Historically High - K2: The Savage Mountain

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

Welcome to the Savage Mountain—a 28,000-foot pyramid of vertical blue ice, 60-degree rock walls, and a building-sized ice block that hangs over your head like a loaded gun. This week, we climb through the brutal history of the world's second tallest peak. Now while Everest might be just a little taller, 780' to be precise, K2 much tougher to summit and far deadlier. K2's historical death rate is 1 dead for every 4-5 climber that summit while Everest sits somewhere around 1 out of 100 who summit. K2 has only been summited by 800 individuals while over 7,500 can say that about Everest. Everything about K2 is more dangerous, the journey to the mountain, the journey up the mountain, and as you'll find out today, the journey down. Join as we literally get high on K2. Thanks for listening and don’t forget to hit subscribe, leave a 5-star rating and write a review. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join us at Patreon.com/HistoricallyHigh and get enrolled for some fun extra content Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Pack your bags, strap it on a mule's back, take 10 days, hike in, set up camp, because we're climbing the Savage Mountain today. Or we're talking about climbing the Savage Mountain today.

It's been three years since we did Everest, almost three years since we did a mountaineering episode. And I don't know if maybe it's just, I've kind of forgotten a lot of the dangers that we talked about with Everett.

but K2 has changed the way that I look at like recreational outdoor sports. So this is kind of to me, you know when you see the end of like you get done beating someone in Madden and you see the stats come up and like their side is like green green green green green green and they beat you in every statistic and then the one is maybe like yardage. and you're like, oh, I got more yards than you're like, I literally be, that's what the K2 Everest thing is. Everest is the tallest, the talls peak.

So that's what it can claim. It's the tallest. K2 is the second tallest, but it's the most dangerous. And the other mountains, as far as like three, four, five, six, it's not like that any of them are going to be more dangerous than K2. K2 is the most dangerous.

I actually think, is it the most remote? I think that's part of the reason why it is the most dangerous because I think it's the hardest one to get to. I think there are many, many reasons why this is the most dangerous. Yeah, it's just comparing, listening to everything and watching everything and hearing people talk about Everest and then hearing just one or two climbers that have summited K2 try to explain their experience. It's just like everybody that's climbed Everest is like real cold.

a lot of elevation. I'm walking up a grade of probably like 15, 20% for a real long ways till I get up there. K2, they're like, yeah, I was climbing up a 60% grade underneath a 100 foot tall overhang of ice that could drop at any time. It's hard to compare the danger. And I have to sit there, and that's in the death zone.

And I'm having to sit there for multiple hours in that zone because moving at that point, you're so high and doing so much work that it takes you take a couple steps you got to sit there and try to kind of like suck in those small little breaths because you're one third the normal oxygen we're going to cover all that what it takes

um patreon dot com slash historically high go get the bonus content um a lot of these we're going to be doing like companion episodes as well this is going to have a companion episode we're not going to discuss the 2008 disaster on K2 at length because the personal stories that come out of that that are available are pretty insane.

And so we want to give those time and have that be its own Patreon episode. So we'll be releasing those. You'll be getting K2 the next Friday or that coming Friday. You'll get the 2008 disaster one. It's a heart wrencher. It's a very sad one. Continuing with those five-star ratings, they are awesome for us. We're getting to heights and numbers that I just have really never even.

contemplated with all the people that are listening. I love hearing the reviews from you guys. Keep subscribing. We're climbing. I think we're pretty close to 30,000 subscribers on Spotify, which again is a crazy number. Yeah, so thank you for all of the support on those angles. Those are growing us faster than anything else that we've done.

I'm sure that you've realized that advertising-wise, as far as trying to get our podcast out there, we're lacking. So word of mouth always helps. So thank you very much for that. Um, you got your petons? I do. I'm Professor Chris. That's Professor Adam.

We're taking a trip up to Savage Mountain. So K2 or Karakoram 2 is the second highest mountain on earth. So it stands 8,611 meters or 28,251 feet above sea level. Now, it's located in the Karakorum range, which is on the border between, I believe it's like Pakistan and China, correct? There's certain regions that it's between. It's about as far north in Pakistan as you can get. But it literally is on the border.

So one side of it is on the Chinese side, correct? And then the other side of his on the side. Or I guess you would say two sides are on one side or dependent how it's divided. Yeah. Beginning all the way back in 1802, under the British East India Company, they sent this British infantry officer out named William Lampton to start this trigonometrical survey of India. So this is them going through and trying to survey India

before they maybe dip their toe into colonialism, I think. Well, thinking of going down and conquering India, if you could go down there and map out the area, see if there's any tall mountains for us to sport climb. So during this survey, there's this guy named Thomas Montgomery that makes the first survey of this Karakoram mountain range, and there's two highest peaks, Kerakorum 1 and Karakoram 2.

There was a 3 or 4 and a 5 to begin with. K1, had a local name of Mashabrum. So they, in very rare fashion for white folks going into a region that's inhabited by somebody else, they went ahead and just called it by its local name. So he was doing it from like left to right, correct? He was up on another mountain top. And as he was surveying a lower mountain top to basically where he could get everything.

And I believe he was, yeah, just pointing along the way. So the second one to the left. whatever was K2. K2 had no known local name. And as Chris alluded to earlier, most likely it's because it was so fucking remote. Yeah. Nobody had been out there.

They're like, so what do we call this mountain? Because obviously our deity lives in this mountain or whatever it is. They're like, actually, we have no fucking clue because no one's going to that mountain. And that's so much of a difference between Everest, as Everest has this very deep lore and history and the religion of the Nepalese people because they were trying to climb it to find their gods. And K2 is so remote that there's like, yeah, that's a super big mountain. Maybe we'll get there one day, probably not.

As Chris said, K2 lays kind of in the northwest of the Karakoram range. To reach the base camp of the mountain in Pakistan, the closest farming village, so not city, farming village is called Ashkull. It's about 56 miles or 90 kilometers. away from the mountain from base camp. The closest airport is in Scardu, and from Scardu, it's a seven-hour Jeep ride that's through very rough terrain to Ashkull, and then leaving Ashkull, the only path to base camp is this kind of seven-to-eight-day hike that traverses not only Caracora mountain range, but you have

to go over this thing called the Baltoro Glacier. So to get there, you have to pass through a mountain range, climb a glacier, walk across the glacier with all of these crevasses and everything else that could suck you in and kill you. It's seven to eight days. Usually parties take about 10 because again, as you're climbing in altitude, you're trying to climatize yourself before you even get to base camp. And most time you're coming with these larger nowadays especially up until like 2,000. And it was 2000, what? 15. 18? Maybe 18. 18.

And then there was something that occurred. We'll talk about it. A couple years of no one's summiting. And then it kind of got more. They call it the Everettization. So basically it got kind of commercialized because there were some shitty events that happened. But the whole point is with Everest, you can get there pretty much a vehicle. Can you kind of take you almost all the way?

There's a little bit of hiking involved. To commit to actually do this, not only are taking on the mountain itself, but you're taking on the journey to get to the mountain. So as you're doing this eight to ten days, what normally people take because they, like you said, want to acclimate. You're not hitting these permanent tea houses or lodges like Everest. It's all wilderness tent camping. And everything's coming in by porters with these 55-gallon plastic barrels on their backs that they are slinging over their backs, mules that are carrying stuff in. Some of the

like outfits that will come in and hire these guys are coming in with like 100 to 120 man porter teams to bring in all of their equipment. And as you're going through before reaching K2, you pass through, I believe it's this thing called, it's where two of these glaciers meet.

One of them is the Balthoro that you mentioned and then one of them is called the Godwin-Austin Glacier. And it's known as the throne room of the mountain gods because it offers this 360 degree view of four of the world's 14, 8,000 meter peaks. So you get to see K2, one called Broad Peak, Gashabrum one, I think you said, and then Gashabrum 2. That is quite a walk-in. I believe they said that Godwin-Austin Glacier is the longest glacier in the world, too. Obviously, not the biggest because it's within the mountains, but it just stretches for so long in between these peaks.

Yeah, so far down the mountain through a valley or whatever. Yeah. So K2's base camp elevation is approximately right around 5,150 meters, so about 16,896 feet. For reference, we call Denver the Mile High City. That's 5,280. So we're talking more than three times the height, the elevation, just to get to base camp above sea level. As hikers are climatizing, they take, like I say, 10, somewhere in there 10 days to get from Ashkold to base camp. The peak of K2, as Chris was talking about, is the same.

second highest in the world at 8,611 meters, 28,251 feet. Everest, 8,848 meters, 29, 31 feet. I mean, I feel like when you start talking about these 8,000ers, and I understand we'll talk about the death zones and everything like that, anything over 8,000's insane. Oh, no, it is. I mean, there's only 14 of those mountains on the planet. And in fact, this one's considered so insane that they almost require you in some instances to have climbed Everest first or like a combination of the other 8,000 meter peaks. And with the base camp being situated right at the foot of this, basically just the massive south face, the way that Everest is shaped is if you look at it, it's kind of maddenhorn-esque.

Like it looks like it almost kind of twists up a little bit. And then it kind of spurs off of like another section, which is why you can hike around and then get up on that saddle part of it. K2 is just like it's the tallest mountain all around it, which means that it takes the brunt of all the winds and everything. Everest has a thing where it's got enough peaks around it that are of similar elevation, or at least close enough to similar elevation, that they can try to buff it some of the winds away.

Yeah. And so with K2, it's also like a pyramid shape. So it's more, it's just, it's more of like a climb. Not so much of a hike is with, I'm not saying Everest is a hike. But if you're comparing them, there's climbing and then there's hiking and Everest is a hike compared to K2. You're not doing a lot of rock work on Everest. You're doing rock climbing for certain stretches getting up K2 along with working through the snow. As you're talking about the weather, K2 is far worse than Everest.

And it's because it's just so much further north. It takes the brunt of all of these weather systems and jet streams that sweep across Central Asia. It's high enough to be in the jet stream to where it acts as like a rock sticking out of like a little stream or a river. Yeah, dude, just insane how it just sticks out like a sore thumb. These violent storms can form very, very quickly. It also has lower barometric pressure, which means that there's just less oxygen. and conditions are worsened in the death zone. The safest climbing season for K2 is pretty short.

We're talking from late June to August, which is kind of nuts because when you think about that, that's 60, 75 days. So late June? Yeah, late June, July, August, 60 days, call it maybe 15. Yeah, I mean, if you're thinking, like, let's even say late June is you get one week of each in early, August. Yeah. You're sitting it only six weeks. And you got to hope that during that six weeks,

there is a, what, four to five day window in there that you can make your attempt. But it's not just that four to five day window because you're not just going there, setting up shop at base camp, and then making a run to try to do this. There's a lengthy, like, acclimatizing, like acclimating time frame that you have to go through to even get prepared to climb. You have to actually get to the altitudes and get your body used to the lack of oxygen to where it thickens your blood, which means building up more red blood cells because there needs to be more oxygen carriers because there's less of it to try to disperse it. So when you are doing this acclimatizing, I think you're going, let me look for the order

here unless you got it. I don't have that. Well, you're looking for that. A climbing expedition on K2 usually lasts 8 to 11 weeks. So you're there for basically the entirety of the season, 60 to 75 days from arrival just waiting to get these three

or four days to push towards a summit. As you're talking about, I hate to keep denigrating Everest because it's just insane to say that the tallest mountain in the world is just kind of pales in comparison to K2. Yeah. But you're hiking up to camp one,

you're hiking back down to base camp, you're hiking back up to camp one, you're moving back up to, or you're going up to camp two, you stay there for a little while, you're hiking back down to camp one, and so on and so forth, kind of working your way up. So yeah, so what it is is to adapt, you'll pretty much play this game of yo-yo

with the mountain. So again, you do that to trigger the production of like more oxygen carrying red blood cells, and then after that you feel, that after you felt like you've done that, you go down and take like a rest or recharge period and then you try to basically just like fucking haul up the mountain and make like one big go of it so rotation one climbers will trek from base camp to camp one spend one or two nights sleeping there to acclimate then

hike back down to base camp second rotation is they bypass camp one entirely climb straight to camp two spend two nights there this is when they will um they saw it call it making a tag it's when you climb up without sleeping. And that's to the bottom, I think, of what they call the Black Pyramid. So that's around 6,800, 6,800 meters before then going all the way back down to base camp. Third rotation, they'll go to Camp 2, sleep for a night, climb through the Black Paramed section to Camp 3, which is at 7,300 meters, sleep there for one or two nights. And then they said this is the hardest rotation afterward all the way back down.

to base camp for a long period of rest like four to six days to wait for that weather window. And by the end of that rotation, they said it's heavily thickened enough, preparing them for like when they need to make that final push. So you like, yeah, you have to be there weeks in advance

just to be able to make these acclimating trips during the docchio. So I watched the documentary, you listen to the podcast or a variation of which when he was just describing it. He's interesting as good be. And this dude, he was sponsored by Eddie Bauer.

Love me some Eddie Bauer. Please don't ruin Eddie Bauer for me if anyone knows anything. I'm not aware of it. It's one of those things that just like, let me have my thermals. If there's some weird German ancestry, keep it to yourself. Please. So he gets sick on this eight to 10 day hike there, like out both ends. And still ends up proceeding on after resting for a couple days.

gets to base camp, it hits him again, then it hits someone else within their climbing team. And as they're doing this, the other people in their climbing team are going up the different routes. They're setting up the tents and the camps and everything like that. And these people are literally like dehydrating

and just because of the illness. And then a few days later, they're so used to this, not like they're getting sick, but like keeping their bodies and knowing what they need to do. They're still making attempts to climb up this. I don't, part of the reason the sickness happens and he goes into pretty great detail about this is because of the remoteness. Because as much as you want to say that you're going to leave the place cleaner than you found it, when you're that far away and you're in base camp, there's no restrooms that they build.

Yeah. There's, you're in an area that's just. Well, now they do actually, but it's just one of those blue 55, it's a. restroom tent. Oh, yeah. And it's one of those toilet seats strapped to one of those 55, which then someone has to backpack out. Not signing up for that.

But it's, you're living in, it's filled. But it's just because you are kind of one track minding yourself to get up there. And then when it's time to get off the mountain and go all the way back into Pakistan, it's going to be a very long hike. And you're not always going to take a lot of that stuff out. So sickness in base camp isn't necessarily. and if you're going to get it, it's just when you're going to get it,

and then how bad it's going to affect you. And speaking about that, let's go back to the first attempt at this. Yeah. Let's do just a fuzz more description first. Okay. Basically, this area that they're going to be in prior to commercialization, climbing K2,

the summit death ratio was one and four. post commercialization, the fatality rates dropped to roughly 10 to 13%. So originally, before they commercialize this and before they started getting more people to the mountain. So not one in the sense of like one out of every four people that attempted to climb it died. It's one out of every four that summited died, which is still insane. If you were to tell somebody and be like, hey, you guys are a group of four. and if all of you are planning on summiting, just so you know, statistically,

one of you will then die. A large amount of that, just in the wording that you said that, they've summited, and then they die. Because if you die before you summit, it doesn't count as a summit. So these are people that have reached the mountaintop

and die coming down. The highest percentage of people that have died have been people, and it's not even like died as far as halfway down. it's been this very specific area where it's been within this death zone because, and we're probably just going to kind of jump around to different things when they come up during the podcast. But when you're in the death zone, your brain is so starved of oxygen and your decision making. They said that like simple things like adjusting your headlamp or putting that on will take you like 15 to 20 minutes because you're trying to comprehend how to do it where it would normally take you like maybe two. Yeah.

