No fewer than 145 people topped out on K2 last Friday, more than doubling in a single day the Savage Mountain’s highest yearly total of 62 summits. With dozens of climbers still on the mountain, the number seems likely to surpass 200 this season.
To put that July 22 summit total in context, before this month only about 500 climbers had ever climbed K2. “Yesterday’s tally was a total of 20 percent to 25 percent of ALL people who have climbed Chogori,” mountaineering historian Bob Schelfhout Aubertijn commented July 23, using a local name for K2, the world’s second-highest peak at 8,611 meters (28,251 ft). George Bell coined another name for the mountain after the 1953 American K2 Expedition, telling a scrum of reporters, “It’s a savage mountain that tries to kill you.” The moniker has featured in headlines ever since, alongside the superlative deadliest and K2’s oft-cited (and now outdated) death rate of one fatality for every four summits. To alpinists though, K2 is simply the Climber’s Mountain, revered as the toughest climb in the Himalayan pantheon.
Some of that luster has faded in recent years, as the mountaineering-industrial complex has slowly chipped away at K2’s once impenetrable façade. Nearly as shocking as the sheer number of climbers atop K2 this season was the ratio of support climbers to paying summiteers, which climbing blogger Alan Arnette calculated at 88 Sherpa or Pakistani high altitude porters to 54 paying clients during Friday’s summit bonanza.
“The Everest model is now official on K2,” Arnette wrote.
While the conga line has been a fixture on Everest’s southeast ridge for a couple of decades now, mountaineers long thought K2 immune to that fate. The mountain was simply too difficult, its location too remote and its technical cruxes too high to tolerate the sort of commercial carpetbagging endemic to Everest. Or so they thought.
Some trace the taming of the Savage Mountain to 2017, when investment banker Vanessa O’Brien followed a train of Sherpas to the summit, where she posed for a selfie wearing a MAGA cap. But the groundwork was laid in neighboring Nepal, where outfitters perfected a blueprint for high-altitude success based on abundant bottled oxygen, fixed ropes to the summit, and armies of highly skilled Sherpa climbers. Soon enough, the successful model infiltrated the Karakoram. Now the Sherpa railway goes straight to the summit of K2, and any reasonably competent climber with a sufficient bankroll can punch his or her ticket to the top, given good weather and a bit of luck.
A rope-fixing team of Sherpa climbers working for U.S.-based Madison Mountaineering and Nepal’s 8KExpeditions reached the top after 10 o’clock Thursday night, July 21, and the summit stampede was on. By 3 o’clock Friday morning, all 15 Madison guides and clients had topped out, only to find their way down blocked by dozens more climbers on the ascent. Imagine Nepal boss Mingma G posted a now-viral video of the climbers queueing that morning at the Bottleneck, the gauntlet of hanging seracs at 26,900 feet.
The descending climbers had to fix about 200 meters of new rope to get safely around the jam, company owner Garrett Madison told ExploresWeb from base camp. Fortunately his crew had manpower to spare, with 13 guides supporting just two clients.
The same day, 8KExpeditions and Seven Summit Treks each put 11 people on top, and Furtenbach Adventures claimed 14 summits. Nimsdai Purja’s Elite Expeditions tallied 33. By Arnette’s reckoning, about 145 climbers had touched the top by the end of the day Friday, with more on the way up.
Successful climbers included Samina Baig, the first Pakistani woman to climb K2, and Norwegian Kristin Harila, who is in hot pursuit of Nimsdai’s record of 14 eight-thousanders in six months and six days. They and the vast majority of commercially supported climbers used supplementary oxygen.
Wasifa Nazreen (right), the first Bangladeshi woman to summit K2, celebrates with her guide July 22, 2022. Via Facebook.
Among the notable exceptions were three young female climbers, Jing He of China, Grace Tseng of Taiwan and Stefi Troguet of Andorra. “I can’t believe it. I’m on top of K2, with no O2. The hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Troguet tweeted from the summit via satellite tracker. She dedicated the climb to friends Sergi Mingote and Muhammad Ali Sadpara, who died on K2 in winter 2021, and Antonios Sykaris, lost on Dhaulagiri last April.
The salute comes as a reminder that despite giving up a record number of summits this week, K2 has not lost its edge. Even in this historic season of fine weather and clockwork efficiency, the Savage Mountain claimed three aspirants. Afghan Ali Akbar Sakhi died July 21 of apparent altitude complications at Camp 3. Canadian Richard Cartier and Matthew Eakin of Australia disappeared while descending from Camp 4 the next day. Their bodies were found near Japanese Camp 1 and Advanced Base Camp on Tuesday, not far from the rope lines that scores of triumphant summiteers followed home.
Top Photo: A frame from Mingma G’s recording of the quue at the K2 Bottleneck taken the morning of July 22, 2022.
