The Love Story Behind K2's Deadliest Day

You're about to hear two of the most gut-wrenching love stories of your entire life, one of them from the second tallest mountain on earth, and one of them from the depths of the Grand Canyon. And what makes them so painful is that neither couple went into the wilderness looking for tragedy. They went in chasing the thing that made them feel the most alive, the adventure, or the freedom, or even each other. But in both stories, nature strips everything down to two unbearable questions. First of all, when the person you love is in danger, how far do you keep going? And second of all, what happens when love still isn't enough to bring them home? Both of these stories begin with a photo, but only for a brief moment, and so if you're listening audio only, don't worry, you're still going to enjoy this. The image matters far less than what happened before and after it was taken. Folks, the show is officially back for good. I'm going to be doing weekly episodes, and so if you enjoy watching, please subscribe to my channel. Please leave us a five-star review and help get the show to 1,000 five-star reviews. We're getting so close, but we still have a long ways to go. And so with that said, I'm Kyle Haytyking. Listen on if you dare. In just a second, I'm going to show you a photo, and it's going to look innocent. It's going to look cute. Unless you're a psychopath, this photo should make you happy. But I'm going to show you the exact same photo again at the end of the video, and I promise that the second time you see it, you're going to be the first one to see it. So if you're a psychopath, you're going to see it. It's going to be very, very hard to look at it. This photograph was supposed to go on the mantle of Rolf Bay and Cecilia Skog's house. It was supposed to celebrate the greatest climbing achievement of their lives and another chapter of their young love story. But just two hours after this photo was taken, they would find themselves in an entirely different story, one that would rip them apart forever. I'm about to tell you an epic love story. It's heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time, with the highest highs and the lowest lows that you could ever imagine. To me, it only feels right to meet Cecilia and Rolf at the exact moment that they met each other. It's the year 2003 on Mount Elbrus in Russia, the highest peak in Europe at 18,510 feet. And standing at 5 feet 2 inches is Cecilia Skog, a tiny, beautiful Norwegian woman with wild, curly blonde hair, glacier blue eyes, and. a hunger for adventure. She was only 29 years old, and let's just say that she had been a little distracted throughout this current trek she was on. And it wasn't because of all the breathtaking views surrounding her, and it wasn't because of all the looks that she was getting from fellow climbers. She was actually distracted by a sound. More specifically, a harmonica being played by one of her male guides every night at camp. Now, climbing mountains was not how Cecilia had planned to be spending her adult life. She grew up thinking that she would become a nurse, but every so often, she would feel the call to go hiking. Or I guess not even hiking in the way that I do it, more like climbing. I'm talking glaciers, mountains, basically anything that was super tall and in reach of her native Norway. Just before she turned 30, Cecilia realized that instead of continuing down the safer career path of nursing, she wanted to go all in on extreme mountaineering. And as someone who just turned 30 myself, you know, as much as I love hiking, I can't relate to that, and I will continue to do my mostly indoor job, which I am doing right now. So Cecilia basically said screw it to a normal life and became a professional adventurer. And she was good at it, by the way. Like, scary good. Climbing Mount Elbrus at 29 years old is not an easy feat. I couldn't do it. And as the smallest person in the crew, this very beautiful Norwegian woman was drawing plenty of attention as she was attempting the summit. You know, attention from the media, from fellow climbers, and again, from one specific male guide in particular. A guide who didn't just have a knack for playing the harmonica, but who also thrived in extreme conditions. I'm talking about a fellow Norwegian named Rolf Bay. Much like Cecilia, Rolf was also highly accomplished before the age of 30. By the time that he met Cecilia, Rolf had already 3,800 kilometers across Antarctica, which at the time, I guess, was the longest ski journey in the world. He ran an adventure company that specialized in Arctic survival courses, which meant that the polar regions were basically his thing. You know, ice, snow, sub-zero temperatures. That's where Rolf felt most alive. And so you can probably imagine that Rolf and Cecilia clicked pretty much immediately. They were both adrenaline junkies. They were both obsessed with pushing human limits in the most extreme environments on the planet. And so, you know, falling in love on the peak of a mountain was kind of fitting for them. Once they were finished with Mount Elbrus, they pretty much immediately started doing expeditions together. They first set off on a several-month climbing tour of Tibet and Nepal, capped off by Cecilia summoning, what else but Mount Everest in 2004. And while she was doing this, Rolf was, of course, waiting at base camp to welcome her back. And then the next year, 2005, the couple skied to the South Pole together, which is, you heard that right, just the two of them skiing across an ice shelf. Absolutely insane. And then in 2006, Rolf and Cecilia flipped the globe and decided, you know, let's try to reach the North Pole this time, you know, where Santa lives. However, there were no elves there to help them on this one. They were once again fully unsupported, meaning no resupply drops, no outside help. I mean, picture these two people dragging 200-pound sleds across the Arctic Ocean. There's sea ice cracking beneath them. Polar bears leaving tracks all around their camp at night. Temperatures hitting negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Just absolutely insane. And when they finally did reach the North Pole on April 24th, 2006, after 48 days of this adventure, well, Rolf got down on one knee in front of Cecilia and he proposed because of course he did. And while proposing is definitely a big deal, Cecilia may have accomplished the more impressive feat with that trip when she became the first woman to climb the Seven Summits and reach both the North and South Poles, achieving the Explorer's Grand Slam. And now she had a wedding to plan. They got married on May 12th, 2007. Life seemed pretty perfect, right? They were running their expedition business out of Norway. Cecilia was even thinking about maybe slowing down a bit, maybe going back into nursing, and maybe having kids. However, Rolf, well, he wasn't quite ready to settle down yet. He actually still had one more dream, one more mountain that he felt like he needed to climb. And it just so happened to be one of the most dangerous mountains in the entire world, K2. Rolf and Cecilia actually had a history with K2. In 2005, they tried to climb it, but bad weather prevented them from actually summiting. And I don't know if it was just the perfectionist in them or just the fact that their relationship was