And so the way up, you're already deluxe. hilarious getting there. Then you hang out up top for a little bit because you do want to drink it in and then you start heading down. Now, if you're on ox supplemental oxygen, you can still get, because it's not giving you a ratio of what it is down at like sea level or whatever. You're just getting a little bit more oxygen to stave off like the symptoms of like hypoxia or whatever it is. Exactly. And so there are people that do this though without oxygen. So as you're coming back down, you're already past the point like, you've already

been experiencing this delirium or whatever it's impacting your body. And as you're coming down, you also have to be going through climbers that are on their way up. Going down sometimes is harder because then you're trying to get grip with like the back of your feet and everything. This is when you

can fall and you're already having the momentum of going down. And if your time to summit was pushed back at all in your coming down in the dark. So not only is going down more technically challenging, but you're at a point where you're less capable.

And it's a race against the clock. Exactly. So just to go through that, 10 to 13% post-commercialization for the fatality rate, Everest, 1%. So this is 10 to 13 times more dangerous in the fatality rate of summiting the die on Everest.

That's just how much more serious it is. Most of these routes up to mountain involve an average of this 45 degree climbing. That's not to say, that's just the average. 45 degree grade. It's more than 10 to 13% more isn't it? Well, it's 1% and then

you're talking, but the number of times, yes. So think of it in the sense of it's what a thousand times more likely, right? Technically and odds wise, it's a thousand to 1,300 times more likely that you're going to die on K2 than Everest. My math is correct there, is it?

Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right there. This average 45 degree grade varies, I believe, at the steepest point, it's like 65 degrees. But there's constant exposure to rock falls, there's constant exposure to avalanches. And K2 not only requires the ability to hike. You need technical rock climbing. You need technical ice climbing. There's so little flat terrain to rest that there's points and times in these camps when these people are pitching their tents.

and their tents are hanging off of the ground because it's so just scant of any flat area. So there are camps that are actually, and the snow has because it's gathered on these ridges, and most of the paths are up the ridges. And there's a reason for that is that when avalanches happen, mountains act is like a funnel.

So everything tries to come off of the ridges and funnel toward the center of the lowest point. That's why areas like the bottleneck are so dangerous is if anything were to come off the glacier that is literally right above it, it funnels it right down through there and will literally obliterate anything in its path. One of the ways to climb this up is called House's Chimney. Yes. So as you're going up these ridges, the reason they do that is although those are hit by a lot higher wind, because again, if it's coming through the valley, it's then funneling it up onto that ridge.

The wind is dangerous, but those are normally, because the wind is there, it's blown clear, of like the snow in the ice so you're almost on like rock or at least hard pack snow that's remained there so the footing's a little bit better so there's a trade off to that yeah you're in the most dangerous zone but you're also somehow in the safest zone it's it's a very weird kind of juxtaposition it's it's more brutal while you're there but it's safer as far as what can happen accidentally and snow's not covering up you know crevasse or something like that so this this most traditional route we'll talk about kind of some of the different routes um after you Base Camp, you begin climbing. The first

thing that you come to that's of great importance is this area called House's Chimney. House's chimney is how big? It's a hundred foot basically think of like a chimney if you were to cut off a cross section of it and it's like when you see

people climbing up stuff and they're like bracing their hands on both sides of it. That's kind of what it is. It's straight up. It's not climbable without an actual like rope to get up through it. Now like an actual climber that's just trying to put a rope up there without like a pack might be able to get up there that's an expert but this is something for when you're climbing k2 you have to have your harness

strapped in and you're basically kind of pulling yourself up by those um the ascender things i can't remember like they let you go one direction yeah and then they grip and they allow you to pull yourself up so you're doing that with all legs trying to get whatever grip you can on the ice the vertical ice wall. Once you're up house is chimney with your pack on again, this isn't people carrying your shit. You got to be able to actually pull your weight up that. Camp two is right up there. During that documentary, I don't know if they talked about it, but did they ever explain on what you were listening to how they would make new spots? Uh-uh. So these guys took rice bags that they had gotten down at base camp and basically filled them with snow and left them out to where they were then

solid and they had taken a bunch of those while they were up there and made like a platform with them they dug out part of it and then extended part of it out to where they made a flat area and then they were able to get a pack it down to where it wouldn't shift or anything like that and that's where they secured down the tents that's insane so they created more land usable land so as chris is talking about these rotations you're going to go up house's chimney to camp two and then you're going to go down House's chimney only to go back up House's chimney again to get to Camp 2. After Camp 2, I believe it might be on the way to Camp 3. You run into something called the Black Pyramid. So that's right outside of Camp 2, I want to say. So basically

House's chimney leads you up. There's that area where people will go ahead and camp. And then once you come out of that camp, you're directly onto the black pyramid. You're looking up the black pyramid. Black pyramid, you're going to say, well, that's weird. How would you get a black pyramid on a snow-covered mountain? Because as you climb up the ice wall in the chimney, you then have to switch over to rock climbing to get up over the black pyramid. Yeah. So it basically is like you get to the chimney. That's technical, actual, like vertical climbing. And then the black pyramid is basically because it's a ridge. That's kind of you starting to go up.

the spine of the ridge itself to where it's exposed rock, there's snow, but you're trying also not to walk on the rock. You're trying to find a flat spot for your, because you're wearing your crampons the whole time, which are those spiked things that are attached to your boots. It's like you never take those off. Those are, you're wearing those at all times. You wear those and you wear your helmet at all times. Yes. And so while you're walking, if you're hitting rocks and shit like that, twist your ankle would really easy if you those one of those like, you know, twisted a rock off or something. and then if you knock a rock off, someone back down it

is it's going to start and it could cause something to happen. So you're actually trying to stay off the solid land. And that's why you always wear a helmet. Yeah. After you get through the Black Pyramid, you have to,

like as Chris is talking about, you navigate up these just rock faces, these steep narrow cracks while having all your gear on while you're carrying your pack, 400 meters below the bottleneck. and this, I believe, is right up. I want to say it's a few hundred meters outside of Camp 4.

You run into the bottleneck. Now, all the roots on the Pakistani side that lead to the summit require that you travel through the bottleneck. They say about 80% of travelers take what's known as the Abruzzi spur route of the mountain. We'll explain why it's called that. Yeah, we'll explain the Italian Duke, the Duke of Abruzi, that came up there. But the abruzzi spur isn't taken the most common route

because it's the easiest. It's just like not the hardest. Like there's nothing easy about the abruzzi route. It's just less difficult than everything else. You're going to run into, like we just talked about all this kind of stuff, on this Pakistani side and there's different areas as far as getting up to the bottleneck. But if you're getting on the Pakistani side, it has to go through the bottleneck. The Chinese side, I believe, is on the north face.

And the north face going through China has this crazy just to get to base camp. You have to wait for a certain time of the year to cross a river. And then in order to get back, you have to wait a certain amount of time until it freezes enough that you can then carry everything back across. I think you would just say, I'll get the stuff later. Just get yourself across to do whatever you could do. There's a time limit on the Chinese side. The Chinese side gets climbed way less. China is, I think, a little bit tighter with their regulations and their ability to give them passage.

Yeah, so it goes, so you have base camp, then base camp because it's below the south face, that's actually not technically where you start if you're going on the Abruzzi spur. You have to kind of walk to Camp one, which is kind of at the start of the spur. So between Camp one and two, that's when climbers are already having to go through, houses chimney, chimney. Between Camp 2 and 3, that's the Black Pyramid section, and then three is, I believe, at the top of the pyramid. Then above you go to Camp 4, and then as you go out of Camp 4, that's kind of when you

enter the death zone, because Camp 4 is just out of the death zone. They're like, hey, well, just keep it right here. And there's no Camp 5 because the rest of its death zone. Yes. and then yeah above camp four is that's when you get to like the bottleneck and the sarac and everything. Yeah, so the bottleneck is 200 meters into what's known as the death zone. The reason it's called the death zone, as Chris was talking about earlier, you have about one third the oxygen concentration that you would have at sea level.

So your brain is getting one third the amount of oxygen, your bones or your muscles, everything is getting one third the amount of oxygen it traditionally would. It comes to a certain point where as you're climbing this mountain, your body is eating the muscle that you've had these climbers lose so much weight, these mountaineers lose so much weight as they're going up. The bottom leg is this 100 meter traverse that is between 50 to 65 degrees steep, and it's super narrow. It's like a two-foot pathway.

So I know that that doesn't sound when people are like 60 degrees, you know, 60 degrees when you're looking at an actual 60, it might as well be near straight up. 45 degrees is everyone knows that. That's almost, you know, staircases in houses aren't 45 degrees despite what everyone thinks. I think they're easier than that, right? Um, I think they're a little higher. Really?

Yeah, I think they're probably right around 50 degrees. Oh, because it's a stair system. I guess it depends on the span that you're going up. Um, 60 degrees going up like a 330 foot stretch, you're basically in this thing. I think it's called a Calus or Calis or something like that, but it's a goalie that's in the mountain. And because it's a goalie, any time that there's been any calving off of that

CEREC, which is basically a glacier that's at almost like near the peak. We're about to talk about that pretty clear. But when this thing breaks off, because it gets too heavy, these chunks come directly down this bottleneck, and because it's cleared out anything that isn't hard as shit,

you basically get the bottom of it as just this layer of glacial blue. They described as bulletproof ice. And you're climbing at a degree angle, all you're doing is trying to kick the spurs of the front of your foot in, get enough of a grip to then pull yourself up once and then take a breath. And then keep doing that for about 330 feet.

Once you get out of that, you are basically, and if you were to look up at what's in front of you, all you're seeing is this giant glacier get bigger and bigger in front of you. And this thing is like a sheer cliff. Yeah. In front of you. So you get up and you turn to the right and there's the wall right next to you and you turn to your left and there's a rope connected across the bottom, the base of this glacier, this CERIC. And then on the other side of it, there's, or I guess right next to that rope, there is a, trying to think how to describe it. Like, I don't know if anyone has like jogging paths or anything like that, like where they live.

but this is like a one person wide, narrow one person wide, just trail that goes right along the base of this, and then a almost, would you say another 60 degree drop off to your left? Probably. That basically just goes all the way down and then drops off into an abyss. So you have to be very accurate with all of your steps. Yes. While looking up at what is just above it, so located about 100 meters, or it's about... 150 feet is how tall they say from the base of it, up to the top of it, is a giant piece of ice. Yeah, it's this giant ice outcropping that's known as the Surac.

Now, it's named after the French cheese Syrac, and it's named after the French cheese surac because Surac is super crumbly cheese. If you're climbing below an ice boulder that's hundreds of feet tall, the last thing you want that to be described as is a crumbly cheese. So what ends up happening with these glaciers, if you're looking at it, it's just like a glacier similar to one that would be in like a valley, like lower. If you're looking at a glacier, yeah, there's crevices and everything in it. But what happens is that's like the top layer that's like separated. As you get down lower, it's basically just like solid ice underneath, and those cracks just form over time.

They don't go all the way through it. This is just like that, except at the almost very top of this mountain, and how it's formed is all of the snow buildup here just compresses over time until the bottom layer has all of the oxygen squeezed out of it and turns into this blue glacial ice. The top of it is cracked and everything, though, as well. So when it gets any type of melting, the water seeps into those cracks, fills gaps, then refreezes overnight, it's, you know, continuing and contracting these cracks and everything. You get these fractures, and it can cause these sections that are, so I went deep on this Surac thing. And the way it explained it, because I was like, is there some type of, like, fuckery where Everest is taller because it has a bigger snowpack on it? Like what's K2? What's the difference?

They said that the Everest snowpack because it's rounded is much, much deeper. So it's got a, but it's not deep enough to make it even when you get down to the actual rock. It's still taller than K2. Okay. K2 said you can go down about six feet and you're hitting mountain. Because that wind blows everything off. Because it's in the fucking jet stream and it gets sandblasted all the time. So this sarahk that sits up here is kind of covered a little bit on the other side of the peak and it just builds this thing up.

I and as we know Gravity's the son of a bitch Okay so sorry what Yeah I'm finally on topic now The Seric the reason that it also caves off like that Is because there's nothing underneath it supporting it So basically if you were to melt everything off of that mountain When they're crossing that

That's basically just a giant ice waterfall And then where it kind of then goes from straight To the base of it and then goes at that six degree angle going down, that's not there. That's ice and snow and stuff. Had it melted, they would just be out over nothing on the mountain. Chris is talking about all of these base camps and everything, not base camps,

but all these camps on the mountain are in pretty direct lines. They're close enough to the bottleneck where it can still get stuff coming down. Yeah. So just depending on where this Syrac caves off, because this thing is not just on one side of the mountain. The mountain almost wears it like a half crown, right? kind of wraps around a little bit. You know what a burl is on a tree?

A burl. Like it grows around the... Does gross that kind of come off of it? Like they come off like a knot? Like if you were to cut a tree and it grows around it? Okay. Yeah, it's almost like that it's a burl on top of the mountain that's wrapped itself around it. Kind of.

Is the way that I look at it and kind of play with it in my mind is it's just this outhanging, this hang. You can see at some angles where it looks like someone just took a square of ice and just planted in there It's like, okay, see how long it can say. And it's a moving glacier. So as it itself moves, it then expands that area out into the space. No one can tell how quick these things can move inches or feet in a year. And as that moves out, it just the weight can't support it. It literally can go at any time.

And you're camping underneath it and camp four pretty much. Or you're spending six to eight hours underneath it sometimes where you're just like, is the line going to move? Exactly. It's a nightmare. You're waiting and you can. It's not like you can just, you can try to skip the line. We'll talk about what happens when you try to skip the line. Not good usually. But these avalanches from these temperature fluctuations can trigger and slide all the way down the bottleneck. The bottleneck is just basically the groove that will get caught and take everything down. It's the shooting gallery. Yeah. 13 of the most recent fatalities on K2 have occurred at or near the bottleneck. It accounts for a very disproportionate share of the near 100 deaths that have happened on K2. There's only 14 mountains in the world as Chris is talking about that rise above 8,000 meters. K2, second highest death rate.

The first highest death rate is a mountain called Annapurna. It's in Nepal. It's only 8,900 or 91 meters tall, which again only is a crazy word to use. roughly less than half have summited Anapurra compared or Anapurna compared to K2. Yeah. So death rates. Well, the reason they also say that it's because it's so much more accessible. Anapurna is so much easier to get to, they said.

So more people are attempting to do it. No, no, no, no. Less. Half the amount of people have submitted Anapurna compared to K2. So that's why the death rate is higher on Anapurna than K2 is just simply because less people have been able to do it as far as summiting it. So why isn't it more dangerous than K2? It is more dangerous than K2. The death rate's higher.

Correct, but I think the number of deaths is higher. I don't think it's the death rate. Well, if you have less people submitting and you have people dying still, it's going to make that number look much different. The first real attempt on K2 comes in 1902, so about 100 years after it was. surveyed. The team that attempted the ascent five times, they gave this thing five times a shot to try to get up there. They only reached, and again, only is an insane word to use, 6,525 meters or 21,407 feet. So if you're coming 51, 50 off of the glacier, you're climbing up to 6,525 meters,

you're not going super high, but you're also going higher than anybody ever has. Yeah. Kind of the, I guess, the star of this climbing expedition was Alistra Crowley was on this attempt. So the famous occultist had traveled there to go up K2, and he was just coming off of a bout of malaria. So he already wasn't great shape coming off of malaria. Somehow he thought he was going to go climbing up.

K2. Well, I mean, the only thing that was positive about that is he already had it so he wasn't going to catch it on the trip because that trip suffered pretty heavily from people actually getting malaria on it. Because again, you're going through a section that's never, you know, your body isn't acclimated to it. You're not, you haven't traveled through there. And at that point to back in 1902, you're probably going through the jungles just to get there or like a steamship that's going to take you around to India. You're going through. It was a certain part of India. With that, you know, so it was the chemist, Oscar Eichenstein. And then Alastair Crowley, and it was a six-man crew total. It took him 14 days just to hike to the foot of the mountain. And then the Alster Crowley, like little known, he was actually one of like the most experienced rock climbers of his age. That guy's going to be a wild episode of one day.

