened with growing jealousy to their convivial stories about fording wild, icy rivers on Glacier Peak and navigating whiteout snowstorms on Mount Baker. Their chumminess didn’t just exist on mountains and in hallways; it slipped into meeting rooms, too, like a thick fog that I could