born on mountains, but Rolf was pretty easily able to convince Cecilia that they should give K2 one more go after their honeymoon, of course. Now let me explain something very important about K2. Mount Everest is taller than it, Mount Everest being 29,032 feet roughly, but K2 is objectively way more dangerous, like it's not even close. Less than 1,000 people have summited K2 in history, with about 800 of those summits occurring since 2000. Now to put it in perspective, almost a thousand people summited Mount Everest just last year. So there's obviously a huge difference between these mountains. K2 sits at 28,251 feet and it's right on the Pakistan-Chinese border, and it's crazy to say this, but historically, about 1 in 4 climbers who attempt K2 don't make it back down alive. And compare that to Everest's fatality rate of around 1-2%, and so, you know, K2 is clearly a different beast. And you're probably wondering why, and it's actually because of a few different reasons. First, the routes are just steeper. K2's face is characterized by 45-degree angles with a rocky and icy surface. And yeah, there's some climbing on Everest too, but on K2, you're not just, like, walking uphill. You are, like, climbing, right? And second of all, the weather is insane. K2 often gets hit with sudden, life-threatening storms that can trap you on the mountain. Like, for instance, in 1986, which was known as the Black Summer, when 13 climbers died in a single season due to storms and avalanches. And third, this is a big one to remember, there's this thing called the bottleneck. The bottleneck is a narrow, steep couloir basically a 100-meter funnel of ice pitched at 60 degrees, and it sits at about 26,900 feet well into the death zone. Every climber has to pass through it, whether they want to or not. There's just no other route. Oh, and hanging directly above the bottleneck is something known as the Great Serac. A Serac is a massive, overhanging block of glacial ice. And K2's is the size of, like, a city block. It's a 500-foot-tall, glacier suspended there, waiting. It could collapse at any moment and obliterate everything and everyone below it, basically like a bomb made of ice. And because of this danger, when climbers talk about K2, they talk about minimizing the amount of time they spend in the bottleneck. Get in, get out, move fast right because if that zarak falls while you're underneath it then there's there's no survival strategy you're just done now i'm sure that rolf and cecilia were thinking about all of this in fact cecilia was apparently starting to even have some second thoughts uh she obviously knew all these scary facts about k2 and even though she and rolf were both at the peak of their careers athletically that was far from any guarantee of safety and plus rolf was primarily a polar explorer and while he did have experience with high altitude mountaineering it wasn't really his specialty however in early june of 2008 just before heading to k2 rolf and some teammates spent 27 days climbing a new route on the trango tower face in pakistan which is one of the biggest sheer rock walls in the world and so he wasn't just proving to himself that he could handle technical climbing at altitude but he was also showing cecilia that there was there was nothing to be afraid of he could take care of himself and uh she wouldn't need she wouldn't need to worry about him in an environment as unforgiving as k2 where it really is every person for themselves that assurance means everything cecilia boarded her flight to pakistan and waited for her husband to arrive at the base camp of the savage mountain and this was early july 2008 neither of them had any idea what they were arriving into because the 2008 climbing season was the first time they'd been on k2 was about to turn into a nightmare the climbing season typically runs from june to august but in 2008 the weather was just terrible all of june passed and then all of july passed and there were zero summit windows during these two months multiple international teams were stuck at base camp kind of just waiting for that window right some teams had been there for almost two months getting more and more restless every single day by late july 2008 the climbing season was the first time they'd been on k2 and they were not able to get to the summit until july which was around the time that rolf and cecilia's team would have hoped to summit k2 there were 10 different expedition teams all camped out at k2 base camp norwegian dutch american serbian french pakistani among a number of other nationalities in total there were 29 climbers positioned to make a serious summit attempt when the weather finally broke and if you're used to my everest videos uh that might not sound like it's a lot of climbers you know we hear about these traffic jams and nightmares and all that but you have to remember that once again k2 is a much different beast and all of these climbers would be facing the most demanding and most technical climb of their entire lives pretty much at the same time and when you think about it like that 29 bodies trying to do this at the same time well it might as well feel like a thousand at base camp life was pretty normal cecilia arrived first and then rolf showed up shortly after and since they had been away from each other for almost a month at this point they were able to climb the top of the mountain and they were able to climb the top of the mountain on the top of the mountain and they were able to climb the top of the mountain on the top of the mountain on the top of the mountain uh rolf didn't come empty-handed rolf brought them a present and this was an inflatable plastic couch for their tent every night as they slowly made their way up the mountain to higher and higher camps rolf and cecilia would watch dvds together by a little gas heater hanging out with other climbers from different teams they were making friends sharing meals they were part of this community of elite athletes all waiting for their shot at the summit and it's worth mentioning that cecilia and rolf were pretty well known by this point and they were able to climb the top of the mountain and their love story was documented and and their names were in the record books already with how experienced they were with how much they had accomplished k2 should have been in theory just icing on the cake now the weather was rough on the mountain during their slow multi-week long ascent but the 29 climbers held out hope that eventually one day of perfect skies would open up the opportunity for them to finally reach the summit and that hope was finally met with a date august first 2008. the forecast looked pretty good and even though it was a few days earlier than they had planned for the climbers decided to hurry up the mountain and make it in time for their ideal summit push the 29 climbers including rolf and cecilia arrived at camp 4 on july 31st to rest up before making that final push the following day and it's important to note that a few logistical things had to take place before they could actually make that attempt because this was the summit push of the season even though it was so late an advanced team had to go up beforehand so they could set fixed ropes through some of the tricky sections like the bottleneck and a section called the traverse which is a route above the bottleneck basically leading