So, I mean, but at the same time, think of this. The stuff that you're using, you got to think of this in the context of like, the environment itself hasn't really changed. Not in the 100 years. And I'm not saying it in the sense of like, yes, it has changed. But at K2, it's always been able to kill you. Yeah. It hasn't gotten any deadlier, or maybe it has gotten just a tiny bit deadlier, but it was deadly even in 1902. Climate change has probably made it less predictable.

but other than that, it's still very deadly. Yes, but while you're doing that, I mean, okay, so here's what they're using back when they first, you know, these first attempts until we discuss the advancement in like the technology and like the equipment. So for clothing, you're wearing thick, heavy wool or apparently silk long underwear, multiple layers of wool sweaters,

flannel shirts, heavy tweed trousers. You're trying to wear like wind resistant, like woven candied. or canvas. So I'm assuming like heavy like almost what like duck material or what do they call that Dutcloth or something like that. No, no, no. This is all before down my friend.

Really? Yes. We weren't stuff in goose feathers or whatever down is into blankets? Not yet. Not during these first initial ones. They had to have a reason to explore something so ridiculous. True. Getting so cold.

But it was this wind resistance stuff. It kept the wind out, but it had no breathability. and got super heavy when it was wet. Well, guess what? There's a lot of up there. Snow and moisture. Here we go. Down jackets were completely non-existent

in the 1902 and the 1909 attempt. So we'll talk about that in a second. By the 1930s, the primitive kind of downfilled parkas were introduced, but they also didn't have waterproof shells. And they didn't have, you know how nowadays when you see a puffy jacket? It's got the stitching to keep it compartmentalized.

Yeah. If it got wet or they weren't waterproof, all that would clump up and just go down to the bottom of the jacket. And the insulation would be nowhere near the upper body. You'd be wearing a tutu of insulation. That's why a lot of now will have like a lot of stitching in different patterns and quilting and everything to keep it all within those sections. Again, non-existent at that point. I got a pretty dumb moment when you just said that I never realized why that stitching was there. I thought it was just fashion.

Listen, as an Eddie Bauer man, I was well aware of that. I got a North Face jacket. There you go. Pretty fancy. So they had heavy leather boots with soles that had like embedded steel spikes for a grip on the ice. And then by the 1930s, those were replaced by the leather boots with like screw in rubber, like on vibram soles. And but these things still offered like no internal insulation. All they did was it was just, you know, the actual layer of leather.

And then just wearing multiple pairs of wool socks, which would actually frequently freeze solid to the boot. My thought with that, and I don't know how accurate it is, but I just immediately flashed to thinking about the trench foot in World War I with those army boots. Could there be a way that mountaineering boots were more technologically advanced than those army boots? Probably not, right? No. So all that trench foot and all that wetness that they were getting in the gangrene that they were getting in the trenches, you're still climbing up except for you're climbing up and just frozen water.

So at any point in time, when you do attempt to get warm, your boots are going to soak through. Well, and what's going to end up happening is you don't even have a chance for like with trench foot for your feet to get soft and moist and moist everything. It just freeze. Yeah. You're actually, it's just freezing as it gets wet. So that's where the frostbite and you losing your feet are going to fucking kick in. So for gear, you would have like long, heavy tools with shafts that were made of like, solid like hickory and like forged steel head so basically pickaxes like modern like what we would

consider like yard tools at this point they were used more like walking sticks and anchors than actual like a climbing axe per se for like you know an ergonomically shaped climbing axe that they used today they would have these like heavy steel frames that were strapped directly to leather boots using like canvas or leather straps and that was their like crampons so they would have bikes on them, they'd have to cinch them down. And then if they lost those, because they weren't fully attached to the boots, you would carry them

or like time to your backpack if you weren't using them. If you lost those and you needed to use them for a section later on in the climber coming down and you didn't have them, that was like a death sentence because you weren't getting grip on ice. Yeah, we'll talk about that, rearing its ugly head. Rope was made of like twisted natural, either manila hemp or flax.

So think of it at this. point like naval rope what they would be using on ships and like for rigging and things like that they were heavy no elasticity because of course on a ship you don't want elastis you want everything holding tight you don't want it to lose its you know tension they absorbed water rapidly and they would just freeze exactly where they were so like these you basically just have a coil of rope that regardless of what you did it was like solid like steel so basically just a cable is basically what you had at that point um nylon rope was only just beginning to be tested

by the 1953 expedition by the Americans. Thank you, DuPont. Huh? Thank you DuPont. Mm-hmm. Like you were saying, the pittans, the steel spikes that were driven into, like, the rocks and everything, they were heavy and soft.

And the carabiners, the clips that they would use were made of, like, heavy steel rather than the lightweight aluminum ones that everyone has on a water bottle or, you know, whatever. Thanks to REI for introducing those to the public. aluminum has changed the climbing game. Oh, yeah. I would say,

DuPont didn't create aluminum, obviously, but I feel like it'd be more difficult without DuPont's inventions of just everything that they created from that episode that we did. To try to get up there as far as, like, nylon goes. Oh, yeah, 100%. So much of that stuff.

You would just find a way to make a hard plastic frame instead of a metal one if you had two. It's also, the fact that, they're using and yes, Hickory is very strong. They make baseball bats out of it and all that kind of stuff. But if you're sinking that ice axe

in as hard as you can, you see bats crack in baseball all the time. And if your ice axe cracks, ice axe cracks, yeah. You're just kind of hosed. It's the cramp on thing all over again because you're not going to have something to be able to pull you up.

You're not going to have something to be able to kind of, of used as a cane in some instances. Yeah. So that's why you're going to see more plastic, but carbon fiber type. Aluminum ones even. Yeah.

These axes now. You know, replaceable blades and everything like that that you can put on them. During these early times, of course, no supplemental oxygen was used. Climers like this guy, his name was Wisner. I'm trying to remember what his full name was. Wiesner? Wiesner. Weisner.

Yeah, we'll talk about him here. soon. But he'd believe that like pure athletic conditioning and like acclimating were superior and that early oxygen systems, which they were considered, you know, too heavy and basically unreliable. Imagine something you're like, I figured out how this oxygen system works. It works fantastic. Well, will it work on the mountain?

Of course. You get it up there and everything freezes. The valves, the tubes, everything like that. Or it weighs 200 pounds. Well, and again, it just got to the point where it's like, this is like going into space. The margin for air is a lot like space travel. In a way like space travel, weights also a big thing because you're still having to get it up. Now, once the Americans join in, they would bring like experimental open circuit oxygen systems. But again, it's trial and air. You can't

really test it at that altitude unless you're at that altitude testing it. Yeah, where in the hell are you going to be able to test that state side? And most of the time it would end up with them just having to not use the oxygen and trying to acclimate and do it the old-fashioned way. Tents were made of heavy canvas or cotton. They had, you know, the ones you see at most base camps now are that geodesic dome shaped. That's because wind will, you know, go over that and it's not as easy to catch. These things were literally a frame tents that you would see on these mountains and would just get ripped off if some of these storms came through. And they're trying to set up camps up the mountain in these early attempts.

It's not just base camp we have some of these tents. You're going and you're setting up like a shepherd's tent up at, you know, 7,000 meters. You could strap that tent down better than any tent that you've ever strapped down at Camp 3. It's a canvas sail. Once you climb back down and you get to the next climbers, they're like, hey, is Camp 3 set up? You're like, yeah, you're going to love where I put that tent. It's not going anywhere. By the time those climbers get up there, that tent could be gone.

Oh, by the time they get up there, they see it halfway over their heads heading off over the rest of the Caracorum. Did you guys see that? Yeah, I hope that wasn't the tent they put up there. What else would it be? Sleeping bags were these giant heavy bags that were insulated with either this stuff called Iderdown, which I'm guessing is a type of animal down or wool, but had any like waterproof lining. So if you sweat in it or anything like that or had to d-thaw in it, it was just soaking into that stuff. stoves to actually melt the water because you can't just have water, it's a little freeze. So when you need water, you need to melt water, you need to probably have water warm when you're drinking it because any type of cool water, that's why they can't just eat the snow will completely cool their core temperature and speed up that like epoxy and all that kind of stuff for altitude sickness. And with these stoves, the like the heavy early stage ones, they were fueled by kerosene.

and it would take them hours at high altitude to like actually melt water. They would clog and then sometimes they would even like fumigate the inside of these tints with carbon monoxide because these weren't vented. They were trying to keep these things as closed as possible. You don't want the air in there. It's all the fact that these people, and that's everything that you just described, to say that this first real attempt, they only got up to 6,525 meters. with the equipment that they had, that's insane. And thinking from the standpoint of like, they had no idea what to really expect.

When they get up there, they have people getting altitude sickness, again, malaria. There were some beefs apparently within this crew because a lot of them had these personal conflicts. There was this, I guess, famous argument between Crowley and Eckenstein over basically like their rucksex that were packed full of like, heavy books that Crowley had been like

no I'm not leaving my books like I'm taking my books up the glacier and they're like there's so much more that we can pack instead of this shit you won't have time to read the books son well I mean again they didn't even make to the death zone but during these like summit attempts via I guess the northeast ridge that they were trying they had to turn back at 21,407 feet I mean it's still a really impressive feat for the simple fact that think of it that

how much rope could they even be using at that point up there if they needed to try to you would have to get to points where you had to have rope and they'd be like someone can't go up there first because it's impossible to get up to that zero fatalities though that's pretty good for a first time or first time

didn't get around the death zone so it's expected you're so far yeah and people are suffering from malaria and you still get everyone out True. Probably not some of the porters if they caught malaria. No.

That's the untold story behind every one of these summits. Is porters play such an important role that nobody's ever going to be able to just do this themselves? Porters are essential to not only any successful summit, but just getting to the mountain. They're the unsung heroes of all of this. Before we move on to Rionstead, the 1909 attempt? Yeah. Let's take bathroom brick. Peace. Well, hello. Listen, while we head to the restroom and get ourselves something to drink,

why don't you do something nice for yourselves? Head on over to patreon.com slash historically high and get signed up for a little bonus content. I mean, come on, you deserve it. If you want to keep up with this, our main source of social media is going to be our Instagram, which is historically high pod, P-O-D. You can also head over to its Twitter, it's X, It's Twitter, come on, at historically high. And that's high, H-I-like, hi. If you have any recommendations, you want to get to us, just want to reach out and say hello.

You can hit us up on our email at Historically High Podcast, H-I-G-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-Podcast at gmail. All right, and with that said, let's get back to the good stuff. What do you mean, peace? We ain't done with this? Full disclosure. I was going to play a mean trick on you. and since this is the K2 episode,

I was going to try to figure out if I could actually find real K2, which is just synthetic weed, and try to pack the bubblers with it. But being the nice guy that I am, I decided not to. Is that what it was called? Yeah. Oh. Yeah.

So being the nice guy that I am, I just decided to mix two of our regular flavors of cannabis and the gorilla... Oh, boy, what is it? Vanilla Gorilla and I don't even remember what the other one was

I'm high I said peace going to the bathroom like we were ending this and then I looked up was like wow that's not the right board that we're going to end this on

so that's definitely not right a little surprise for you yeah we're all getting surprised right we come to 1909 the Italian a job one of many because this one's led by

a Louis Giamadeo He was the Duke of the Abruzzi, or Duke of Abruzzi. There's a fun thing in this whole mountaineering community that these countries take such pride in being able to summit these things first. And the fact that Italy, I mean, they're right there along the Alps, so I would assume there's probably a pretty big mountain climbing community. I mean, I get it, though. Yeah.

It just, it's so fascinating how these countries take such great pride in like England with Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgaa getting Everest. Yeah, I mean, here's, that's a country thing. Yeah, that's never going to be something that can be repeated because there's never going to be another highest peak or, you know, whatever. Well, okay. I had a couple real high thoughts last night. Okay.

Maybe this is, we'll speed round through the first one. I'm just going to say that I ended up in a real concerning Google. search about the python epidemic that's going on in Florida and how far it could reach in the United States. Okay. Spoiler alert, not good. Not good at all. Not good as in like far, farther than you would hope. Yeah, it was somewhere around like 2100. In theory, if everything were to go right for those boa constrictors that are down there, we could see them in the Pacific Northwest. There's enough nature that they can survive

and adapt in that they could crawl their way across the country and eventually be a problem up by us. How could they do that? It's cold up here. But if it's a mild enough wintertime where we are or in Washington, Oregon. I, no, I don't believe this.

I refuse to back to K2. Okay. The second thing is we talked about during Everest, about how Everest continues to grow. Will there ever be a time I wonder. and I should look this up,

but that we can get a 15th, 8,000 or peak, just because if all of these mountains are still growing. Yes, 100%. Think of it a sense of like, these things, in essence, are formed off of the splinters of two gigantic tectonic plates.

And when those are grinded against each other or mashed against each other, some of that stuff has just splintered up. Like when you're cutting through a piece of plywood and you don't cut it clean or something like that, it gets those splinters at the end. Yeah, it's just forced them up. So what could happen is if those two plates keep rubbing against and keep pushing against each other,

it could technically force more of those splinters to keep rising up and create more peaks. Because a lot of those, that's why a lot of those are within those same ranges. Oh. Because those are on the same plates budding up against another plate. So technically, yes, you could get, if there was a very large movement, fuck, I don't know, like, what movement happens, but if it was a catastrophic earthquake, you could have like oh shit overnight we have 20 peaks that are over 8,000 meters yeah we'd probably die at that point in time but if there was something that was sitting at like 17

like most of Asia would be in ruins or some shit yeah if we have a mountain right now that's sitting at like 7,998 feet maybe that one creeps over in our lifetime we get another 8,000er and at that at that point do you get to say had you already climbed it that you climbed oh all the other records all the people that climb 14 that have either died or retired. Now you can just go ahead and climb up the 15th and take all the glory. Be the first one to do all 15. That's not. All right.

So going back to Luigi. So he maps out the southeastern ridge. He declares after mapping this out and trying to get a little further that K2 is completely unclimbable. It's again to be climbed. Today, the exact route that it is the most climbed. I think it's what like the ratio of like 99. percent of people that have, well, no, not that high, but I want to say somewhere between like

90 or 95 have summited through the Abruzzi or usually all commercial climbing goes through the abruzzi. And that's like we were talking about earlier. It's not that the abruzzi is easy. It's just that it's the least dangerous. It's the most developed as well. Yeah. Because it's been traveled the most. So yeah, the abruzzi spur, it's the standard climbing route used by most modern mountaineers. We also could have had a very weird situation where pretty much, well, I guess the person who summits from that route probably would have named it, but this

abruzzi party went multiple different, they attempted multiple different routes. Like this wasn't just like they chose the abruzzi spur and they went up as far as they could. They felt their way around the mountain until the spur was just where they could get the highest off. They ended up getting to 6,250

650 meters or 20,510 feet. So you're not, I mean, you were 65, 25 for the first attempt. You didn't get as high, but at the same time you had a lot more success as far as like getting up there

and figuring out a way to get to there. It's not as high as the first attempt, but at the same time you are trailing this, or I guess blazing this path that'll be used to be built upon. The fact, though, that you mapped it and then you were like, can't be climbed, and then literally like,

not only will we climb it, or we're going to climb it in the area that you said it was unclimbable. And we're going to be Italian. Well, no. The next people weren't. No, but as far as to get to the summit. Spoiler alert.

Which one do you have next? 1938. Yeah, almost 30 years go by before the next attempt. In 1938, this first Karacorum American expedition. USA, we're wetting our beak on K2. It's led by this climber slash doctor named Charles Houston. It's Houston. Everything in my mind wants to say,

I heard it pronounce Houston so many times. Like Thurston Howell? Yeah, pretty similar. That's not even close. I don't know why my brain just made the connection. Houston, Houston, you got some stuns in there. This expedition was sponsored by Eddie Bauer.

