Vassily Pivtsov, Maxut Zhumayev, Darek Zaluski, and Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner (from back to front) carry equipment to K2’s North Ridge route in preparation for their final 2011 summit push.
Savage From Any Angle
No amount of training or preparation can tame K2, the world's toughest summit
The world’s second-highest mountain is beautiful to behold, difficult to climb, and frequently deadly. The 28,251-foot summit is merely a half-dozen lengths of a climber’s rope lower than the apex of Everest (29,035 feet), but by any route the terrain is peppered with steep rock and with ice cliffs that explode and sweep the mountain. Alpinists on K2 must cope with demanding climbing in that brain-numbing region above 8,000 meters dubbed the Death Zone. Add K2’s propensity for unleashing diabolical storms onto climbing teams and it’s evident why this peak is called Savage Mountain.
Statistics paint a grim picture on K2, especially when the data is contrasted against Everest. Eberhard Jurgalski, who tracks climbing on the 8,000-meter peaks on 8000ers.com, notes that to date, K2’s summit had been attained three hundred eighty-six times (by three hundred seventy-seven individuals), that eighty-four deaths have occurred on the mountain, and thirty-five of those fatalities have befallen climbers coming down from the summit.
Everest, till the end of 2016, had a whopping 7,001 ascents (by
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