to the summit now i'm no mountaineer but from my understanding fixed ropes are pretty much essential on k2 not only do they guide climbers but also if you slip being clipped into that rope is what stops you from falling thousands of feet the plan was for an advanced team to go up beforehand so they could set an advanced team to leave camp 4 before midnight on july 31st and set these ropes and get all that done before the main climbing groups started their ascent the advanced team was supposed to be led by shaheen baig who was a pakistani who had successfully summited k2 in 2004 and it's important to note that he was the only person among all the teams who had previous k2 summit experience and his leadership was crucial however he ended up getting altitude sickness and had to turn back before he got the job done and so that left nobody officially in charge of the rope fixing operation apparently a korean team was supposed to double check that the ropes were set properly but there was some miscommunication some confusion uh different teams had different expectations about who was responsible for what and you also need to remember that these teams all spoke different languages and so i think it's fair to say that uh no one really knew what the ropes were for and that led to one deadly gap in responsibility and the first critical mistake of this summit push the backup advanced team didn't leave at midnight like they were supposed to they were delayed by 75 minutes and when they finally started setting ropes they had placed them in the wrong locations too low on the mountain you know where they weren't even needed and so by the time that the main climbing groups started their ascent right around 3 a.m they discovered that the ropes ran out right where they actually needed them and so they were able to set the ropes and they were then the most above the bottleneck i mean can you imagine climbing a vertical staircase where the handrails just end and below you is 9 000 feet of abyss this meant that on the morning of the critical summit push several climbers had to go back down the mountain pull up ropes from the lower section and then refix them higher up it took hours it took tremendous amounts of energy and remember they haven't even gone through the most difficult parts of the climb yet already they're up against the clock and plus it's not like they had large teams of sherpas helping them the climbers themselves were doing most of the work to cover for this miscommunication and organizational failure and so ultimately a 75 minute delay became a several hour delay and it didn't just cost time but it pushed climbers into the death zone of k2 during the exact time that you never want to be there around 6 a.m the sun was rising on the mountain and the climbers were finally in place even under the stress of this fixed rope drama uh rolf and cecilia took a second to look out at what was ahead of them beautiful views of the mountain the great serac hanging above the bottleneck these are the kinds of views that make what they do worth it these were the landscapes that defined the best moments of their five-year relationship and so in this moment rolf paused cecilia just before they got to the bottleneck and they were able to get to the bottom they decided to snap a quick photograph they kissed this might sound familiar from the beginning of the video by 8 a.m climbers were finally arriving at the bottleneck but they were greeted with pretty much the worst case scenario uh human traffic right turns out that when 29 elite climbers all need the same few hundred feet of terrain at the same exact time well it's not the smoothest operation getting each climber safely through this highly technical area took hours some of the climbers were able to get to the bottom of the bottleneck and so climbers developed early signs of frostbite as they took on and off their gloves to adjust the ropes others struggled with their oxygen supply the clock kept ticking and around 10 a.m a few climbers even decided to abandon the summit push entirely and turn around i imagine that a few of you might be thinking that this was a little early to make that call but um again these are some of the most experienced climbers in the world they knew how perfect you had to be during your summit push to reach the finish line and they were able to get to the bottom of the bottleneck and so after all the mishaps that morning they just they just didn't want to risk it any further however despite the few that turned around most climbers kept going because remember many of them have been waiting at base camp since june this very well could be their only weather window for the entire season maybe even for their entire lives they'd invested tens of thousands of dollars into this expedition and now they're so close they had summit fever behind cecilia and ralph in the bottleneck was drain mondich he was a serbian climber and he was clipped to the fixed rope right behind cecilia and he was feeling a little bit lightheaded he needed to adjust his oxygen system quickly and so he decided to actually pass cecilia and this is a pretty normal maneuver but under the stress that they had all been under maybe he did it a little bit rushed i don't know drain unclipped himself from the rope but he was able to get to the bottom of the At some point, he lost his balance. He actually bumped right into Cecilia, who stayed clipped in and was knocked off her feet, but of course she didn't fall. However, Drain was not so lucky. He fell violently down from the bottleneck as Cecilia and Rolf watched in horror, like 300 feet straight down the side of the mountain. The climbers who turned back could see Drain off in the distance through their binoculars. He even stood up briefly, but then he fell again and, well, he didn't get up a second time. After almost five minutes of back and forth, they decided that it was just too risky to turn back and maybe some of the climbers below them were better positioned to help Drain. And plus, the odds were that it wasn't likely that he was going to survive the injuries anyways, and so everyone kept climbing. And while these climbers may have made the right call about their ability to save Drain, maybe this was just a coincidence. This was a sign that the Savage Mountain was living up to its name on this particular day, because what they didn't know is that just a few hours later, during the recovery mission of Drain's body, the Savage Mountain would strike again. Jehan Baig, a Pakistani porter, was feeling a little bit lightheaded as well. He was acting kind of strange for reasons that no one could understand. As they hauled Drain's body back to Camp 4, he just kind of let go of the rope, keeping them on the mountain. The Savage Mountain didn't use the self-arrest technique to stop his own slide. Like, he didn't even try. He fell very slowly at first, but the speed picked up, and he ended up falling to his death. And so now, two people would not be coming home from K2. Two people, and no one had even reached the summit yet. Around 3.30pm, Alberto Zerain, a Spanish solo climber who had left earlier than everyone else, well, he became the first person to reach the summit of K2. And so now, two people, and no one had even reached the summit of K2. And knowing that he was already pushing the limits of how long you should be at that