Eddie Bauer. We keep your butt cheeks warm. Yep. Along with everything else. This took, as Chris was just talking about, this a bruise route. They ended up reaching a height of 8,000 meters 26,000 feet they get all the way up there. And the only reason they really couldn't go any higher

is because they kind of ran out of supplies. I believe that they said that they had... Not warm jackets. Didn't run out of those. It was more of the actual food and water and fuel for the stoves and things like that. So they come up with this kind of semi-brillient plan. They're like, well, we don't have enough supplies

for everybody else to climb at the same rate. So if we pool our resources, we send our two best climbers, We'll see how far up that they can get. They did end up getting, you know, all the way up to 8,000 feet. So you are getting kind of to your tiptoeing. You're almost kissing the death zone at 8,000 feet. 8,000 feet and above is considered the death zone.

But they ran out of resources. Not much you can do at that point. You can come back the next year. Yeah. Which is exactly what they do. So this attempt by the Americans in 39 comes really close to the summit. It's actually organized by the American Alpine Club. At this point, once Everest had been conquered, they're like,

we need American Club to conquer the rest of these mountains. And it was led by this guy, we mentioned his last name a little earlier, Fritz Weissner. Kind of fucked up that we have an American expedition, and we want to lead it with American excellence, and we choose a guy named Fritz Weissner that's from Germany. Correct. He was an American, but he was from Germany.

He was a brilliant German-born climber. He was arguably like the strongest mountaineer in the world at this time. If we're going to be splitting hairs about problems that we have with the Germans in 1939, this one's not making a list. We got some other bigger issues with the Germans. So, I mean, he leads the expedition at least. Well, here, something that comes into play here is a bunch of like the top tier American climbers. They didn't want to join because of this, you know, overarching, this thing that might have been kind of building up some steam in Europe called World War II.

And so Weissner's forced to recruit basically like inexperienced hobbyists, but to have enough money to be a hobbyist climber. You have to essentially just be very wealthy. And at that point, you're going to just be a hobbyist and you're going to expect, hey, I got to the top of Kilimanjaro. Yeah, but how many people did you have carrying your shit or, you know, things like that? So there was this divide essentially between Weissner, who is this guy that, you know, demanding hard driving perfectionist. And then you get these guys that are just like, we don't have to be perfect because we can just maybe pay for someone.

to get our tents or like once we get to the top they can help us up he's like hey it's not gonna work like that like it's like gotta be all of you actually doing it and we have to work as a team so they lose time basically due to the weather which there it's completely unpredictable like we've mentioned wisner small group of shirpa's basically push up the abruzis spur they establish a chain of nine camps that's a lot i mean modern day there's four right uh yeah And when it was, yeah, so at that point in time, I mean, you're, I think you're establishing a camp like right before you die. And well, and at that point, too, what you're doing is you're just like how far, because it's all exploratory. Yeah.

Again, we have to view that through the mindset of humans have not set foot here at this point. There's not a rope leading them up to anything else. They're taking their time up the mountain. And yeah, they're having to just basically like every time they stop. They're like, set up a marker, camp here. and then we'll hit it the next day. So by mid-July, Weisner and then this guy,

Dawa Lama, who was... That was the name, right? Passing Dawa Lama. It's so close to Dali Lama. Yeah. Dawa Lama is so cool. But he was a Sherpa. They launched this summit try from Camp 8.

Now, on, I think it was July 19th and 39, they got to about 8,382 meters or 27,500 feet, which was just a few, well, you know, several hundred meters below the summit. But as, you know, they're looking at it, evening is starting to come around. This is before the time of headlamps.

Jesus Christ, I didn't realize that. Yeah, I mean, you know, you had, I think they might have had flashlights in World War one. Yeah, they had the little angle that we talked about. So they probably had something similar, but that means you had to have a hand free, not holding something like a line or something like that. So they wanted to basically like climb through the night and try to get there. But the guy with him, Daubaluma, is like, listen, it's getting dark. This mountain is already, you know, no one's been this far up before.

I don't know if there's mountain spirits here or anything like that, but I'm not going to go any further. So Weissner is like, okay, we'll turn back. We'll try again the next day. well during their descent back to camp eight he accidentally dropped the crampons the foot spikes Passang did yes drop down slid down the mountain face and that was that because you're not going up without those Yeah I don't think it was an accident I had a thought in my head too of being like Okay I had to just convince him not to go up there in the dark what if it's like the weather is shitty or something happens tomorrow I can I convince him

again not to make an attempt at it. I feel like this guy's willing to risk it, my life included, to do this. So, yeah, because you think you'd be wearing them, right? That high up, you're going to want those on at all times. They also had just a large amount of anchors that were weighing them down to because they took up this very wealthy man.

I'm pretty sure he's probably a benefactor of this whole trip named Deadly Wolf. And Deadly Wolf started suffering altitude sickness. They ended up leaving him at Camp 8. They would come back down. as they're looking for a resupply after you said Passang had talked um, Weissner into coming back down. He was just supposed to be there as a support team.

They had support people at like a bunch of the camps. That was Wolf's job. He was at the highest camp, but his job was to kind of support the summit team. Well, Wolf ends up getting sick. They are going to bring him, I believe, back down to Camp 7.

There has been a massive miscommunication at the lower camps and at base camp. A colossal fuck up. And when we say lower camps, it's not like there's a

miscommunication at three, two, and one. No, there's a miscommunication at seven, which then leads to

them pulling seven back and pulling six back, five, and they just pull these camps back because the remaining

like teams down at the lower camp it was led by this guy named Tony Cromwell was basically convinced because again,

I don't know if right, like World War II of course had radios, but this is also cold weather batteries. Like they say even with modern lithium, like stuff doesn't work up in like the dead zone because of the cold. So he's convinced because of zero communication, maybe not being able to see them, the Weisner, Wolf, and Passeng had died. So Cromwell is the one that orders this retreat instructing the Sherpas to basically evacuate every other remaining camp

and carry the survival gear back to base camp. So finally, when an extradite, extremely dehydrated and just exhausted Weissner and Passang end up coming down from Camp 8 down to Camp 7. They find it completely stripped. No food, no sleeping bags, no fuel. I believe they did have a tent though because that's where they threw old Duds. Duds waited at Camp 7. Correct. But they didn't have, there was nothing, it was just putting him in there. So as they're going down the mountain, again, no oxygen. So they're having to get, down the mountain, finding just no support, all these like ghost camps.

And they realize that as they get lower, maybe camp, what, five, they're like, we're getting a long way away from camp seven. There is no additional support left on the mountain. Wolf's already fucking loopy in the head and probably a little bit crazy. What are we going to do about him? They don't have any kind of ability. They don't have supplies to go back up. up. This is the way that they had decided, quote unquote, that something had happened to Wolf Passang

in Weissner was they had gone up to Camp 7 and they had shouted to see if they could get a response. And when they didn't get a response, they had seen an avalanche that had happened at a certain point. And they had just figured that that avalanche should take them all out. Nobody answers at Camp 7. They start pulling all of this shit away. and I can understand taking the support stuff, but if you see pictures from this that were taken, these things were like torn to shreds. Like it was just shit that was strewn everywhere.

Yeah, it was like a general retreat of like, we got to get the fuck out of here. Abandoned ship. They were, what do they call it when you're marching and you're burning everything beside or beyond you? Scorched earth? Oh, yeah, scorched earth. They were scorched earthing.

way down the mountain. And when you're up at this, anywhere on the mountain, for the most part, it's not like you're going to be of any use. If you try to turn around and go and rescue somebody, turning around to do anything is like the most, what am I trying to say? Egregious act. Yeah, because essentially it's, you, you're not going to be of any help even if you try. Yeah, one dead person turns into two dead people pretty fast. And so, Wisner and Passang, are like what we need to end up doing Weisner's like ruined He has severe frostbite

They end up getting To base camp And they're like what the fuck Happened I think they said that in one day They descended from four to base camp Yeah And these three Sherpas

Pisseng Kikuli Pissang Katar And I want to say his name was Pinso Two brothers or two cousins Yep Climb back up the mountain To the desk zone to rescue Wolf.

They get to Wolf at camp seven or eight. Seven, I believe. And he's basically suffering from severe altitude sickness and dehydration. He's got shit all over himself. Yeah. He's refusing to leave, telling him to come back, you know, form the next day. Again, view this into the point of like, this is somebody up there where it's an unbearable level of cold with extremely old-timey resources like clothing,

stuff like that. He was basically crazy and delirious at that point, but because these guys are like Sherpas, I feel like because of the action they're going to take next, they're like, okay, we'll come get you, I guess, the next day. They go down just a little bit, have a private conversation like, okay, he's all crazy. He's crazy, right? And all of them like 100%. This guy's fucking nuts. Now, what happens if we come down without him? What do we say? Oh, he told us to leave him up here and come for him. No, they're going to be like, why didn't you? It's going to come out on us. They're going to make us disappear. So they walk back up there and basically force him to come down through like a storm. Well, the first time when they reached him, I had to, at this point in time, I think

that everybody kind of knew Wolfe's mental state because they had all written him letters encouraging him to come back down to face camp. Well, and here's the shitty thing too. Like we joke and everything like that. None of them were ever seen again. No, no, it is truly shitty. They had told Wolf, they would be back the next day. There was a storm that prevented them from going back up. So they go back up that day after Wolf's still not going to happen. So they end up dragging him out and trying to bring him down.

They get swept up in a storm and basically pushed off of them out. Well, they don't even go back the first time and then go back up to get him. I thought they'd gone back up the second time. No. Because had they come back to base camp without him and we're like, yeah, we were up there, but he told us that, fuck no. Well, that's why they went back the second time. They didn't go back a second time.

What happened is they go up there. They talk to him. He says, come back a second day. They start going back down. They don't go all the way back down. They only get slightly back down. Yeah, they went down a camp or two. Correct.

But there weren't camps reset back up. They had stripped everything. They were the rescue party going all the way back up to Camp 7. There were no other. They just went back a little bit and then decided, because they saw a storm coming in, they had to get him out now. My mindset in that situation is,

you're hired by these guys, you're probably like, if we don't bring him down, regardless of our excuse, they're going to do something to his back of base camp for not getting him down here. Yeah, I think we ran into when I said go back down. I didn't mean the bottom.

Okay. Getting back to base camp and going back up, there's no way they would have done it. But it's just that little kind of retreat to give Wolf the, silence that he needs. I don't know. I think it was a situation

where they're sitting up there and they're like, okay, we're going to leave and they get away from it. It's like, we're going to have to knock out this fucking white guy and drag him down the mountain,

aren't we? And they go back up and you never know what happened. Maybe they had to, he could have taken off sprinting out of the fucking tent and they could have tried to chase him and all of them could have been killed. Yeah, that's very true.

What do you think Cromo felt when he saw Weissner walk back in Holy shit. When he saw him come in, probably just frostbitten and everything like that. They showed back up to camp at 2.30 in the morning, too. So this was at night. He probably walked. The guy was probably asleep.

People I walked in there and punched him with his just fucking dead fingers. How's that feel? Frozen? Yeah, you know why it feels frozen? Because you fucking stripped everything from the camps. Jumping ahead to from 39 all the way to 53. to another American attempt. This is widely regarded

as kind of one of the most heroic and legendary failures in mountaineering history. So you can still fail, but do awesome. Is that the way we spin it? Like, we didn't get to the top, but we were so fucking teamwork-oriented.

And more people could have died. Here's the thing, too. I love this story because this is cool, like, American shit that you can be proud of, of what happened right here. So they didn't reach the summit of K2, but basically the way that they were able to keep

mostly everybody alive is through the actions of just like selflessness and sacrificing like personal glory. So the expedition was led by Charles Houston yet again. And this guy named Robert Bates. So instead of hiring like aggressive, like the superstar climbers, Houston basically looking back at what happened the first time intentionally selects this team of like really talented amateurs based on like meetings with them, their character, how self like climbing with them to see how they perform in everything,

seeing how they get along under pressure, how they work together. And this eight man team is climbing without supplemental oxygen. And they're deciding to kind of switch it up by adopting this more lightweight style lightweight I guess you would say for the era because not compared to what they use now but for the era so what they called it is climbing on ambient air

oh you mean you're just climbing you know using the oxygen that's currently presented all around us that's fucking branding for you that's slowly dissipating but I think one of the reasons they had to say that is because at that point bottled oxygen systems at that point although they were like heavy and clubsy they still

basically were able to be used in some circumstances or attempt to be used. But he felt that, as that as Weissner did, that a team that was acclimatized, physically fit, they could climb K2 without the extra weight of the, you know, the oxygen tanks.

So, they packed lighter to be able to get there quicker, but that meant that if something were to happen to trap them in, you know, the dead zone or anything like that, they were extremely vulnerable. And what's going to

happen when you set up for that exact situation. Worst case scenario. I don't know, as you were talking about, this is a great success story that still ends in failure. I have a certain

I guess concern of being tied to somebody else because I'm always concerned that if they go down, I'm going to have to figure out how to make the save. And in this situation, I mean, the story kind of defies.

It does. Just, you know, if it was tied, if, you know, I was tied to you and everything like that, you should feel pretty good. It's me who should be worried if something were to happen. Uh-huh. Yeah, that's where the concern should be. So, instead of, like, using hundreds of porters, the American used a much smaller, or the Americans used, like, a much smaller pool of local high-altitude Hunza porters. the porters only carried gear up to the lower camps.

Once they were on like kind of the more steep tactical spine of the actual Abruzzi Spur, the eight American climbers carried all of their own food, tense, fuel, and then all of their ropes like up the mountain itself. So just a quick point before that, I just remembered. When we're using the term Sherpa, that I think is related to the Nepalese people that are working up Everest and in that area. The Hunza porters are essentially, I believe, the same thing in Pakistan, except for these Hunza porters.

They're just called high altitude porters. Porters are usually the people that are bringing everything in for you. They're going to be restocking the camps. Into like base camp itself, yeah. So these high altitude... The back is trained, basically. These high altitude porters are essentially what Sherpas are. It's just a different, I guess, ethnicity.

They're the people that are there to keep the white people alive. If you only want to just break it down. We'll continue to call them either Hunza Porters or Sherpas. It's the same thing. Yeah. So they had like simple canvas packs with wooden frames. They would use these heavy like straight shafted wooden axes that would be used for balance and steps. Not what they use them for today with actual like climbing itself and everything like holding your weight.

They didn't use, you know, thousands of feet of fixed ropes to create like a safe path up the mountain. anything like that, basically, like you just said, they're going to climb primarily tied to one another moving in teams of two and three. So while this does make them again very fast and agile on the way up, the margin for error is fucking razor thin at this point. And by early August, the team had successfully established Camp 8 at 7,770 meters, so it was 25,500 feet right along the Abruzies spur. they were in good shape at this point. Nothing really significant had happened to make them feel like there was going to be any type of additional danger for the summit. They were really prepared.

