The Bottleneck on K2

K2’s nickname, the Savage Mountain, is well earned. With only around four hundred total summits and almost ninety deaths, it maintains, despite modern guiding, equipment, and weather forecasting, a fatality rate of more than twenty percent. The climbing on all routes is consistently steep and technical (rock and ice) at altitude, the weather is famously bad, and avalanches and rockfall are daily occurrences. But it is the Bottleneck, an overhanging wall of ice that sits immediately above the main route at more than 8,000 meters (26,000 feet), that is responsible for an outsize number of deaths. The Bottleneck drops microwave- to car-size blocks on a far-too-regular basis, and all of those blocks are funneled through a thousand-vertical-foot couloir that climbers ascend.

The Bottleneck is perhaps best known for the 2008 tragedy in which eleven alpinists were killed in a single incident. Lots of external factors led to the high death toll, but the basis of it was a large collapse of ice. The falling seracs killed