altitude, he made it back down through the bottleneck safely before dark. But he was the only one to make it back before dark. Rolf and Cecilia were climbing with another Norwegian, Lars Nessa. But somewhere around 2pm, about 300 feet below the summit, Rolf was ready to turn back. Maybe it was altitude sickness. Maybe he felt like he just didn't have the energy in him to make the final summit. And so he told Lars and Cecilia to keep going. After all, they would be the first Norwegians to ever summit K2. Rolf grabbed his wife's hand and released it, wishing her luck, believing wholeheartedly in Cecilia. Around 5.30pm, Cecilia and Lars pulled themselves up before realizing that what they saw ahead of them was no longer a sheet of ice. The savage mountain was now entirely below them. And Lars stood atop the summit of K2. Cecilia, rightfully, cheered. Rolf may have even heard her from down below. He, of course, was happy for them. But he also checked his watch and they were approaching over 14 hours in the death zone of K2. And the crazy thing is that Cecilia and Lars weren't even the last people to summit that day. Some people didn't even summit until after the sun went down at almost like 8pm. But when Cecilia and Lars were there, they were the last people to summit that day. Cecilia and Lars started to descend right around 6pm. They met up with Rolf after about 20 minutes. Cecilia and Rolf embraced each other, happy to see that they were both alive and well. And then the three of them started down together towards the fixed ropes above the bottleneck. It was getting darker by the minute. And even though they had headlamps, obviously, adding darkness to the already, like, ridiculously difficult scaling of the bottleneck is just not ideal, to put it mildly. Before Rolf started rappelling down the bottleneck, he turned to Cecilia to make sure that she was all clipped in, his headlight illuminating her as he got a final look. He then turned to Lars and said something that felt like it was almost a joke. He said, quote, Look after my wife. Not, I'll see you in camp. Not, I'll be careful. He said, look after my wife. It feels to me like some part of him is saying, look after my wife. Like, some part of him just knew. Like, some part of him understood that he might not make it down. And yet, this message wasn't about himself, it was about his beloved wife. Rolf went first, and once he was far enough along the fixed rope, Cecilia went next. It was now, like, straight up nighttime. Cecilia could see Rolf's headlamp in the darkness ahead of her. And then, a sound. Like, a horrible sound. I just think about the harmonica. The harmonica I told you about at the beginning. The sound that brought Cecilia into Rolf's orbit nearly five years earlier. But this sound was not anything like that. This was the sound of the Great Surrack. The massive, street-block-sized chunk of ice that had been hanging there above the bottleneck for decades. Suddenly, breaking free. Thousands of tons of ice plummeted down through the bottleneck. Cecilia felt the rope kind of jerk. She felt the ground vibrate beneath her feet. She looked over, and the fixed line. The ice had been severed all throughout the bottleneck. Oh, and in front of her, she couldn't see any more light. Rolf's headlamp was gone, and that's because Rolf Bay fell 9,000 feet down to the glacier below. He was gone. Cecilia watched all of this unfold, and there was nothing she could do about it. She was now just hanging there on the bottleneck, completely stunned. When Lars finally reached Cecilia a few minutes later, they knew that they didn't have much time left. They didn't have any time to grieve, at least not in this moment. However, Cecilia couldn't just bring herself to leave yet. I mean, she felt like her life was just sitting there at the bottleneck. It's almost as though, once she did finally leave the place where she lost Rolf, she would be losing everything, right? But then again, Cecilia and Lars were stranded in the death zone above 26,000 feet in altitude. In the dark, mind you. Now, with no fixed ropes. And that reality soon came. K2 just cut the only way down, and now it was basically a race between life and death. Thankfully, Cecilia had been carrying an extra 100 meter Kevlar rope in her pack this entire time, which is either insanely lucky or more likely just insanely smart because she knew what she was doing. And so she and Lars used that rope to rappel down the rocky section on the left side of the bottleneck, avoiding the main route where the Surak had fallen. There only. The only other support was ice axes and crampons. No harnesses, no, like, proper fixed ropes. And through some miracle, they made it down. And they left that rope hanging on the new route, hoping that the other dozen or so climbers who were stranded above them would find it and be able to use it. Cecilia and Lars reached Camp 4 around 11 p.m. that night. And finally, Cecilia had a second, a second to breathe. And this. This is where the true reality began to sink in. However, the job also wasn't finished. And to be honest, the disaster on K2 was just getting started. 18 people had summited that day, but most of them summited after the Surak fell. They were now all stuck above the bottleneck with no way down. Right. Many climbers tried to descend in the darkness and knowing the urge. But in the emergency of the situation, these elite climbers were basically mad, scrambling down K2 with no fixed ropes. Some climbers even use each other as counterweights for their harnesses, which is just extremely dangerous. But in a testament to their skill, you know, these, again, were some of the best climbers in the world, several of them made it back to camp that night. Most of them ended up kind of just waiting in the snow all night, slowly freezing, waiting for the sunrise so that they could descend maybe a little bit more. Safely, and this is where the story gets truly horrific, as if it hasn't been bad enough. So when the sun rose, several climbers who had been stranded on the mountain began descending once again. And this is where another nightmare scenario played out. Three Korean climbers and their Sherpa had somehow become tangled in ropes above the bottleneck. And normally this would be bad enough already. But to add to this, they were actually tangled upside down. And unable to free themselves. I mean, talk about pure hell, right? A few climbers who passed them on their descent felt that they had no way to help these poor guys. Maybe they were doubting if what they were seeing was even real or if it was just like a trick of the savage mountain. I don't know. However, Gair MacDonald, an Irish climber, well, he stopped. It was just in his nature to be helpful. He had summited Everest previously and had already saved several lives during a different trek through Denali. And so when he reached the tangled Korean climbers on the morning of August 2nd, he didn't hesitate. He spent three hours trying to free them. According to the best available evidence, he did manage to free the Koreans. He cut them loose and they all started descending. But then, despite this act of pure heroism, the savage mountain struck again. Throughout the morning of August 2nd, giant chunks of ice from the Great Surak continued to collapse in multiple avalanches. All four of them were destroyed. Four men, the three Koreans and the Irish climber, were swept away from the bottleneck. And then, almost. Immediately, another Serac fell, killing two climbers from Nepal who had been trying to rescue them. It was a morning of pure carnage, capping off the worst 36 hours maybe in mountaineering history. By the end of August 2nd, the death toll was just staggering. 