They were all still in excellent physical shape. Illness really hadn't came through the camp or anything like that. They had 10 days of food. And they were just basically cocked and ready at the, you know, starting line to make that historic, you know, final push up to the summit. Be a real shame of weather showed up. Yeah, you know, one of those. just insane storms because you're up in the fucking jet stream

so that's exactly what ends up happening this crazy storm rolls in pins them inside all of their tents just for days the winds were so bad they couldn't even light the stoves to melt snow so they're all getting dehydrated so all of a sudden

now all the advantage of the shape if this even does let up is going out the window and plus if the storm doesn't let up and you have to try to make a move. What are you doing here, like, as far as the decision to, how long does this have to last before we're like,

we got to try to just get down the fucking mountain. Screw the equipment, screw packing up. We just got to get out of here. What's that day count of, well, shit, now we can't drink. How dehydrate, do we, if this lasts for three days, are we willing to say three days dehydrate for that amount of time? But then what do we do? We can light the stoves and rehydrate,

and then we just keep staying up here. Like, what is the math in your head? for that. I don't even know if it's math. I think you're stuck between a rock and a hard place because if you do try to descend and you do try to get down in the middle of that storm, you're probably going to die. Like, trying to leave in the storm

is just as dangerous as trying to continue in the storm. Sometimes stuff will force your hand. Yeah. And that's kind of what happens in this circumstance. Because during the storm, this 26-year-old team member named Art Gilke, he ends up collapsing. So Howston diagnosed him with, it was like a thromba,

what is it, it's a blood clot in his legs. that it like traveled up to his lungs. It was thrombose for a little bit. It's sorry, I butcher the shit out of that. But at that altitude, it's basically a death sentence unless they could get him down like immediately. So without hesitation, the entire team is like, you know what, let's go ahead and get down here.

I question because I have to, of course. At this point, they had to, people were probably just sitting there and everyone in their head is thinking, someone be the first one to say we should head down. I'll be the second. I'll jump in as soon as that person wants to bring that up. I'll be the next person in there to throw in the second and then we'll get a third and a fourth.

As soon as Art goes down and they're like, we need and get him down. Everyone's like, oh, we got to get out of the storm in this fucking death zone. Okay, yeah, let's, yeah, we, everyone, we got to get Art down. That thought went the opposite way that I was thinking it was going to go. I thought we were in a situation where somebody was going to be like, well, we might not even get him down the mountain alive. And we're already pretty close. If he dies, he dies?

I think had that happened and there was no storm, I think it goes your way. Yeah. Because of the storm, dude, they're all dehydrated. They came in light fucking stoves. They're all just looking for a reason to get the fuck out of there. And even if the weather clears, it's going to take them a number of days and supplies that they don't have.

The weekend getting down and they're fucking way up there. So because Gilkey can't even stand, the team wraps him in like a sleeping bag and then basically this makeshift like canvas tent to be able to slide him through the snow. So on August 10th, they end up going down, um, you know, they're going down like the steep eye slope and everything.

And one man slips dragging his partner down with him. The rope ends up tangling another two man team pulling. them down too, along with a fifth guy who tried to catch them and was yanked off his feet. Now, these guys are on a slope sliding toward like a 10,000 foot drop. Because again, the way this mountain is set up, it is a very like vertical mountain. Not a lot of flat plateau areas like Everest has. It's a water slide. Yes.

So when something starts going over, the snow will extend out for something and then you're just out over the abyss and you're falling. and there's one guy left standing. Pete Schoen. Fucking Pete Shonin. Basically, he Superman's up. He jams his wooden ice axe behind a boulder, wraps the climbing rope around his body and the axe, and then just fucking braces himself as best he can. And as this weight hits him, the fucking rope somehow doesn't break. Because again, these ropes don't have elasticity. This is still that hemp and rope or whatever is the peak of that engineering at the time. Somehow he holds his ground. The axe fucking bends. It's in a fucking museum right now somewhere. And against all like, even mathematical odds.

One guy holding five other guys up. He actually stops the fall and saves the entire team from death. Isn't this where Gilkey meets his unceremonious end? No, no, no. Not you. Okay. So as the team basically recovers from this, they find out that, not Houston, we'll say Houston. Houston?

Houston. Houston has a severe concussion. They're all battered, frostbitten. They're in shock from this because this isn't like a simple, hey, we can just bounce up and recover from this. You're so fucking exhausted that like the recovery time to get. everyone safely back up where they can get their footing. Check everyone's going to have injuries. Like, they end up managing to anchor and immobilize Gilky to like an ice slope so they

have two ice axes. And I think they jammed them underneath his armpits. Yeah, that's right. And they're like, okay, we need to go and pinch tent nearby, basically shelter the wounded because there are multiple people that are kind of wounded at this point. When three of the climbers, they're like, okay, if the tents up, go get Gilkey, he was gone. and so a localized little avalanche had basically just swept him off the mountain face.

They said that it had looked like he had maybe pulled an ice axe, and that might have been how he had slipped off, was he might have taken one for the team. So, like, historians, climbers, the climbers themselves kind of noted that his sudden disappearance probably saved the remaining seven guys as, after that accident, again, that impacts six total guys because it's the guy holding him, the five guys that slipped and fell and were dragged down there. Man, after that, because he's conscious and everything,

they said that they were too broken to have survived the rest of the descent while carrying him. Well, and I think that they'd said the blood clots had traveled to his lungs. So at that point, again, I think what happened is he probably did try to de-wedge himself or something like that, Or it could have again been, fuck man, Avalanche has happened all the time. They're moving around that entire area, dislodging stuff.

I'm not saying it's their fault. No. That mountain is, will kill you. But at the same time, I don't believe it's an instance because of how far they had gotten at that point,

that it was just like, hey, get rid of Gilkey. I think they came back and Gilkey was probably like, I ain't making it, boys. Like, you guys are all beat to shit.

I would not, I don't want to have to have, I'm going to die anyway. I don't want to have to have all you guys have letters to your families as well. Also, crazy fun way to go out probably. Oh, just fucking sledding your ass all the way.

As long as you stay on your back. Rather than the slow painful blood clots and everything, at that point where they weren't able to help him medically, he was probably just like, don't fucking leave me here. Don't stake me. Motherfuckers don't stake me down. Put it through my chest.

Tobogging me off the fucking side of the mountain. basically the survivors crawled back into base camp days later there's a memorial called the Gilki Memorial it's this massive stone like structure at the base of K2 and basically stands of this monument of art to Gilki and then all the other subsequent climbers

that have lost their lives on the mountain it's become a pretty sacred place any time that you're going up a mountain anytime that you're about to experience something that even commercialized, even climbing in these teams, there's a 10 to 13% chance you're going to die. And if you don't believe that you're in that 10 to 13%

you look over at that monument and you see how many people have erected these memorials to the people that didn't make it. It's something that's always going to make you think twice. Kind of the issue that's going on in 53 with the Americans getting the passed to go up at the mountain is the Italians had made a check or they had made an attempt they had tried to get in in 53 you have an Italian nation who I'm sure is still licking their wounds after the whole Mussolini in World War II debacle they need to get themselves on a national stage

in a positive way yeah in 53 you have Tenzing Norgay and edmund hillary finally summiting Everest and you know that they were trying to do that as well probably I don't know if we mentioned that the competing attempt. That's what I mean. These countries are running back and forth being like, we can be the first one. No, we can be the first one. No, we can be the first one. No, we can be the first one. And they have a separate probably crews that are trying to do. Yeah, both. And so they end up not getting the pass for K2. Now, obviously,

we just talked about the incredible save in 53. 54, it's at least time to shine. They get the pass. And as they get the past, they treat this shit like the Olympics. They make sure they're pulling the best the best. This is when you see the montage. This is when you hear, you're the best. Are they not allowing multiple countries to be in at the same time? I think they're cutting it off because it was, I think they were at this point in time, they were all getting just one country,

got one pass to try to make it happen. So Italy basically throws what we would consider like NASA training at these. The government throws its backing behind this. It treats it basically as the Olympics at this point with like support and funding. And they're looking for the 11 top climbers in the country. Now, they get some pretty good climbers here. They get some fucking assholes. Very, well, I don't want to cast dispersions on the Italians, but out of 11 Italians. The story will reveal the truth.

June 1954, this team included 700 porters that reached base camp. Mm-hmm. They brought enough shit to where they needed 700. hundred people and donkeys to ferry this stuff. This thing was run like a military operation. So it was organized by the Italian Alpine Club, funded heavily by the government and corporate sponsorship. The budget was eight times larger than the year before's American attempt. So before this attempt here in 54, Frostbite was like virtually guaranteed.

It was just one of those things that's going to happen. Guess what? It was a question of there was an old saying, how many toes will K2 claim? Because you were going to be losing either toes or fingers or something like that. So the Italians commissioned basically a completely new design for boots from the Dolomite Boot Company. So multi-layer was done instead of just single leather. It was lined with reindeer fur. The exterior was made and treated with like a water resistant leather that was then wrapped in like these rubber bands.

and it prevented basically the frostbite of the feet at least that were suffered by previous expedition. So you're already more mobile, you're already more comfortable, you're going to be more effective. So they wore windproof suits that were made of this really tightly woven, lightweight nylon.

We've got nylon coming in play here. That basically shed snow and kept out the wind without like absorbing water or anything. Their down parkas featured compartmentalized stitching to keep the feathers evenly distributed. provided this math, massive warmth at basically a fraction of the weight.

Because if you've seen like even the ones that Eddie Bauer has where you can tuck him into the little bag and they're the vest and the jackets, like that's how compact and lightweight down can be. So instead of basically these like A-frame canvas tents that were just ripped apart by the winds, they were the first ones to design those like aerodynamic dome tents.

so they used lightweight aluminum that was probably pioneered and heavily used. They needed some way to for the aircraft and shit like that during the war. They're like, we need to do something with this aluminum.

Make tints out of it. And like heavy duty rubberized nylon fabric that could withstand like the winds. And while in 53, the Americans had been like, we're not going to do the oxygen shit because of the weight and the freezing,

the Italians had spent that time perfecting the system with like government funded scientist. You're throwing everything that you want. This is like, you know what it is? And I'm not saying that it, you know, Ivan Drago in the Rocky in Rocky Ford,

the training montage where Rockies in the woods, chopping wood, like hauling rocks, Drago's in the lab, getting fucking steroid shots and doing all the high tech equipment. This is what it feels like, that the Italians are doing. Just off of what you were talking about with the boots, I had to know this. climbers do take their boots off on K2

but strictly at lower altitudes like base camp so 5,100 meters this is the only place that climbers safely remove their boots to rest and dry out their gear and let their feet breathe camps one through three they wear these highly insulated double boots and they will take the shells off sometimes you can remove the liner

to let it kind of dry but your feet are never exposed even past camp one. Yeah. And when you get to like a summit push, when you get to four, your boots just never come off. Yeah. So if you're up at camp four for two weeks,

you're not seeing your toesies for two weeks. You're hoping to God that they might feel cold at certain points and you're just hoping to God. You're just praying you can still feel them. Yeah. Just like I still feel them. That's all I need. And I guess it's kind of like a probably like a rolled

ankle. You usually don't want to take the shoe off because if you take it off, you might not, once it swells up. You might be like, you know, with them doing all that stuff, reinforced ankles, all of that kind of stuff, anything they could think of. So the expedition's commanded by this guy, Ardito Decio. He's basically this asshole geologist. He doesn't even climb with the team. He just runs the operations basically from base camp. And they had named him, I don't know if it's secretly or not so secretly, El Ducito, which is Little Mussolini, basically based on the style that he was running this operation. He had them... He did make the trains run on time.

That might be a good thing for this kind of expedition. Could be. So, like you were saying, how much gear they had to come bring in, they engineered a manual winch and cable system just to, like, haul heavy gear up, like, the lower rock faces and everything. So they have this massive chain of, again,

nine camps all the way up the abruzzi spur so there's going to be no chance of failure the Americans had their shot we're we're not going to fail so up at the final what they consider like the final assault tent so it would be what camp nine yeah it was agreed that this guy last name was um was it compignon so you have achili compagioni and lino and lino Las Adelaidelli. You probably can't get too much more Italian than that. They are going to

be the summit crew at 9. So by mid-July, the Italian team and some of these high-altitude porters push up pretty high onto the mountain. July 30th, it's decided that a man named Walter Bonatti and this Hunza porter named Amir Medi

are basically tasked with running up this extra oxygen to Camp 9. So Walter is like the youngest climber. He's 24 years old. He's a fucking stud. Walter, they said that Walter is known as the greatest climber of his generation. Yeah.

And the Hunza Porter, Amir, is a baller fucking climber as well. So their job basically is they're sent down at Camp 8. They're going to carry the oxygen up to Camp 9 for Campioni and Lacedelli and La Cadelli to go ahead and make their attempts. So July 30th, Walter and Amir make the ascent hauling the 40 pound oxygen set. So 40 pounds on them each. And when they reach this prearranged location for Camp 9, there's nothing there. So they're up in, are they Death Zone at this point? I believe they're just outside of it.

This pisses me off so much. I know. It's fucking, it's horrible. So Campanioni had deliberately moved Camp 9 much higher up, hidden behind this rock step formation, basically for fear that this younger, much stronger, Walter, basically this guy's jealous as fuck. Walter was probably fucking handsome as shit too. And they're like, he's just going to run right past us up the mountain. Well, and the last thing that they need is a younger, fitter, maybe more. sellable

Benotti And God forbid Amir Yeah God damn Oh yeah Yeah Porter makes it up there too The two old guys That were originally in the ascent team The summit team

Kind of fall by the wayside If this happens So they're afraid He's gonna overtake him And steal the glory of the first ascent So it's getting dark And as it's getting dark Basically Walter and Amir

Like shouting like where the fuck are you And they're shouting back hey, leave the oxygen bottles right there and just head back down in the dark. So at that point, they're like, fine, fuck you. They leave the oxygen bottles. They weren't planning to do anything anyway. And they're having to descend in the fucking pitch black without lights or ropes. Because they weren't planning on having to, they were just going to stay at that camp, weren't they?

No, they stayed the night. They stayed the night at where Camp 9 was supposed to be. I know. But what I'm saying is that's why they were. like staying there the whole time because they thought that eventually they were going to find out where they were telling where they were because they had to sleep that was the whole plan they forced them to stay there so long before being like just leave them they're like you're really not going to tell us where they're out they're like nope they're like fuck it and they just left the auction

and they didn't even have enough time to get back down to camp eight so they fuck them in the sense of leaving them open because they were forced to survive what they call a bivouac right where you're just surviving out in the open they had no tent no sleeping bags no shelter where pits to sit in to break the wind

yes at over 8,100 meters that's the death zone that's the death zone which is exposure almost always fatal they actually crazily enough both survive the night I don't give a fuck what they had to do to survive I'd be cuddling my ass off

I'd be cuddling next to each other I'd be doing whatever it fucking took to stay warm. In sub-zero hurricane winds. Now, we'd be breathing in each other's mouths just trying to stay warm. Amir ended up suffering from horrific fucking frostbite that would later require the amputation of his toes. He began staggering down the mountain. Walter left the oxygen cylinders on the snow as requested and started going down behind him. So they didn't even take the oxygen back with them to like help them fucking feel better or do anything.

like that. Well, they couldn't anyway. Yeah. Because the mask and that stuff and all of the fittings were up with the assholes at Camp 9 because this all comes to light during a trial. They might have been able to take poles off of the hose. They didn't have hose. It was just tanks.

So shoot it like you would helium into your mouth. I don't think you could like think of how cold it would be to try to put your mouth freezes to the right to it. Exactly. So later in the morning on July 30, first, asshole Campanioni and Lacedaelli climbed down from their little hidden area, take the oxygen tanks, and basically begin their final push. So they navigate through the bottleneck under the

sarac and claim near the top that their oxygen ran out. Now, despite the fact that the oxygen runs out and there's no reason to carry them, they still continue to carry the heavy empty steel frames to the top and got to the top at 6 p.m. So they do end up submitting first. This is the first instance of summon summoning K2. They plant the Italian flag, take photographs, and then safely descend. Now, when the team returned to Italy, Decio's official account of all this, so the guy that wasn't up there, the guy back, bark in the orders at base camp, completely sidelines Walter and how he contributed to this. If it sidelines Walter doesn't even fucking mention Amir at that point.

who lost his toes and then eventually his career is a high altitude porter because he doesn't have toes. Yep. And a lot of those guys can still do that. They're just so fucking good. Yeah. I think it was a situation too where there was great shame that was put on Bonatti. Probably that was. Because basically Campanuni comes out and accuses Walter of secretly using the oxygen tanks during the night to stay warm, draining the tanks and making it to where they ran out of oxygen.

on the way up. So basically he's like, yeah, we made it despite him almost trying to kill us because he had come out as well and been like, they left us out there to die. So Bonotti ends up suing, or Walter ends up suing a journalist for libel in 1966 that had been running these stories from Camponia. He ends up winning proving that he couldn't have breathed any of the oxygen because he didn't have the respiratory masks, which were already up at Camp 9. Well, it alternate camp nine. It was? It alternate camp nine.

