The K2 winter summit is one of the most challenging climbs in mountaineering.
John Snorri from Iceland, Juan Pablo Mohr from Chile and Ali Sadpara from Pakistan crossed the 8,000-metre level - below the 8,611-metre peak - before contact was lost on February 5th.
Last month, a Nepali team set a new world record to reach the summit of the mountain in winter. But others have also died while trying to achieve the same feat. Sergi Mingote from Spain and Atanas Skatov from Bulgaria both died from the falls during the mountain descent.
Chris Burke is the first Australasian woman to climb K2. She has climbed 10 of the 14 ‘8,000 metres’ peaks in the world, including Mount Everest. She says the famously called ‘savage mountain’ is a challenge even for expert mountaineers.
“I have met Muhammad Ali Sadpara, on the Dhaulagiri [mountain range in Nepal] as recently as 2019," she told SBS Urdu.
"Very quickly he was hitting up, and I was hitting out. Atanas and Sergi whom I climbed with on Dhaulagiri, also in 2019, unfortunately, died on K2 as well. The winter expedition on K2 at the moment has had a number of people, unfortunately, die over recent attempts.
Sadly, you have the most challenging conditions on K2 at the moment.
"K2 is around 250 metres shy of Everest [in terms of height, Everest height: 8,849 metres), but the weather is treacherous while the winds are huge. Along with the technical challenges, it is steep, it is unrelenting, there are crevasses high up on the mountain, there is a huge serac sitting high above camp 4, which claimed 11 lives in 2008."
In summer, it is one of the most challenging mountains to get good weather windows and stable weather [to climb] and here we have winter attempts at times when the temperatures are between -40 to -60 degrees.
It is estimated that so far more than 85 climbers have died on the K2 mountain while less than 400 have reached the summit. Compared to that, around 300 mountaineers have died on Mount Everest while around 5,790 mountaineers have climbed the tallest mountain in the world.
On 2nd August 2008, 11 mountaineers from France, Ireland, Norway, Serbia, Nepal, South Korea and Pakistan died during multiple falls on the mountain within 24 hours due to challenging conditions.
The Pakistani climber’s son, Sajid Sadpara, was along with the three climbers but due to a fault in the equipment returned to the camp, he went back again to search for the missing climbers.
22-year-old Sajid Sadpara left the 3 mountaineers at the 'bottleneck' on K2 due to a fault in the equipment. Source: A BALTI/AFP via Getty Images
Talking to media on Monday, 22-year-old said that the three mountaineers should have "reached the summit but might have had the accident on the descent because at night it started to get very windy."
“At about 8,200 meters, at the Bottleneck, I felt that I was not feeling well, I was lacking oxygen [up to that point Sajid and his father had ascended without using artificial oxygen]. My father told me to use the oxygen from the client [John Snorri] because there was enough.
“When I was putting the regulator on, the oxygen started to leak because it didn’t fit well. As I was not feeling well, my father told me to go down, while they continued up. At 12 o’clock I began to descend towards Camp 3, which I arrived at 5 in the afternoon. I spoke to the base camp and explained that my teammates were trying to reach the top and that the next day we would descend together. They did not carry a satellite phone or walkie talkie.”
Muhammad Ali Sadpara, a national mountaineering hero in Pakistan, has climbed 8 of the 14 world's highest mountains and recently received the sponsorship from the Government of Pakistan to climb all the remaining mountains.
Below is the tweet from Sadpara's Twitter account before he made the final push for the mountain's summit.
John Snorri from Iceland had already climbed K2 earlier in the summers of 2017 and wanted to do the same in the winter expedition. On his website, John says that the climb isn’t just about reaching the summit but also about demonstrating the immense human potential, "mind over the mountain.”
Juan Pablo from Chile had an amazing run in recent years, climbing Annapurna in 2017, Manaslu in 2018 and Lhotse, Dhaulagiri and Mount Everest in 2019.
Italian Mountaineer Tamara Lunger who accompanied them during a few stages wrote a heartfelt on Instagram, after the Chilean went missing.
Sergi Mingote (left), JP Mohr (centre) and Tamara Lunger (right) in a tent. Source: Instagram/Tamaralunger
What does it feel like at 8,000 metres?
Australian mountaineer Chris Burke told SBS Urdu that even with the assistance of supplementary oxygen it is very difficult to function properly at such a height.
“It is physically exhausting, reduced oxygen makes it difficult to breathe, your organs aren’t functioning as they do at sea-level. Once you get into the death zone, in terms of the human ability to survive over, the time it is very limited. The reduced oxygen impacts you mentally because you can become depressed, angry or you don’t think as clearly.
Mountaineer Chris Burke and Lakpa Sherpa at the K2 mountain summit in July, 2014. Source: Christine Burke
You've really got to have every experience come together to be able to succeed at that altitude.
SBS Urdu program broadcasts every Wednesday and Sunday at 6 PM (AEST)