11 of the 29 climbers who tried to summit K2 on August 1st had died, and the mountain would be keeping most of those bodies for good. My understanding is that this was the single deadliest incident in K2 history. And obviously, while this story is focused on Rolf and Cecilia, each of these souls have their own story. It's just so brutal that they all had this chapter of it in common. Cecilia Skog tried to sleep on August 2nd to recover from the exhaustion, both physical and emotional, of the day prior. However, she had to make a satellite phone call to Rolf's parents in Norway. Her in-laws. Rolf was their only child, and Cecilia had to tell them that he was gone. She was crying between sentences, and it just sounded like she had given up. But Rolf's father said to her, quote, We only have you now. You must get down safely. And so, with Rolf's father's message in mind, and Rolf's voice still echoing in her mind, Cecilia made it back down to base camp, which is incredible. But this is the end of the story. This was just the beginning of the road ahead, because for the first time in five years, she was now a solo traveler. She had to fly home to Norway alone, all the way back to their now-empty apartment. The same apartment where she and Rolf had planned their future together. Where they had talked about having kids. Talked about what adventures that they would take their kids on. Where they even debated whether they should try to summit K2 in the first place. Cecilia later said, quote, Rolf was my home. And I had to leave him up there on the mountain. For nearly a year, Cecilia barely left her house. Sometimes she would go to the beach and just kind of sit in the grass, hiding away from the world, if you will. She was obviously processing unspeakable grief. But she was also processing something else just as difficult, maybe even more difficult. I don't know. I've never experienced this, thankfully. I'm talking about survivor's guilt. Like, why did she make it, but Rolf didn't? it but rolf didn't should she have insisted that rolf come to the summit with them sadly there were no answers to any of these questions there was no closure but she did keep coming back to something that Rolf would often say, not just to her, but to everyone in his life. And that was that you should not just sneak after your dreams. You should grab them with both hands and hold them really tight and try to live them. Rolf died chasing his dream. He knew the risks. He accepted them. And he wouldn't want Cecilia to stop living just because he was gone. And so, spoiler alert, Cecilia followed Rolf's advice. In November of 2009, she and an American explorer named Ryan Waters set out to cross Antarctica completely unsupported and unassisted. No supply drops, no help, just them, their skis, and the 200 pounds of supplies and sleds that they dragged behind them. It took 70 days, and Cecilia cried almost every day on that expedition. On January 21, 2010 she became the first woman to complete an unassisted unsupported crossing of antarctica and of course she dedicated the achievement to rolf she never went back to high altitude mountaineering i mean the k2 experience was enough and instead she focused on polar expeditions on writing books and on hosting tv programs in norway she eventually got remarried and she had two daughters and she continued adventuring just in a slightly different way and if you're wondering what the the fallout was with k2 after this whole situation well after 2008 there was definitely intense scrutiny on k2 expeditions reinhold mesner a legendary italian climber was scathing in his criticism he told german television quote people today are booking k2 package deals almost as if they were buying some all-inclusive trip to bangkok something like this is not professional it is pure stupidity my understanding is that k2 isn't regulated the way that mount everest is there's no central authority enforcing rules each expedition team operates independently and as long as people are willing to pay money and take risks the same problem is going to persist however there have been improvements since 2008 more attention has been paid to rope fixing there's been stricter emphasis on turnaround times as well as improved weather forecasting and this has allowed k2 to become a slightly more popular mountain to climb while also slightly decreasing fatalities however k2 is still k2 the bottleneck is still there the great serac is still hanging people still die on the mountain all the time which means that the savage mountain can still live up to its name at pretty much any moment now here's the photo that i showed you at the very start of the video when this photo was taken rolf and cecilia had no idea what the next few hours were going to bring but now you do and that's why it's now so hard to look at but weirdly and this is really hard to explain um that's also what makes looking at this photo a little comforting to me like in this exact moment before any of the chaos they were just two people in love completely present this photo is heartbreaking for us but for them it was it was peace and though i wish their story ended differently i'm i'm still very glad that they got to have that moment rolf and cecilia's story is devastating because we know exactly what happened but our next story is haunting because we don't and the deeper that you get into it the less certain anything becomes so without further ado i present the mystery of glenn and bessie hyde in the grand canyon the story you're about to hear has haunted park rangers for decades and it has three of the most astonishing coincidences that i've ever seen many people have suggested that the couple in that photo glenn and bessie hide well their disappearance was simply the result of an accident but over the years whispers of a very dark secret have surfaced hints that perhaps there was no accident after all stick around folks because the most unsettling we'll say twist in this story comes at the very end in november of 1928 newlyweds glenn and bessie hyde departed on the most epic and also tragic honeymoon imaginable and the crazy thing is that this honeymoon had goals way beyond just celebrating their new marriage and in order to explain what i mean by that i need to take you on a virtual trip right now to the grand canyon where this mystery actually starts now i think it's safe to say that when glenn and bessie hyde visited the grand canyon on their honeymoon again they had very different intentions probably from any other couple who had ever visited it they weren't there again to celebrate their marriage and they weren't even there to take in the scenery they were there to make themselves rich and famous by all accounts the 22 year old Bessie and her 29 year old husband Glenn were about to enter what should have been the best season of their young lives I mean you see this all the time right from the outside in the couple had it all but as is so often the case especially now we know this with social media and everything the