Because Bonatti and many were and where camp nine was supposed to be. It had been in the equipment that was set up at camp nine. Lassetti and had taken up there and had with them. Exactly. So this drives on or drags on for like five decades. So like 50 years. Finally, 2004, Lino Lacedelli, this asshole, the guilt finally, finally gets to him because he breaks the silence in this book confessing that they lied.

He basically admits the Camp 9 was intentionally hidden and confirmed that their oxygen had not run out, basically pulling out his own personal summit photos that show them actively breathing through their masks with the mask still on. So took him three years later in 2007, the Italian Alpine Club basically rewrote history, which in this situation, because you're the first to summit K2 is a pretty big deal. Yeah. But they basically clear Walter's name, formally acknowledging that basically his heroics on the first ascent made it possible. And Amir doing his thing made it possible for them to be the first ones to get up there.

Maybe I'm not a team player. Tell me if I'm wrong, if you would feel any sort of way about as Benotti and Medi are leaving and Medi is most assuredly going to lose his toes. if Benadi doesn't reach back and twist one of those valves a little bit and walk away. Would you blame the guy? He didn't know he was going to get shafted. He's just happy to be alive. He's probably not thinking clearly. I think it's more about like survival instead of fuck those guys at that point.

And then once I get, the other thing too is one of those guys dies because the other one gets down there and reports it, it's on you. If you leave it untouched or anything like that, they already, he, Redigart lied to, you know, like you just said, he was using some of it. He was never using any of it. He had no way of doing it. But I think for him, it was, he never suspected it was going to turn out like this, you know. Yeah. For me, I'm, I'm twisted.

You've been, you've been planning revenge for, you haven't been planning revenge in, you know, the death zone. It's been hotter than hell here. I plotted that revenge all through the heat. I can't imagine doing it. Some nights, I believe they said that night might have gotten somewhere around negative 60 degrees. It's impossible whether to survive. I'm going to be really mad if I can think even semi-clearly. And it's 100%.

They only survived due to that advancement in equipment. For sure. What is our next? Do we want to keep going through the positives or do we probably? We can just kind of hit it chronologically. I mean, there's not much as far as, goes because I mean in 54 after Italy did that K2 pretty much completely shuts out the mountaineering world for like 20 years and basically it's a combination of like you know the reputation of the mountain there's a lot of

stuff going on within like the Pakistani geopolitical border closures all of this coming together basically means that no one's going to successfully stand on the summit again until 1977 so and again that's reached the summit there are going to be some climbs and attempts during that time frame, just not really in mass, I guess, or in strength. So the first attempt to repeat the Italian route didn't happen until 1960. So again, there are some attempts. There was a German-American expedition that tried to scale the mountain, but battered by like the weather and everything, they failed to get anywhere near the top. These are less funded expeditions. These aren't the ones that have the entire backing of the Italian government. And it makes sense because thinking about

it, there's no reason. You can't be first or more. There's not going to be a government or state sponsored attempt to do this. You're going to have to start getting private companies and sponsorships involved, which if you're like, well, we want to be the second team to do this, they're going to be like, yes, second's not sexy. There's a reason why the space race ended after we made it to the moon. So shortly after that kind of half-hast attempt, the region ends up getting closed, basically

like as a military zone due to the border disputes that are involving Pakistan, India, and China over that entire cashmere reason. So they're not going to be dealing with permits or anything like that at that point until like 1975. So Pakistan finally reopens the mountain to climbers in the mid-70s. The Americans immediately return this guy named Jim Whitaker, who's this legendary climber. He was the first American to Summit Everest. He's like, I'm leading this highly publicized 1975 expedition.

We got, we didn't make it the last time. We should have been first. We didn't make it. We wanted, you know, we played as a team and everything like that. We're glad everyone that could make it down the mountain made it down. We played as a team. We almost died as a team. Gilkey did end up unfortunately, but this time we're going to go ahead and do it.

So rather than using the standard of Bruisespur, because that's old hat. That shit's been done. If you're going to climb it and reach the top, you at least got to say, hey, we found a different way of doing. it. So you can at least have your claim on that. They're going to end up going this incredibly difficult line that's on this northwest ridge. Now, again, as with the unpredictability of K2, brutal storms move in. There's a ton of altitude illness that these guys are experiencing. There's a bunch of like interpersonal conflicts with the team. And at that point, they're just like, fuck it, it's not working. And they abandon the effort. So again,

the Americans are defeated by the mountain. Yeah, I mean, it's, you are in their defense. And of course, we're going to defend them, being that they are, our statesmen. Trying a new route is something that's, I mean, it's old. That's what I'm saying, though, is like, that's going to, imagine like in the sense of before the abruzy spur, even with the spur made, it took several attempts of that. Yeah. If you're going to be pioneering a new way up, that's just exploring the unknown. you have no idea what you're preparing for

and you just have to kind of do it on the fly. And nobody dies too. Correct. That's also a pretty important thing. Nobody dies during 76 during that expedition. And I mean, again, you're getting sick. The biggest thing that you can avoid is the fucking conflicts within the team. That's the avoidable stuff.

The storms and the illness, that's kind of hard. But you can't work against yourself, I guess, is what I'm saying in that situation. Agreed. 77 rolls around. Japan is going to make an attempt at it. And on August 9th, exactly 23 years. after the Italians did, a massive Japanese expedition led by Yichzawa.

Yoshizawa. End up breaking this long-time curse of nobody reaching it second and secures the second place, the silver of ascending K2. 52 team members and over 1,500 porters to haul gear to base camp. As cool as it is, maybe the best part of that story is there was a guy in that group named Ashraf Amen

Amen maybe he becomes the first native Pakistani climber to make it to the mountain so you or make it to the summit so you have finally a mountain that is bringing all of this tourism into this country and bringing the eyes of the world onto this country and you finally get a native well it's like how tennson was able to go and be you know in that situation The other thing too is When you know 75 the American attempt We're not throwing Everything at it again it's really publicized

And everything like that there's a legendary climber But we're not throwing the resources But what we're doing Is we're basically ensuring that whoever watches our attempt The next people up are like we can't go in like that Yeah So that's why these you know Other countries are thrown like massive amounts of resources in

78 rolls up again it's our shot. Jim Whitaker, he's like, I'm bringing back. I'm not dealing with this drama shit. I'm bringing back a brand new team. He's not going to do the 1,500 porters like Japan did. They're going to basically do like a more lightweight kind of way of going about it. So they spend months battling this long, new crazy, like corniced routes.

So basically like more like little gullies like trying to go up on. that northeast ridge on September 6th, I think it was 1978 so that we're still talking about 78. This guy named Lewis Richard and John Ross Kelly end up summiting without supplemental oxygen. So they're able to take a new route

and get to the summit on that second attempt up that new route. So Wickwire had spent a Bivouac night 150 meters below the summit. Who did? Jim Wickwire.

Oh yeah, because Rick, Ridgewater. It was Rick Ridgeway and James Wickwire, who a day later had reached the top as well. So there were multiple teams, yeah. He stayed overnight 150 meters, 490 feet below the summit. That is so high into the death zone to send that long night. So I want to say that that is still not even below the Sorok. That's somewhere. It's between the Surak and the summit, I think.

Correct. So he just wasn't going to go back down the bottleneck. That's what I'm saying. Or traversed the sarok and then to the bottleneck. So when he, yeah, and he got to the top, it was on his way down. I want to say that they weren't like climbing. They were climbing as a team, the two of them, but it was a situation where they weren't like right next to each other. Yeah.

So Ridgeway had gotten there first. He had been sitting up there for a little while. And then I want to say that Wickwire got there. And then Ridgeway was like, I'm heading back down. Don't be too long. Wickwire ends up taking longer. It affects everybody differently as far as because, again, they're going without supplemental oxygen, I believe.

And he stays there by himself. So not only was like the other guy wasn't even there with him by himself. It's the coldest, loneliness place on Earth. Oh my God. I don't even want to know that was. But that was also like, they're like, yeah, we got two teams to summit. One of our guys was even able to stay at the night like 150 meters below the summit. So I mean, no big deal.

Is he a lot? Oh, yeah, 100%. He just, he loved it so much up there. He's like, I just want to see the sunrise. We're so good at this that we actually had a guy up there that has the longest, highest altitude bivouac ever. Yes. That's how good we were. We sent a guy.

He beat that record. He slept over. He slept in the deaths. Yeah. Not even just in the death zone above the sarah. He had an overnighter. So, okay. So one, two, three, all the podium's been filled.

So between 1978, 1986, 1986. this is when kind of the now that the bruise spur had been done the northeast ridge had been done now everyone's kind of looking for that to stake their claim of like a new way to get up K2 it's got to be the new

the new route so that's when kind of the world's most elite mountaineers start kind of looking for different ways to get up there and they're looking at like unclimbable faces they're trying to find like new you know how like you have the chimney and all that kind of stuff They're trying to find their own little landmarks about getting up these things. And most of them are doing it, like a lot of the time without supplemental oxygen. There's this weird thing in the climbing community that I'll never understand.

And maybe it's because I'll never be in the climbing community or the mountaineering community. But this doing these summits without supplemental oxygen, I get it. It sounds super duper cool. Would I ever cast shade on anybody that used supplemental oxygen? Not a goddamn chance. I can see the, I see the appeal because you at that point are saying, aside from the ocean, aside from water, which is deadly to everybody. Yeah. There is not a place on earth.

There's not a stable height on earth that I cannot go without help, I guess you would say. Yeah. It scares me to think that they would use the term PED for oxygen. Yeah, but I mean it is. It is in that situation. And it also is one of those things where like... Do you consider weed a PED? No, but if you ever, you ever bold?

I don't know. It seems very crazy to think that that's a badge of honor. It totally is. Because again, I don't know how high I would go without supplemental. I would assume that there might be a time in my life that I'll cross a high enough altitude to where I would need it, but I can't guarantee it. I don't know, because at what point do you start needing it? Yeah. And when are we ever going to be in those situations?

Yeah. That's one of my bucketless items to get you into a situation in which you're required, not from a medical like emergency standpoint. A couple flights of stairs. Yeah. I mean like, I want you to need it where other people are like, hey, this is an option for you. Not we're like, sir, we need to get this oxygen on you now. This isn't an Empire State building type situation I don't want you in a panic attack for that reason

I'll be fine Hey any parking garage that we go to Won't ever need it Okay I can promise you that We can park all the way at the top I'll make it all the way up to the top No need for supplemental oxygen

Good to know Uh 1979 This guy named Reinhold Messner Who's this climbing legend Arrives at K2 Basically intent on opening A very derout Or not

What word was that Direct route? Direct route. There you go. A direct route. Very, very technical, which means a lot of actual, like, rock climbing type stuff on this south, southwestern ridge,

which he dubbed Zimagic Line. He's being cute with it. And basically after evaluating basically all of the vertical technicality, all the avalancheous, because that's where places are going to be getting avalanches. He's like, this route is complete suicide. So he tries to discover it. And then he's like,

no, this will just kill you. So he abandons the magic line, pivots his team to the abruzzy spur, where he and this guy named, last name, Doc,er successfully end up reaching the summit without supplemental oxygen. So he, I mean, he gets a little ways up, but then he just has to kind of merge it into a more well-known route. He panicked. At the same time, you're still saying, yeah, I had to use it for half the time.

I figured out this crazy-ass way up the mountain that was even harder, but it didn't have been I don't think honestly Is there is that a Can that be a flex to tell him like Oh you didn't get it up on you? You know like like motherfucker have you even Yeah

Like who's gonna talk shit to you about that? You if your eyes Lay to gaze Upon what it looks like at the summit now Oh okay yeah You couldn't even go out to regular route huh? We get 1981 Which is the first descent of the West Ridge

August 7th Ijo Atani of Japan And Nazer Sabir is who's one of Pakistan's greatest, like high altitude mountaineers, end up making history by reaching the summit via this new route. And in 1982, we get the first descent from China. So before then, K2 had only ever been climbed from the Pakistani side. Still like 99% of trips are done from the Pakistani side.

And basically this crazy, well-supplied Japanese expedition led by Asai Shin Kai and Masatagu, Konishi, end up completing the unexplored North Ridge from China because no one else

had been able to take that route before. Just to kind of lay this out, we have four deaths in 1939, go all the way to 1953 to catch our guy or Gilki.

54, you have one death, Mario Puchos from Italy. 78, we go all the way before we get a death from the United Kingdom, Nick Escort. And by the way, these are avalanche, pneumonia, pneumonia, avalanche, altitude sickness.

We go from 78 to 79. You have two deaths in 79. That's going to be via a fall into a crevasse and a stroke. Three years later, another death from Poland this time, another stroke. You also get a Japanese climber who dies of a fall. 85, you get one death, this Daniel Lecois. But you can almost tell just based upon like you're not getting three to four deaths a year that they're probably getting better at this, right?

Yeah, I mean, you would imagine, but again, you're still trying to climb new routes. If you're climbing the Ebrusi Spur, you can just go talk to people about what it takes to climb that, what you're going to be preparing for. they can give you, hey, you're going to be doing this for three hours, so train this way. If you're going up somewhere else, you just know it's going to be elevation. You don't know how much climbing is going to be evolved. If it's hiking, if it's ice, if it's rock, you have no clue until you start making these attempts. There also is the loss of motivation too and turning back and thinking, well, I'm not going to be first or even 10th at this point of making it.

There is that. And you need to find the new first. So now like instead of there becomes this thing about maybe not a new route. But when is this mountain hardest to climb? Fuck it, it's hardest to climb in winter. So like in 85, you get the first winter attempt. So you get this guy named, was it, Christoph Wiliki? And this guy with the last name, Rebecca.

So in the winter, basically, you get these hurricane force winter jet streams. Negative 50 degrees Celsius temperatures. What is that Fahrenheit even colder, right? Yeah, so cold. They managed to push camps all the way up to 7,000. 300 meters on the spur before severe frostbite and just shredded tents and equipment forced them to turn back. So at that point, for another 30 years, winter's not going to be a go for climbing. We're not going to skip forward 30 years because the very next year of 1986

becomes to be known as the Black Summer. That's why I stopped at 85 when I was talking about the desk because it seems like we might be figuring some stuff out. And it just is a situation where the mountain is starting to be more populated, I think. I think there's a lot more people trying. And 1986 just kind of shows you the nastiness of what K2 is. Between June 21st and August 10th, there were 13 climbers that died in these various accidents and storms on the mountain. There was this sudden plunge in temperature on August 10th, and it trapped climbers that were attempting to descend after they had already summited.

Only two climbers survived that storm, and they both suffered severe frostbite. They lost their fingers and their toes. Well, I mean, this was a situation where there had been like an unprecedented amount of expeditions. I think there were 11 expeditions with over 150 climbers. again, climbing window very short for K2. Like you said, it was that last week, then July, then first week, maybe a little bit more of August. And then you're just hoping for days during that period. It's not saying that's six weeks of just perfect climable shit.

You've got to do all the acclimatizing and all that kind of stuff. So this creates this environment of like intense competition with all of these climbers from all these different expeditions. There's super chaotic like planning that's trying to be because are you trying to make? sure everyone like working together pooling resources to make sure everyone get up are we sharing ropes what are we doing so in late may there were teams from the uk france italy poland south korea austria and the u.s that it were established a base camp on may 31st this giant guy named john smollich and alan pennington who are two american climbers were attempting this new route on the south face, they're crushed and killed by a massive rockfall in avalanche.

