Marco Confortola humped his trumpet up to 17,400 feet. One night, unexpectedly, and after most of the climbers at the K2 base camp were already in their tents, he began to play.

For three months, I, like Marco and the members of his Italian expedition, had chosen to live in a tent in the shadow of the world's second-tallest mountain. At night it was minus 22 or minus 40 or minus 58. The number didn't matter then and it doesn't now. What did matter was that on more than one occasion I heard Marco's trumpet emerging out of the aching silence in a place rendered barren by meager oxygen and icy cold.

He played a melody I couldn't identify but I loved it still. The song had the kind of long and somber notes that made Miles Davis a legend. It made me feel, however fleetingly, as if I were home in my soft, warm bed instead of sleeping on an 11,000-year-old ice skating rink known as the K2 glacier. It was a moment Marco created for all of us who had come so far from so many different places.

I strained to hear more. But at base camp, I was living as if I were in the Pliocene ice age, the Earth's last great glacial era. I really didn't want to unzip my sleeping bag and risk releasing my body heat. I did manage, however, to wrench my head from the hood of my bag to hear the music more clearly. Marco's trumpet saved all of us that night. It redeemed us from the vast, frozen, emptiness of the western Himalayas perched at the intersection of Pakistan, China and India.

That was what I recalled when I first heard his name on National Public Radio as the last-found survivor of the 2008 K2 disaster. I thought of Marco's trumpet and how his delicate, frostbitten fingers were failing him now.

Marco will always be a "mountain climber" to me. The term "survivor" just doesn't sound like him. It makes him sound like a victim. That isn't the Marco I knew.

He was in charge of his own destiny and made his own choices. How else can you explain a grown man carrying a trumpet to the base camp at K2?

HOW A GUY FROM HAWAI'I GOT TO JOIN ITALIANS' 50TH ANNIVERSARY ASCENT OF K2

I met Marco Confortola in the summer of 2004. I arrived at base camp as the self-titled "One-Man 2004 Hawaiian K2 Expedition." I fancied myself as a freelance adventure travel photographer and journalist. At the time I had earned a spot on the masthead of Honolulu magazine as a contributing editor. All that meant was I wasn't a paid employee. It also meant I worked for little money and even less glory. Covering the 50th anniversary of the summit ascent of K2 by the Italians wasn't going to change the former, but it might change the latter.

Like Marco, I had an Italian surname. But unlike him, my mother is Japanese from a little valley outside of Honolulu called Palolo. I was born in the Islands and I loved the beach and the sun and lifestyle. Marco was quick to laugh and make fun of everyone, himself included. I remember how he once mockingly pleaded, "Guy, you live in paradise!" He paused and I knew what was coming; "Per favore, what are you doing here?" Maybe now he'll come and visit me in tropical Honolulu.

It was a fair question. As unlikely as it might be, the short answer is I liked climbing mountains. The long answer is embedded in history and chance. An American expedition to climb K2 ended in failure in 1953. A year later, Ardito Desio led an Italian expedition to the summit of K2 in Pakistan's Karakoram mountain range on July 31, 1954. Italy has thought of K2 as its mountain ever since.

The chance part of the equation led me to Guido Carlo Pigliasco, who quickly became my dear friend. As it happens in the universe of random selection, I later learned that Guido Carlo was Ardito Desio's great-nephew. Through Guido Carlo's efforts (he's a faculty member of the anthropology department at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa), I found myself with an entre as a journalist and photographer to the 50th anniversary climb of K2 sponsored by the Italian government.

PYRAMID OF ICE

The 2004 Italian expedition included Marco Confortola as one of its team of climbers. The expedition also made no bones about claiming K2 as its own. In a striking, if not surreal, symbol of its presence, the command center for the Italian expedition was located inside a white canvas tent constructed in the shape of a pyramid 39 feet square at its base and 39 feet high. The intent was to symbolize K2's angular rock shoulders, which form a nearly perfect pyramid. In the perpetual snow and ice, the tent looked like Giza during an ice age. But the two words emblazoned across its sides said it all: "Casa Italia" ("The Italian House").