What was once a source of true inspiration for adventure, climbing an 8000m peak, has now less of an adventure than running up the little mountain in my backyard. Climbing K2 is now the equivalent of getting in a modern car: there’s a chance that you might die and everything is pretty much done for you. At least when I’m running the 4 mile loop from my house up the peak behind me I’m on my own. If I get hurt, I have to figure it out and I don’t have to wait in line to get to the top. I’m not mad at it, but I don’t understand the mentality of those who choose to go do it. I guess the person with the MAGA hat on tells me all I need to know about those who think they’re accomplishing something by going to climb a mountain like this.
I hope you keep enjoying your 4 mile backyard runs. Please don’t bother K2, as its beyond your league.
Wow, did you completely misinterpret his comment, lol. And so judgmental about someone you literally know nothing about. Even AJ has trolls, I suppose. Sad panda.
Samina Baig and Kristin Harila are obviously in the same camp as Vanessa O’Brien.
It is beyond no one if you have the capital. Any tourist can make it if the weather is good when you have 15 experienced guides and fixed ropes. This is not climbing it is just business.
What’s next? Bolted climbs, fat skis, motors on bikes, oxygen to climb mountains… When does it stop?
Until the next extinction level event?
So many sad things about this rampant development.
It’s a bit like buying a degree; you have a degree, sure. But what did you authentically learn?
That CF at the Bottleneck makes me appreciate the numerous high viewpoints that can be had in the Cascades without all the crowds.
Guess I am just not competitive: rather take a spur to a quiet viewpoint, than join the throngs at the ‘top’!
I love adventure but to me climbing these high Himalayan peaks is a form of insanity. A lot of people or no people it’s still madness. So what does it matter that the mountain has been commercialized. People act surprised. Wherever there is a dollar to be made forces will gather. It’s only a matter of time before there’s some big calamity. They got lucky this time.
There was a calamity on K2 in 2008. The next one will probably be worse.
We had the experience but missed the meaning.
– T.S. Eliot
Watching the video reminded me of waiting in line for service at a DOT office. It can’t be the experience one envisioned prior to ascending. Each their own……
The description of Vanessa O’Brien is either comically misinformed, or a deliberate attempt to misinform. Do better.
Degoutant. Whatever happened to “by fair means?”
The reason people climb peaks like a herd of turtles is really pretty simple, I call it the Blowfish or Fugu Effect. Why do people eat Blowfish? Is it the best tasting fish available? Hell no. They eat it because unless it is properly prepared it can kill them. Relevant to climbing Everest or K2 the Blowfish Effect provides them with bragging rights as to both having done something “dangerous” and having one-upped the person to whom they are talking. It’s all about massaging their ego and dropping a lot of money in the process.
Das ist nur mehr Hoehenbergscheisse
Hanns Schell
K2 just lost it’s appeal for many adventurers
Colin has clearly never been to 8000m. People that have will likely have a valid opinion.
Mike Davey, you don’t know what you are talking about. Colin is reflecting on this current circus of rich people hanging on the coat tails of Nepali mountain entrepreneurs. It is not a mountaineering expedition. Real climbers plan and prepare their own routes and pay their own way by raising money for their trips. These people are being brought up the easier routes. I have friends still lying dead near the summit on K2 from their efforts in 1986. What is happening nowadays is a travesty?
Nothing says Mike knows what he’s talking about like making delusional assumptions.
the ultra super rich will pay millions to fly almost into space so what the heck this is maybe a cheaper alternative for the super rich who want to spend their money. seems crazy but to each their own.
When Vanessa O’Brien took her MAGA hat out, her Sherpa Mingma G. fumed, “Had I known you had that Trump hat in the rucksack, I would have never taken you above the basecamp”.
K2 like Everest has suffered the same fate as any tourist attraction. It has become a victim of its own success and let’s face it those making the ascent are not mountaineers but tourists on an ego trip. Mountaineers don’t have the herd mentality and climb because they have a unique take on life. I’d bet the likes of Pete Boardman and Joe Tasker wouldn’t be too impressed with the way their beloved sport has been turned into a bit of a circus.
Nice. Wearing the hat of somebody who says awful things about entire of groups of people in front of one of those groups of people he says awful things about. How classy and non attention seeking. Gross.
People will pay anything for the InstaFaceSpray photo. And of course everything can be made safer and dumbed down at the expense of other human beings. Where has true adventure gone? I can stand in line at the post office … zero appeal.
What is super interesting is how the Sherpas in a very short span of time have become the elite climbers of the world. They always had the physiology but the Khumbu Climbing School established in 2003 to train the Sherpas in safe climbing techniques opened the door. They are kind, funny, and extremely capable but were lacking in altitude climbing techniques and were dying in inordinate numbers being used by western companies mostly to carry loads between camps. A few of them obviously rose to the top but the wealth of talent was there and ready. Now, the western companies can basically hire small armies of Sherpas to get there clients to the top. They are all friends and family, extremely motivated, making excellent money. Their needs are less than westerners and they even suffer less from the continual GI problems that plague westerners. If you want to climb the most difficult mountains in the world hire some Sherpas!
“It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” For most it is a huge challenge just getting up there on a fixed rope. That’s why it will always have its appeal for many, even with a hundred people in line. Perhaps it is the people who now say it’s “too easy” who need to go find other, more difficult challenges, to feed their own egos?