So starting March 31st is kind of when we get into that time frame. The rest of the American team is just like, fuck this, we're not sticking around and we're out. So they leave after this. June 23rd, Lillian and Maurice Bedard from France or Barard alongside these, Wanda, it's roots, roots quits, sorry if I butcher that from Poland. and then Michael Parmanteer from France end up reaching the summit from the spur,

and Rukowitz is actually the first woman to ever summit K2. So props to Wanda. June 24th, on the descent. So again, at this point, we're kind of going day by day because this shit, we're now in that small window late June. It's just kind of, but it's going to go that entire season. So June 24th on the descent, a storm hits, they become separated in a whiteout, which you're thinking how much room is there

to move around there? Well, it's really easy to get lost because everything looks the same, and at night it's pitch black. So Parmanteer and Rootskowitz make it to safety, but Lillian and Maurice Berard both perish, you know, both die end up high up on the mountain. Her body is found days later at the base of the south face. So that's like way down the mountain, which means off into the abyss, free falling, just tumbling down the mountain. Just to ski down. Yes. July 5th, so we're skipping ahead a little bit.

Maurice. His remains were found in 1998. Oh, shit. 13 years later, near Camp 1. Wow. So he either made it. it almost to the bottom to Camp 1. It died off route.

And they finally found him in 1998. 13 years later. The off route thing has happened. But to get all the way to Camp 1 off route without hitting into the other ones, that seems like more of a nature. He took a slide. Yeah. Took a slide.

He ended up near Camp 1, but 13 years later, they end up finding him. That's crazy. Well, everything's so cold up there. It's probably so well preserved. He was an icicle. Yeah. July 5th? Uh, yeah.

So July 5th, a Polish team consisting of this guy name, I'm just going to go first name, it's Jersey and to use, I end up completing this crazy first ever scent of the vertical South Face. They call it now the Polish line. And they spent five days climbing without tents or sleeping bags. So they're just, I don't know if at that point, because, you know, again, the technology for clothing and stuff like that, if they're basically just wearing giant down like mobile suits that once you're in them, you just pull the hood shut, it seals, you're in there.

I don't know what's going on there. That's the thing, though, is you're not getting warm inside of a tent, but at least there's a little bit more temperature of rise because you're not in the wind and in the elements. Well, I mean, it doesn't turn out well because on July 10th, so five days later, exhausted, hallucinating, and on their descent, of course, and they're on the spur. Piotrowski, he's the Ted U's, loses both of his cramp. ponds on an icy slope. I guess at that point, they're probably strapped to his feet and maybe just like got off.

I don't see why you'd ever take him off or anything like that, but you're also hallucinating and ends up falling to his death right in front of the other guy, which there's going to be a theme to this going forward about these types of situations when that happens because realistically, yes, there is wind up there, but sometimes there's not. and they say sometimes you can just hear your shallow breaths and sometimes the mountain a little bit and your steps in the snow, if you start to fall,

what's the most natural thing to do when you start falling and struggling and you know something's going to happen? Let it be. Just screaming. Oh, yeah. You're just going to do it silently and just... I might go silently at that point in time. I just, because that was the crazy thing they had said,

maybe this was just in the death zone. I don't know about anywhere else on the mountain. but they said that it's about an average of 10 to 12 breaths in between each step that you take. So maybe you just don't have the capability of screaming. You're panting. You're basically just trying to, trying to like, yeah,

that makes more sense. I also see. If you could scream, you would. It's like in space on the mountain. No one can hear you scream. By the time you have it in your body to scream, you might not be alive.

Like by the time your brain catches up to scream. July 16th. an Italian climber named Renato Casavroto. He was doing a solo attempt of this really technical southwest, or it's the magic line, basically, and he has to end up abandoning his third attempt on that due to bad weather. 20 minutes from Base Camp, a snow bridge that he's on ends up collapsing under him. He falls 130 feet into a crevasse, manages to pull out a radio on radio his wife at Basecamp, but by the time a rescue team pulls him out, he had died.

of like the massive internal injuries from the fall. That fucking sucks to know that you're that close. 20 fucking minutes. Yeah. And to know that like you're hurt, there's not going to be help, but like you're hopeful. Like you still got to have hope.

Or do you just know at that point? Are you so just like have the realistic, or what am I trying to say, you have the realistic viewpoint of knowing that an injury here regardless if it seems bad there's really no hope. You might get back to base camp, but you're not getting home. Yeah, if you're down for an hour and somehow you miraculously make it down there, if they don't have anything to treat you.

Yeah. If it's internal bleeding, I don't know what they can do. July 28th, the separate Polish team successfully completes the first ever ascent of the magic line. So after they do that, again, the large percentage during the descent, we've kind of talked about this early on. a team member name, last name Rose, falls to his death when he slips off the end of a fixed rope that was

missing a safety knot. So I mean, even just like crazy, simple shit like that, because you are so just out of it. Stuff is just slipped, like it takes you a long time to comprehend stuff.

And if you just got to the end of the rope and you're just, and you're kind of just doing the thing where you're trudging along and you just walk off the end of the rope without it's that simple there's zero room for error I'm trying to even think

of like a comparison is to I guess it's like blackout drunk I it's tough to describe blackout drunk for obvious reasons but you're still somewhat competent it's just like you lose all

it takes away every inhibition that you have every panic marker in your brain toward nothing, it's almost like everything is so dangerous that nothing seems dangerous to you because there's just no like delineation of how. I think your brain at that point is just in the it's shutting down systems of saying

what do we need to focus on now? Just run some form of navigation where his eyes work and have his legs work. And then at that point it's just like eyes and legs, eyes and legs and you're not like paying attention to shit. August 1st

there's a weather pattern that actually shifts like really favorably to where there's an opening to, you know, a very clear opening to make these attempts. So this big group of independent climbers, they all push up the spur. They're ignoring the fact that they're running out of, you know, communal resources, stuff that you wouldn't think you wouldn't plan out like tents, fuel, food. They end up masking together at Camp 4 right on what's going to be called the shoulder on the spur itself. I want to say the shoulder that's at the top of the pyramid and then there's that big sweep and then up to the bottom

of the, and then there's the camp there and then the bottleneck that you have to end up going up or wait, no camp four is the last camp so it's on the shoulder and then you march out of that up into the bottleneck and everything on August 3rd so two days later this guy named

Alan Rouse and met Maya from the UK Will Bauer, Alfred Emmitzer, Haynesweiser, and then this guy named Kurt Denberg and Julie Tillis make their final preparations.

Rouse and Wolf attempt to push the summit, but they're beaten back by winds. They have to end up going back to Camp 4. The next morning, August 4th, basically believing the weather's going to hold six climbers, end up leaving Camp 4 for the summit. Rouse gets there first. He's the first British climber to Summit K2.

Maya is right there behind him, as well as Bauer, I'm at Sir and Weiser. Later that afternoon, this guy named Kurt Demberg, who was 54, he was a filmmaker. Him and Julie Tillis make a late push, like in the afternoon, which I don't get how that is ever in your head. I mean, is that the stuff that's messing with your head that you would even think? Because, like, they reach the summit at 7 p.m. They have to, they know they have to just, I don't get it, man. like that's just not having like this is the survival instinct there or is it just you haven't

prepared your body enough so even not in the death zone your body is still going through that just degradation of like your rationate like your faculties if you just climbed because they see these are independent climbers yeah so no one's being like you can tell them hey don't do it like this isn't a good idea but it's all Ultimately their decision, no one can force them to stay there. And so they were up there for a couple days already at Camp 4 on the shoulder. If you're not properly, you know, not everyone's up there is on a level playing field. Some people are much more prepared than others.

He could have already been hallucinating the first day or not making grass decisions the first day you got up there. Add two more days to that. Because what ends up happening is, yeah, they get up there at seven on their day. descent total darkness till it slips and basically drags um denberger down like a really steep slope they somehow survive the fall but then they're forced to spend the night completely exposed at over 8,000 meters the next day they end up staggering down to camp four horribly frostbitten at the same time this hurricane force blizzard slams the mountain the jet stream drops directly onto the

the mountain and pins seven climbers inside three little tents just below 8,000 feet, like 7,900 meters. The next day, visibility drops to zero. Climers run out of food. They run out of cooking fuel to even melt snow. So now they're going to start, you know, leading to extreme dehydration. That's going to thicken their blood even more. It's going to start accelerating altitude sickness.

We go to the next day or the next night. actually, August 7th during the night. Julie Till's dies in her sleep inside the tent that she's sharing with that Denberger, the filmmaker dude. Yeah. They think that it was due to high altitude cerebral edema, what they call Hase, H-A-C-E. Her bodies then

moved to an empty tent because I'm guessing they're trying to all shelter in as many people in these tents for warmth and also wait to try to keep them from blowing off the fucking mountain. Oh yeah. Yeah, I can see that. You'd want to be packing as many people. You couldn't just, yeah. Plus, it's got to be scary as shit, and you just

want to sit there with some type of like, inner, like people with you. The vibes are off when there's a dead body in the tent with you as well. Yeah, there's two other tents. But yes, I'm sure there wasn't a huge disagreement.

Like, should we just put it in one tent? Yeah. August 8th and 9th, so we're even further in, the storm continues to go. Alan Ruse, who's the leader,

ends up becoming delirious and then goes comatose from hypoxia and exhaustion. The rest of the climbers realize that if they don't move, the moment the wind drops that they're all going to die. We go to August 10th. So the storm finally clears in the morning, basically just revealing the landscape

that has been battered by this storm for days. They said it looked like a nightmare, basically. Oh, yeah, think too, it's erased all markers of humans being there. Buried the ropes, if they had any leads or lines or anything like that. Rouse is completely unresponsive, can't stand, and basically they have to make the, you know, the decision to say,

what's going to end up happening, is it one, is it all, we're going to try to get him down. The remaining four climbers are basically like we have to leave him behind. We're already in so bad of shape already. It's going to end up killing all four of us. So afternoon, just a few hundred meters into the descent from Camp Four, emitszer and wiser collapse just from complete bodily failure. They're completely blind, unable to walk.

Both men die on the snow within minutes of each other. So just a few hundred meters from it, two of them already down. Bauer, who's Austrian and the film guy, Danberger, press on. They end up becoming separated in a cloud bank because, again, you're up in the clouds, so that does end up happening. August 12th, Bauer, who's able to move a little bit faster,

ends up coming in and just basically falling into base camp. He immediately alerts everyone to basically go up and look for Denver, the last person that he saw alive. Later that night, Denver crawls into base camp on his knees.

His hands and feet were completely black by third degree frostbite. So makes sense. Is that like a Mr. Deeds style frostbite? No, no, no, it's gone. The Mr. Freed Deeds frostbite, I don't think that really happened. That's necrotic, like, that flesh will decay and die. And, yeah, that doesn't really happen.

That's strictly an Adam Sandler invention, yes. So the combination of all of those that we talked about, the summer season officially ends with, like you said, 13 dead. The only people that survived that August, bottleneck issue, the Camp 4 thing, were Bauer and Denberger. Denberger doesn't have any hands or feet anymore, right? I would imagine a good portion

of them are probably no longer there. Just to point this out, there were 27 successful summits that year. 13 of them died. That is not good odds. No. It's not good odds at all. well i mean and we've talked about kind of just in vague terms what happens to your body you know within the death

zone to everything so i'm just going to go through real quick some of the things uh hypoxia is basically oxygen starvation so it's going to give you extreme fatigue every single step is going to require huge effort this is where you're getting people moving two or three steps and then just stopping and one of the really deadly things and it's going to lead up here to what we're going to talk about going to, you know, we're going to do a brief little section on the 2008 disaster, but when you have people where it's only one lane and someone's not in great condition, it's not like someone can just get out of the way. If they're with a group or anything, you're just kind of bottlenecked or you're just kind of waiting in queue behind them. So depending on how people's bodies are reacting,

determines the speed. Cognitive decline happens with hypoxia, oxygen starvation, of course. course, you get this thing called high altitude swelling, which is where you also get that high altitude cerebral edema. You get high altitude pulmonary edema, which is fluid building up inside the air sacs of your lungs. Basically it feels like drowning from the inside out. And then the cerebral edema is where the fluid builds up inside your brain, causing it to swell against the skull. But because your skull can't move, it basically just smashes your brain against skull. Blood thickening and frostbite without the warm blood in your flesh, it's going to go ahead and get frostbitten. And then basically, if it becomes too thick because your body's trying to

compensate for the lack of lack of oxygen, it increases your risk of stroke, heart attack, and then embolisms, blood clots in the lungs. Talked about that with art. So basically, it's just constantly shutting down your body. Because the body can't digest foods at that altitude, that's when it burns its own muscle tissue and fat, just at this crazy raked. So they generally have like a strict 16 to 24 hour window to enter the death zone and then try to get the fuck out. But we've talked on several occasions here of days spent within that.

And it's not a choice. That's the thing. 16 hours, that's smart. That sounds great. It's just you're dying. That's what you're doing. You're sitting there the moment, even before you step into the death zone.

to a degree, you are just slowly dying. And then the rate of death just simply increases as you enter the death zone. It's the most aptly named zone that there has ever been. All right. So 2008. Well, we got a little bit of movement here. So just off of 86 when we have the 13 deaths, 87 a single death, 89 a single death, 92 a single death, 93, you have four, five deaths. 94 you have what is that three four five deaths so we're kind of getting back up there in 1995

is a pretty bad year again for k2 as far as disasters go so early on in the fall july 6th that ended up killing a spanish climber um august 13th there's a storm that hits the mountain i can't quite imagine how this would work. 160 kilometer an hour or 100 mile an hour winds on the mountain. It's a hurricane on the mountain with nowhere to hide. Just the violent weather and avalanches end up trapping these climbers near the summit on their descent. So again, they've already made it to the summit and they're coming back down when they get trapped. The reason that they got trapped was because the summit was slowed by these heavy storms that had happened before.

and on the day that they were going to depart for their summit, they ended up getting pushed back. So this wasn't a situation where they were trapped and there was nothing that they could have done. An earlier log jam just to get up to the summit had pushed them back to where they were going to be trapped before they could back to Camp 4. It's so scary to think that you can come off of the highest high

that you've ever felt probably. Well, technically you are high because your body is pumping in the fucking chemicals. to make you a little bit delirious, so you don't know what the fuck that you are slowly dying. And yeah, at that altitude, those windstorms created just white out conditions. But I mean,

it's the horrible scenario of you're at your most vulnerable, physically as far as your capabilities on the way down. And on the way down, you're also going through the most technical and dangerous parts of the climb. Yeah, it's, I mean Here's the other thing too So when you're So like when you're traveling around

Or like against the Surrock Is it Sorok or Surrack? Surrack As you're doing that It is yes It is one person wide Which means If there was a situation in which you were going to

And I think what they said is they prioritize The people coming down Yeah I would say that's why it's why it's why it's So what happens is if you have people coming down and there are people stretched across the Sirac, that person is, because those people that are already on it, you can't, it's not like traffic where they're holding traffic on one side and they do that for a little while and then they hold it on the other. That could take a long time because then you're waiting on the slowest person out there.

That's not who you want leading to George. So when you send somebody and they're going back, what they're doing a lot of time is the person going forward leans against the wall as much as they can. The person coming around them has to literally hook, they have two hookups, I want to say they say. They keep one, they unhook the other, hook it up, and then hook the other one back up.

But you're also trying to do that when you are at your least capable. Yeah. And trying to go out and around somebody on a single track. So you're doing the most dangerous stuff while you're the least capable of doing dangerous shit. Yeah, this is why drunk driving's bad.

