For the first time in history, climbers climb K2 in winter. The 8,611 meter high peak at Karakoram in Pakistan is the second highest mountain in the world and is considered extremely difficult.
“A team of ten Nepali Sherpas climbed K2 that afternoon,” confirmed the secretary of Alpine Club of Pakistan (ACP), Karrar Hydari, German Press Agency. They started the summit at 1 pm local time (9 am CET on Friday) and reached the top at 4:56 pm. The group of Sherpas stopped at a point 70 meters from the summit to wait for each other before writing the world’s history books together.
The K2 was the only one of the 14 eight thousand in the world on the Pakistani-China border that had never climbed in winter. It was first climbed in 1954. It is considered to be far more in demand than Mount Everest, which is about 8,849 meters high, the highest mountain in the world. Reasons include steep passages and the risk of avalanches, with its surface turning to smooth snow in winter.
The previous highest elevation on the K2 in the winter was 7750 meters, set nearly two decades ago by Denis Urubko and Marcin Kezkan. South Tyrolian climber Reinhold Messner called K2 a “mountain of mountains”, standing on its summit in July 1979.
Spanish mountaineer badly injured
Hyder told Reuters that his success was due to the death of the famous Spanish climber Sergio Mingote, who had fallen into the crevasse while trying to land at the base camp. Several teams have about 49 climbers currently on K2 and try to reach the summit, weather permitting.
Spain’s Health Minister Salvador Ila wrote on Twitter, describing the 49-year-old Mingot as a “personal friend”, “upset at the news of the crash that ended the life of a great athlete.” Mingot climbed seven mountains without additional oxygen in less than two years.
The K2 was first climbed by the Italian Achille Compagnoni in 1954, with 450 people reaching the summit. So far more than 80 people have been killed in this effort. In 2008 alone, eleven climbers were killed by an avalanche. The Pakistani army is regularly called upon to rescue climbers by helicopter, but the weather often makes it difficult.
Coronovirus epidemics had caused travel restrictions to severely affect the traditional summer mountaineering season in the Karakoram Mountains and especially in Pakistan, where five of the world’s 14 peaks are over 8,000 meters. There is also Nanga Parbat (8125 m) in the north of Pakistan, known as the “killer mountain”, which was once called the “mountain of fate of the Germans”.