outside picture of somebody's life doesn't always reveal the truth now glenn had spent much of his childhood and his adult life for that matter living and working on his family's farms in the twin falls idaho area and in 1928 after they got married bessie joined him there for most normal couples this this this farm life probably would have been enough i mean i know for of fact there's couples out there right now who dream of this kind of life but the thing is Glenn and Bessie were not a normal couple they had what I can only describe as this thirst for adventure that just couldn't be satisfied by working on a small farm and thus right after they got married Glenn got to work formulating a insane plan we'll say that would bring the couple the adventure that they so desperately desired and also make them rich and famous in the process. His plan was to turn the new couple's honeymoon into a record breaking feat that would allow them to leave their boring farm life behind forever. Sounds great on paper, right? Well, there is just one problem with this plan and that is that it was going to be much more dangerous than Glenn had ever imagined. So Glenn convinced Bessie that the couple should spend their honeymoon traveling down the green and Colorado rivers in this homemade 20 foot wooden boat that Glenn had this plan came with two important goals. Goal number one, one was to beat the speed record for this particular route and goal number two was to make Bessie the very first woman in history to successfully navigate the treacherous waters through the Grand Canyon. Now it's important to understand that by the year 1928 the public had become mesmerized by these stories of daring outdoor adventurers who were pushing the boundaries of human potential to new heights. Think people like I don't know George Mallory and Andrew Irvin who just four years prior had disappeared while attempting to summit Mount Everest for the very first time. And just one year earlier Charles Lindbergh had made history by successfully completing the first transatlantic flight. I'm telling you the public was just craving these new records these new stories when it came to the outdoors and these things and so Glenn Hyde had this vision of making the first transatlantic flight. And so Glenn Hyde had this vision of him and Bessie breaking those two records I told you about earlier in the Grand Canyon and then returning home to wild media attention speech invitations and enough opportunities to kind of cash in on their records you know to make money from them that the couple would never need to spend another day working on the farm ever again. I told you there was a problem with it and I need to get into that now. I told you it was dangerous and in case you don't believe me I need to know that while Glenn did have a lot of experience on the river he had completed a couple different multi-day river trips before he had built boats things like that. Well his wife Bessie she had zero boating experience none absolutely nothing whatsoever she had never navigated violent rapids like the ones that the couple would see every single day on this trip. And so Glenn Hyde had this vision of making the first transatlantic flight. And so Glenn Hyde and as if that's not bad enough it's been rumored that perhaps Bessie wasn't even really as into this idea as her husband was. That's not confirmed but it has been suggested that Glenn was really the one pushing this and Bessie kind of just went along with it. Now I don't know if that means she didn't want to go at all and she she clearly was very capable but I don't know regardless of that on October 20th the Hyde's journey began when they left the town of Green River Utah. They pushed off into the river you know with their homemade boat and they began floating away from civilization with nothing except for their ambition and the promise of uncharted waters ahead. They dreamed of re-emerging weeks later back into civilization not as ordinary explorers but as icons with newfound fame, and wealth beyond their wildest aspirations. And in a very ironic twist of fate this trip would actually end up making the Hyde's famous. That fame would just come for all the wrong reasons. The first few weeks of the couple's adventure actually went surprisingly well. I mean sure they had a lot of fun but they didn't have a lot of fun. They didn't have a lot of fun. They didn't each been thrown out of the boat over the course of a few different incidences on the rapids. Oh and another riverman had compared their homemade boat to a coffin. Oh oh yeah and uh they made the decision to not take any life jackets with them but you know despite all of that stuff I do have to give them some credit because by November 8th they had traveled a pretty considerable distance and were basically knocking on the front door of the Grand Canyon. But before they entered the Grand Canyon, Glen and the rest of the Hyde's crew had gone to the Grand Canyon and they were told that they Glen and Bessie made a very brief stop into the outpost of Lee's Ferry. Now in my opinion this particular part of the story has been largely overlooked by a lot of people and I say that because it's in Lee's Ferry that Glen and Bessie were given a very direct dire warning about what could happen to them if they continued down the river. A small group of locals in Lee's Ferry, you know a group of people who were intimately familiar with that river, with the terrain that the couple would be facing ahead, they pleaded with Glen and Bessie to abandon their journey. They told the Hydes that their small boat would not be sufficient to carry them through the rapids that they were going to be facing. They told them that not taking life vests was basically a dance with death itself. They told them all these things they warned them dude and Glen and Bessie didn't listen. They had already told Glen and Bessie that they were going to give up. They had already persevered through mile after mile of deadly rapids. Their confidence was clearly running very high and tragically they ignored, they completely ignored all of the warnings that they were given. They pushed off from Lee's Ferry, they continued on down the river and for the next couple days at least their decision seemed to have been vindicated. Finally Glen and Bessie entered the Grand Canyon and they successfully navigated the Grand Canyon River's treacherous waters for just a couple days before making their next resupply stop at Grand Canyon Village. On November 15th, 1928, they docked their boat and then they hiked up to the rim of the Grand Canyon where they eventually introduced themselves to a man named Emery Kolb. Emery Kolb was a very well-known photographer who actually ran a studio that sat right up against the edge of the Grand Canyon. An absolutely beautiful place to have a studio like this and given Glen's ambition to achieve this this fame through the journey that they were on, it's no surprise that that he approached the prominent photographer Emery Kolb asking him to capture a few portraits of himself and Bessie. The result of this request was these photos right here. They show the couple who had now been on the by the way looking weathered a little bit tired you know but largely in good spirits glenn and bessie told emery that they would return to the village after their journey was over in order to retrieve