Climbing K2 is somewhat akin to a fatal attraction that many mountaineers cannot resist.

Climbing K2 is somewhat akin to a fatal attraction that many mountaineers cannot resist.

The world’s second-highest peak, feared as the ‘Savage Mountain,’ was first conquered on July 31, 1954, by Italian mountaineers Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli with the help of their porter, Amir Mahdi, from Hunza.

Sixty years later, on June 14, 2014, history repeated itself with a little help from good fate. Eight high-altitude porters from Gilgit-Baltistan, hoping to take their career to the next level, set off on the first all-Pakistani expedition to the K2 summit — this time as mountaineers.
I saw undeterred courage and a determination on their faces,” said Agostino Da Polenza, world-famed Italian mountaineer and president of the Everest-K2-Committee for Natural Resources (Ev-K2-CNR), while addressing a press conference in Islamabad. When the men of burden, Muhammad Taqi, Hassan Jan, Muhammad Sadiq, Ghulam Mehdi, Ali Durani, Ali Rozi, Muhammad Hassan and Rehmat Ullah Baig, first shook hands with the Italian last year at the Broad Peak basecamp and expressed their desire to climb the K2 as mountaineers and not porters, “Their aspiration came as a surprise” to him. Be he immediately sensed a blazing trail of passion and purpose, “And I promised to find [them] funds and technical assistance, if they [would agree] to go through intensive training to prepare themselves to put their feet on the peak of K2 where I had been in 1983.”
The Italians have had an everlasting love for the K2. They have been associated with the mountain and the Karakoram since 1909, sharing an equal responsibility for its conservation and facilitating mainstream climbing. Polenza first scaled the K2 from the north side in 1983 and has since been the team leader of three successful expeditions to the K2, reportedly his ‘charmed’ mountain.
Although lucky himself, Ploenza is wary of the perennial dangers of the sport and ensured that the porters went through extensive training before taking on the notorious K2. Just last year, the Pakistan Army recovered the bodies of mountaineers who were swallowed by a snow storm during their climb and the bodies of the three other climbers who were caught by an avalanche have yet to be found. At a height of over 8,000 meters, it is foolish to leave anything to chance.

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