Fifty years after the first ascent, the re-conquest of K2 had become a matter of Italian national pride. The 2004 expedition was led by Agostino Da Polenza, who himself had reached the summit of K2 in 1983 from China's northern approach. Agostino, leaving nothing to chance, sought additional assurance and thus was granted an audience with the pope. Even God was part of the expedition.

The blessing seemed to work. In the summer of 2004, Marco and his countrymen were climbing machines. Five of Agostino's expedition members successfully climbed Mount Everest in June of 2004 and then came to K2 in July as if climbing the tallest mountain in the world was merely a warm-up exercise. Marco Confortola was one of those who reached the summit of Everest along with Karl Unterkircher, Mario Merelli, Alex Busca, and Tarcisio Bello.

"K2 will be hard," Agostino warned, as if the obvious needed to be emphasized. He spoke from personal experience, as the 2004 expedition was Agostino's fourth journey into the Karakoram to attack K2. But it is still the Baltistani people of this isolated region who have the greatest respect for this deadly pyramid-shaped beast of rock and ice. To them, it is not a geologic designation — "K2." To them it is Chogori, the King of Mountains.

When Ardito Desio came to the Karakoram in 1954, the expedition lived in virtual isolation for six long months. But not Agostino's team. Even at 17,400 feet, the Italians were going to be Italian. Marco and his compatriots enjoyed Barilla pasta doused with Monini olive oil. They sliced Parma prosciutto and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. They had an endless supply of fresh vegetables and mangos trekked up to them weekly.

They even had fresh eggs cooked for them every morning for breakfast. On one occasion, two crates of eggs were placed in the back seat of a Pakistani army helicopter and flown up to the expedition. At $3,500 a trip, I calculated a single egg cost about $23.

Agostino's expedition was also so technologically in touch you felt they had the capability of ordering a pizza and having it delivered. They indulged themselves with every advantage of the latest equipment. They constructed a solar energy plant and battery storage system to power their laptops, satellite radios, TV broadcasts and Inmarsat Internet connections. They had cellular telephones and tents lit with energy-efficient light bulbs. They even set up a studio for the RAI press to edit their video footage.

MEANEST MOUNTAIN

But in the West Himalayas, money and technology still wouldn't make K2 any easier to climb. In late July of 2004, Marco and three teams of climbers began their ascent and all but one turned back due to equipment and provision problems. In spite of these difficulties, history repeated itself on July 26, 2004, as an Italian team led by Silvio Mondinelli and Karl Unterkircher reached the summit of K2 with teammates Ugo Giacomelli, Walter Nones and Michele Campagnoni.

The difference in height between Mount Everest at 29,032 feet and K2 (28,251 feet) is just a little more than 780 feet. Until this year, in the 50 years since both mountains were first successfully climbed, more than 2,000 people have reached the summit of Mount Everest, but barely 200 have done the same on K2.

Mountaineers concede that the combination of unpredictable weather, the severe angle of ascent along the Abruzzi Ridge, the technical aspects of the route, the cold, and the lack of oxygen above 26,250 feet all give K2 the edge as the meanest mountain on earth.

In fact, it is so mean it kills an average of one out of every four climbers. These statistics aren't hypothetical. On any given day, my Baltistani guide or I would find the remains of dead climbers as we traipsed across the glacier fields. I am happy to know that I will not find Marco's bones one day in those ice fields.

For all of its hardships and challenges, there is great joy in living at the foot of a legendary mountain like K2. Gian Pietro Verza, a member of the Italian expedition, put it this way: "In the mountains, there is nothing that separates you from nature. We in the developed countries have placed machines everywhere to detach us from the pure beauty that is around us here. That is why I only feel alive when I am climbing."

I think Marco climbed for a different reason: It was fun. Plain and simple. And a cool place to play his trumpet. Perhaps that sums up why, in spite of the immense harshness of the Karakoram, we were all there. It was a really cool place to be.

Guy Sibilla is a freelance writer and photographer. When he's not traveling, he lives in Honolulu.