these photos that would give emery some time to develop them you know it makes total sense they would just come back for the photos later but as fate would have it the couple would never see the images that you just saw a second ago now emery was very fascinated with the hides and their journey and he spent a considerable amount of time with them while they were in grand canyon village he was fascinated but he was also very worried and so he also spent a considerable amount of time trying to convince them to abandon their journey just like the locals had done a few days earlier in lee's ferry and this is where it starts to get a little a little a little weird he wasn't just concerned for their safety he felt like something was was off between the couple particularly something was off with bessie she never outright said it but emery got the sense that bessie was kind of scared it's like she didn't really feel comfortable continuing on so he tries and tries to convince them particularly glenn to you know go home don't risk your lives doing this but he he fails at this and so as kind of a last resort a fallback he he offered the couple his spare life vests at least you know if you guys are going to continue on wear these life vests it's going to be much safer but glenn refused this request i mean without reason or hesitation even he turned down these life vests and his his reasoning for this remains a mystery to this day as far as i'm aware but folks it gets even weirder because just as the couple were preparing to hike back down the into the canyon back down to their boat emery's daughter kind of came up to the group and apparently she caught bessie's attention the little girl who was neatly dressed and she was just pristine she was clean well she stood in very sharp contrast to the hides who were obviously you know almost 30 days into this trip through the wilderness they were rugged and weathered you know almost a month of living out in the wild like this you know you get this clean girl you get this dirty pair of adventurers and so taking particular interest in the little girl's shoes bessie commented quote i wonder if i'll ever wear pretty shoes again those were her exact words it's unclear what she meant by this comment you know maybe it was just kind of a slip up or she didn't express herself right or maybe she was just trying to compliment the girl in her shoes i don't know you you can't deny that it is a very disturbing comment given the events that i'm about to tell you about next as the hides were leaving grand canyon village they agreed to allow a man who was named adolph sutru to join them for a short stint on the river it's not exactly clear to me who this guy was or even why he joined them or why they let him join but one thing is definitely clear which is the hides boat and glenn's leadership made Adolph extremely uncomfortable. So uncomfortable in fact that Adolph parted ways with the Hydes at the very first opportunity which presented itself. To Adolph, the group's boat was not sufficient to handle the increasingly violent rapids of the Grand Canyon. He also felt that Glenn was struggling to navigate and he was concerned that the couple didn't tie up the boat when they made camp each night. But most strikingly, Adolph noticed that Bessie also seemed to be uncomfortable and scared, which is an observation that is in line with what Emery Kolb had noticed only a few days earlier. About two days after they left Grand Canyon Village, the group pulled into an outpost known as Hermit Camp and when they did this, Adolph got the hell off of their boat. They all ate lunch with a few of the local people and they were able to get to the camp. Adolph was able to get to the camp, but he was unable to get out of the camp and he was unable to get to the camp as well. He then took this photo of Glenn and Bessie. This is the same photo that I showed at the beginning of the video because this is the last photo ever taken of Glenn and Bessie Hyde. Unlike the photos that were taken by Emery Kolb just a few days earlier, in this photo, the couple looks extremely tired and extremely worn out. Glenn looks cold and emotionless. His expression, as rigid as stone, while Bessie's eyes tell a very different story. They're wide, they're pleading, almost as if she was silently screaming for help. After this photo was taken, the couple went back to their boat, they launched into the Colorado River once again, and then they vanished forever. The date was November 18th, 1928. Multiple weeks went by before anybody realized, that the Hydes were missing. And this makes sense, you know, they had been traveling in the backcountry after all. And it's not like back then they had cell phones or satellite messengers to stay in touch with people. And so it wasn't abnormal for them to go long periods of time without checking in with anybody. But by the first week of December, it was very clear that something had gone wrong, that the couple was in fact missing. And that's when a formal search was launched. This search was unsuccessful for, for almost two weeks. And so the couple was two weeks. But then on December 19th, a search plane that was flying high over the Grand Canyon noticed something very, very important. At the end of the canyon, this plane's pilot spotted an empty boat that was snagged on some rocks, completely standstill right there in the middle of the Colorado River. Due to the remoteness of this area, it wouldn't be until a few days later around Christmas Eve. That the boat was finally reached, you know, via the river and its state of discovery only deepened the mystery of what the hell had happened to Glenn and Bessie. You see, the boat was still floating and it was completely undamaged. There was a little bit of water in the bottom of it, but it was far from capsized. And this stood in very stark contrast to the assumption, that the couple had wrecked their boat and died slash disappeared as a result. It was very strange that the boat was still in working condition when it was found. And even more strange was the fact that the couple's gear and all of their belongings, well, it was, it was all in order. Everything was strapped down inside the boat. Everything was organized. It wasn't a mess. It didn't look like anything strange happened. It was all in order. And so the couple's gear and all of their belongings had happened. Some of the items that were still inside the boat were the couple's camera, Bessie's journal, and also Glenn's gun, which, you know, those are some things that the couple probably would have taken with them if they had abandoned the boat intentionally. Literally, I'm telling you, nothing else was missing from the boat. The only thing that was missing at all was Glenn and Bessie themselves. The film that was inside the couple's camera was developed. And Bessie's journal was also analyzed. And these two things revealed that the couple were alive and well as late as November 30th, which was day 42 of their trip. But after that date, there were no more journal entries and there were no more photos taken. And folks, to this day, no confirmed trace of either Glenn or Bessie has ever been found. However, this is not the end of our story. Things are about to get a lot weirder and, frankly, a little bit disturbing as we discuss the potential theories about what happened to them. So the most obvious and the prevailing explanation for their disappearance is that Glenn and Bessie had an accident and then they died on the river. Now, again, it's strange that their boat was in the condition it was when they died. But it's not the end of the story. It was found. And that kind of contradicts this theory. But then again, there are some people out there that have suggested that maybe they were forced to abandon their boat or maybe it floated away from their campsite one night because they didn't tie it up. And then the couple tried to hike their way out, you know, hike their way back to safety and then died in the process of doing that. And I'll be honest with you, all that stuff is very plausible. But there have been three extremely bad things that have happened to Glenn and Bessie. One of them is that Glenn and Bessie have had some really bizarre twists in this story over the past multiple decades. And these twists have taken this mystery to a whole new level of weirdness. Here's what I mean. So in 1971, over 40 years after Glenn and Bessie had disappeared, a group of rafters were on a multi-day guided trip through the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River when they made camp very close to the spot where Glenn and Bessie had died. And they were able to find a way to get to the Bessie's boat had been found abandoned. This group, they gathered around the campfire at the end of the day, and their guide began to tell the story of Glenn and Bessie's disappearance. They're in the middle of this incredible story that took place so close to where they were camping when all of a sudden, one of the quiet elderly members of this guided group interrupted and blurted out that she was dead. This woman said that her husband, Glenn, had been forcing her to continue with this river trip. And he had been very abusive. And in one day, she just snapped and she stabbed him to death and then hit his body and then fled the canyon on foot in order to go start a new life. The river guide and the people who heard this woman's story obviously reported it and they started to investigate it. And that's when Glenn and Bessie were able to find out that Glenn and Bessie were dead. And that begs a couple questions, of course. Were this woman's claims true? And was she really Bessie Hyde, you know, deciding to come clean after all of these years? And the truth is that in all likelihood, she was not. It turns out this woman's real name was Elizabeth Cutler, and an investigation revealed that she was a retired psychologist who had this reputation for for kind of just messing with people, essentially, you know, playing with people. Playing mind games with them. In fact, when she was interviewed after this guided trip was over, she denied ever claiming to be Bessie Hyde. And this very bizarre twist in the story was basically dismissed as a dead end. But the weirdness doesn't stop there. In fact, it's actually just getting started. So a few years after this woman bizarrely came out and said she was Bessie Hyde, Emery Cold, again, who was one of the last individuals to see the Hydes on the river, well, Emery passed away. Remember, he owns this this studio, this property right on the rim of the Grand Canyon. And so after he died, his studio was searched. And by the way, once again, this is the very same studio that he photographed the Hydes at before their disappearance. And while his studio was being searched, a very disturbing discovery was made. A skull with a bullet hole in it, by the way. And of course, this fueled wild speculation that the skull belonged to Glenn Hyde. And perhaps he was murdered by Emery, so that Emery could like run off with Bessie or something like that. Emery, of course, was no longer alive when all of this speculation started. And he was therefore unable to deny any of these rumors. And so they actually persisted for many, many years beyond this discovery. It is very strange, right? Like, why would Emery have literally kept a skeleton in his closet for years and years and years without telling anyone? That question remains unanswered to this day. But the question of whether or not Emery killed Glenn Hyde has been answered. And as you probably have guessed, the answer is that he didn't. Forensic testing was done, as well as forensic comparisons between Glenn's facial face of this unknown skull. and all of these tests concluded that the skull did not belong to glenn and folks it doesn't stop there so so now let's flash forward to 1992 and this is the year when the famous grand canyon rafter named georgie clark passed away georgie was very well known in the grand canyon in the rafting community even famous you could say for being the very first woman to become a commercial river guide in the grand canyon she had devoted much of her life to the waters of the colorado river and she was basically a legend in the national park and after she died her friends and her family were kind of organizing her belongings when they made a couple very shocking discoveries first they found a small pistol that was hidden among her possessions then they found her birth certificate which shockingly stated that georgie wasn't even her original name apparently georgie clark had changed her name after she became an adult and this birth certificate proved that her original name was bessie de ross if her original name was bessie why would she have changed it it's a very because in what i find to be the most shocking twist probably in this entire story georgie's friends and her family found among her possessions the marriage certificate for glenn and bessie hide you heard that right i i fact checked this as much as i could because it almost sounds unbelievable like it almost like it sounds crazy right why why would this woman have glenn and bessie's marriage certificate when these discoveries were reported this obviously started a lot of chatter about whether georgie clark who had spent so much time on the river in the grand canyon was actually bessie hide herself this missing woman from the grand canyon there were always these rumors that bessie hide had killed glenn and then ran off and she started a new life and so these discoveries found among georgie clark's possessions only fueled the flames for this theory however despite the coincidence of georgie changing her name from and also having possession of bessie hide's marriage certificate this theory that georgie really was bessie hide has been largely discredited once again georgie clark was very famous her life was very well documented and though she did bear a resemblance to bessie hide historians have made detailed comparisons between their appearances and concluded that they're not the same person of course that still doesn't really explain why georgie clark had possession of the marriage certificate but it's likely that she got it over the years just through her connections within the grand canyon rafting community but still it's very very strange even a little bit unsettling isn't it chances are that glenn and bessie died in an accident on the river and and were just never found but given all of these coincidences over the years i don't know they they just give me this gut feeling that there's got to be something more to this story that we don't know about so i don't know do you agree with that like let me know what you think about this entire story