Yeah. At that altitude, like I said, the whiteouts just made navigation impossible. There were seven climbers that died just strictly due to that storm, and most were just believed to have been swept completely off the mountain in that 100-mile-an-hour wind. Twelve of the 32 climbers that had submitted in 1995 end up dying, and of course all that died hit in. up summiting but it's there's so many different ways to die on this mountain there's a thing that

they they I heard it too much in this one that I haven't heard in other documentaries and it sounded very pirity to me and it was and they lived to tell the tale this is one of those situations where that is a legitimate figure of speech because there are people that summited but you say they summited and you have to add and they live to tell the tale because so many people have died on the way down that it's not just a given that after you say they submitted that they're still alive because maybe your thought process is most of the deaths occur either on the way up or they just don't make it yeah it's that you're going from the highest highs to then realizing like, okay, now this starts.

You're going from the highest highs to still being high, but dying. And maybe the fastest low you've ever gotten. So in between then, we have another calm down. And we're just kind of highlighting these kind of big events. 96, you're going to see two deaths. 99's one death. 2001, 2002. You're going to have two, three, back to one.

2004 you're going to have a few more you're going to have God I should have written this down instead of just trying to count these names some deaths seven

seven deaths so you're going to have three South Koreans Alexander Gubev from Kyrgyzstan ends up dying that's the first time I've seen Kyrgyzstan on here Kyrgyzgan from the

Kyrgyn Forge? The Burgen, is that in the Biburgan province? Oddly enough, you have a Russian and Iranian that get lost in the storm. They're never found. And just leading up to it, you're starting to see, like, we had a lot of deaths, then we had a few deaths, then we had a disaster, then we had a couple deaths, and then we had that building back up. Yeah. And now it's just in this pattern to where it's almost like you have windows of years where the storms

and everything on this mountain are just like, it's not just a seasonal thing. Yeah. And I mean, I think that that's just nature and itself, but I think you also run into situations where if there has been a long enough period of time, there is going to be a lack of, like, not remembrance,

but a lack of remembering how dangerous things can be if it's been long enough between those disasters. Because as far as, big ones go, we go from 86 all the way up to 2008. It's pretty weird to think that they have stuff like El Nino here over there probably.

Yeah, definitely. And there's pockets of time to where you're making the decision. You're like, well, it's been really bad for the last three years. Do I risk it and go on the fourth year and it's bad again? But it's that allure and that draw that Mountaineers have that I just can't quite figure out. It's everybody has. their thing. And when it's your thing and you just happen to find the thing, you know, maybe everybody

has this specific thing that they'd be either really good at or super passionate about. And a very small amount of people find the exact thing that they're tailored to. They may have passions and are like good at stuff, but maybe they just are missing out on that one thing. Sometimes people find it. Yeah. I do think that that's what separates K2 from Everest as well as Everest has had a lot of summits. And K2 is K2 because it's had less summits, but also just because it's, it's your favorite climbers' favorite mountain. I also think the biggest thing about K2 is the lack of what, what finances can do for you. The amount of work that finances can do for you on Everest is very minimal at K2.

You can't just throw money at K2 to figure it out because there's that ever-present death. In 2008, you had 31 climbers that attempted to summit K2. 29 of these climbers had made it to camp 4 by July 31st, and they were going to take their shot, try to summit K2. That night, there had been a group that was chosen. They kind of had like a, I guess, a powwow. It wasn't once they got to camp four. They'd agreed upon it beforehand, because they're not going to wait until they get to four. They had, I believe it was like 10 days waiting for this weather window, and they finally heard about the weather window that they could make the shot for the summit.

Correct. So prior to that, because it wasn't like an Everest at this point had been very commercialized in the sense where it was then run by like a single guiding company. K2 was still a chaotic mix of just anyone who was actually shown up whether they were sponsored by the government, independent, whatever. it was. So at that point, you had like Dutch, South Korean, Norwegian, Serbian, French, and American expeditions all there for the summer of 2008. So they, to prevent the situation of competition, causing deaths, errors, and everything like that, the independent teams basically held a meeting at base camp where they agreed to cooperate, share safety equipment, and create kind of more of a, because all of them had independent porters that they had hired. But some of them had like,

Like, if you were to go through the teams and be like, they have the first best, they have the second, they have the third. If you were like, why don't we just have all the best porters kind of work together? We all pool our resources as far as like lines and rope. And all of us can get up there if we lay out and have these guys all put out like lines and everything. That was part of the plan is to basically have those high altitude porters fix the safety ropes ahead of the main climbing pack. and the rising tide would lift all ships. A strike force. Correct, exactly.

Of the, like an all-star team of the best Sherpas from all our teams to go ahead and do this. There was basically teams were having, because there was no shared pool of rope. Teams are just offering up and like, who can give us this, who can give us this? One of the guys that was like one of the best Sherpas had done Everest a couple times,

he's hearing numbers like we need 500 feet, we need 600 feet, and he's just found like, we need 2,000 feet. send us up with 2,000 feet, we'll get the ropes fixed and everything, we'll be good to go. So they agree upon this, but then after this meeting, they never agree upon a singular person in charge who has authority to call off the climb, enforce maybe like a, hey, if you don't get to this point by this time, turn around. No one to basically manage like the safety or hold anybody accountable for like their independent actions. The story that I got from the documentary was that they had gone with 400 meters of rope.

I don't know how many they had. I know what the guy had requested. So he had requested 2,000. They basically laughed him out of the tent. They're like, no way, that's going to be way too heavy. We're trying to get this done quickly. Moving that much rope is going to be a lot. They decided on 400 meters.

Well, that's still 1,200 feet of rope. It's a lot of rope. same time where you're going you want to always have more than one hundred percent but yeah it's at least it's still but what that ends up doing is there's this plan apparently that he's well it's not a good plan it's just the plan of the other guys laying the rope because that morning when they're supposed to go out ahead they like immediately start laying the rope like right in front of camp four leading up about 45 minutes after they were supposed to already be out there yes and he's the first one up supposed to be out on time and no one else is out there. So as he sees them laying this rope,

he's like, hey, we need to save all of this for the bottleneck and for the traverse across. It's going to take every bit of this to set up lines to do that. And they just keep doing this shit. So he takes off with a bunch of rope and starts kind of like laying it himself. And they end up getting, do they even have enough to get the bottleneck done? They get the bottleneck done. They don't have enough to get back up through the traverse. And as they're doing this and as they're laying this out at the bottleneck, you get a 45 minute late jump on this project, which means that you're 45 minutes closer to all of these summit teams that are going

to be heading in that direction. Well, and now all of a sudden, and it's not like you can just be like, oh, hey, they're just going to have to do it without rope. So as there, I think they end up getting like into certain sections. of the bottleneck and then ran out. So like the bottleneck is partially covered. Traverse has nothing. So as climbers are starting to get up and get ready,

the high altitude guys are having to go back down that misplace some of the ropes and start pulling that rope to try to think get it back up. And this is not like a, yeah, let me just jog back down the trail. This is hours of additional work. So as these people are starting to, to end up coming out and kind of work their way up in a gradual wave, they may be doing that,

but now all of a sudden they're frozen up in a traffic jam in the death zone. And any of those people that are using oxygen, because not everybody's just going, you know, with ambient air or whatever you want to call it, now they're just simply using up their oxygen. And they're not conditioned to just go with no oxygen. So, and I mean, it starts early as far as the tragedy. I mean, 8 a.m. is when that first guy, what was it? Give me the name. Dren.

Is it Mandik? Man Dick, that is correct. That is, I looked that up. That is how you say. Man, Dick is this guy's last name. He ends up unclipping from a fixed line to pass a slower climber, loses his footing, and basically falls to his death down the bottleneck. Again, the bottleneck is 60 degrees,

basically a 60 degree gully with rocks on each side that they said go up about 15 feet to each side and then just completely smooth ice. Well, not smooth, but it's slick. There's nothing to grip. So he basically just goes down this shoot, shooting out the other side, and there's no stopping him.

And you're just getting battered. O contrary, mine for air. What? So the document. that I watched said that he fell the first time they think about 100 meters down. They thought that he had died

and then he gets back up. Oh yeah. And he gives them the thumbs up and he falls again. And just keeps going. Keeps going. Just like Chris talked about there's so many times on this mountain

where kind of the rule of thumb is you just don't go back. You're not going to go down and try to grab somebody who's passed away and bring them back down the mountain. And the situation happens after Mandik falls two times down the bottleneck and dies. There's this group of Serbians that decide, hey, we need to go recover his body. They have a high-altitude porter named Johan Biag, I think is how you say it. They end up doing the same thing as far as the belay.

Well, yeah, because there was a rescue team It was him and some Swedish climber named Friedrich Strang strong And basically as Yohan is going down to try to recover the body He ends up losing his footing And he starts pulling the line That's attached to the body as they're descending down the mountain Okay, but then Strugg also tells him to really

Because Bog is going down, or Beg is going down as well and he's attached to other people. Yeah, he's attached to the dead body that they all went to get. Oh, I thought he cut the line because he had slipped. So he had slipped, and they said that it had started dragging the whole entire group down as they were screaming at him to let go of the line. And eventually before they had started, or before the rest of them were going to fall, he ends up letting go.

And he is just shot off like a luge. Into the abyss. Yep. Completely gone. So by 10 a.m., I mean, two of them are already dead. It's a bad time. Yeah, you have climbers that begin reaching the summit at 3 p.m., which becomes an issue.

It's being pushed back. The last climbers summit at 8 p.m. So hours after this standard safe turnaround time, you are basically gambling with your life because it's going to be dark before you can get to the bottleneck, before you get to the traverse that doesn't have a great amount of rope in it, Well, yeah, so the traverse itself is, I mean, there's technically plenty of rope. It was just the timing that it took them to move everything back up. So that's why all of these late summits happened is because they had to go retrieve the lines that were placed too far down closer to Camp 4.

Bring those up, run those on the traverse. But even on the traverse, it is just a line, run along and then screwed in with like ice screws into the sarac. It's also not a Like every time I was thinking about it Before I watched a documentary I was thinking it was like rope This is like cord Almost I mean it's nylon climbing line

Yeah it's just so small though You would think because you have to be able to feel that Through your gloves to know that you're holding on Correct but the whole point about it is Not so much you're holding it You're secured to it by step to it It just it seems like it would have to be thicker It would but you have to carry that up there

Yeah And rope that's going to keep that That size is going to be insanely heavy. It's a catch 22 for sure. So as this is causing people to be able to summit later, again, there's a, there's a area between the summit and where you have to go back along the traverse just to get to the bottleneck to go down. And as these people are still up on the summit are coming down, it's dark. People have headlamps, but you can't see very far in front of you because this is, you know, there's a lot of distance and everything like that. and what ends up happening is that 830

you start to hear these loud cracks and bangs just they said it sounds like a storm I can imagine it sounds like the worst thunder ever but nobody can see what's going on what ended up happening is this massive like apartment building sized chunk of this giant ice wall the sarac ends up that's hanging above the bottle

and that's not the main portion of the sarac This is like kind of like off to its side. The main portion is kind of even over more to the right of the bottleneck. But this huge portion cracks as it starts to get darker, any water that had melted or anything like that that had then seeped down into the cracks of that. And then as it froze widened out, it was just enough to snap off this section. It completely takes out anything in front of the traverse. The ropes, everything are cut.

It sends a ton of stuff down through the bottleneck, sweeping away anybody down there and also any ropes or anything like that. But no one can see what's going on because it's dark. And if you can see what's going on, you're dead because you're close enough to be in it. So you have all of these people who just hear this sound. Probably feel the mountain shake a little bit and everything I would imagine if something of this weight is falling. And then have to try to figure out where it happened if you can get down again. because at that point, too, there's only so many things that can be right. You hear that sound up on the mountain.

You know what it was. That's what I was just thinking. Is there any way you can convince yourself that that didn't happen? Nope. And then all of a sudden, first thing you're doing is you're looking around at yourself and making sure that you are still alive and then you just start moving slowly, trying to get back the way you came. And when people get to the traverse, there's no line there.

And in fact, from what they can see, there is just a feeling. of broken ice shards and just like debris, like not debris is in, well, there's probably some bodies. A, at least. But like, just ice and shit. And all of a sudden, people are stranded in the dark, a bunch of them. And it's not just a situation where you can be like hope to survive till morning. Because there's not even going to be a safe way to get across in the morning.

When you are even more fucked up than you are now. for as bad as this was. So just we'll go a little quick run through here. So the worst part about that avalanche was there was a trio of climbers that were coming down the bottleneck as this happens.

The first one that was in line is the one that gets sheared off by the avalanche. His name was Rolf Bay. This leaves his wife and friend that were still attached to the mountain not only did it sweep him away, but as Chris was talking about, the line that he was holding on to

that Ralph was hooked onto is just gone now. So their movement forward is going to be nothing but Isaacs and your petons to try to get across this field of debris. Cranpods. Cranpods, yeah. What the fuck are petons? Why do I keep thinking of peters?

Pets are the things they drive in. Oh, that. Everything. What ended up happening is, so they were all climbing up together. He got tired. The guy that didn't summit. Yes, the husband.

And she goes, and I think he's waiting at the top of the bottleneck. So he didn't even go across the traverse. They're on the other side when this happens, but he was waiting so close. It didn't matter where he was along that. It was such a section. The distance of the traverse is 330 feet. Coincidentally, the amount, the distance up the bottleneck is about 330 feet as well. It's, yeah.

A huge section of that traverse, that frozen waterfall. came crashing down. So I mean, he, and it came crashing down where it split at the base, which is why it took the rope. If it was just a top section that fell off, it would have fallen off and away from it. It still might have killed some people down the bottleneck, but it would have swept down more. This broke off just like right at the bottom.

And just when it came off, it took the ropes and everything and Rolf with it. So she's over on the other side with their friend. She hears this noise. she's shouting 330 feet out into the distance and isn't hearing anything. It's, Rolf's gone. Rolf, the guy that waited is gone. They were taking pictures up there with things that Rolf had sent up.

So everybody that's now behind that line that just got cut is above in the death zone with no real way to feel a rope down the bottleneck. During the night, there were groups of disoriented climbers that had spent more than 12 hours this point in the death zone. You were talking about the sweet spot for the death zone 16 hours and then shit gets real bad. Yeah, get the fuck out. So they got four hours left for shit gets real bad. And that depends on their condition. It could already be bad for them. Yeah. And that's,

yeah, it's, it's crazy to think that your timing is. It's not just that though. Think about this too. What do you do when you're in a panic? Like what? Use up more resources and energy. Yeah, man. Like, you're you're now you're already fighting for your fucking life now you're up there now there's fear and you're breathing more and you're trying to and now you have to come up with a plan now you have to try to do critical thinking to try to survive instead of just the follow the line get back to camp now it's you don't know and this is where i think you see the real mountaineers come out the people that can so to speak handle their shit there was an Irish climber named Jerry MacDonald and an Italian climber named Marco Confortola,

who had spent a night bivouacked, just like we were talking about with the Italian expedition, just freezing their asses off. They were singing songs and patting their hands together, just trying to stay awake or trying to continue to move. Because if you fall asleep, you're dead. Yeah. Your body slows down to the point to where you can't create enough heat. to keep you alive. They end up surviving at first light as they begin moving,

they find this group of South Korean climbers and porters that had been tied together on a single rope. And they're hanging in some pretty horrific positions. They go down, they check this out, they must have been swept up in some kind of an avalanche or a fall. I realize that some of these people are still alive. Well, all of them were still alive. Everybody was?

Yep. Oh, I thought it was two of the three. Nope. And in that moment, you kind of have a choice to make because you're going to have to spend more time in the death zone to free these people and try to rescue them. And if you spend too much time up there and you can't rescue them, then all of you were dead. Well, here's the thing too. Comfort to Lowe basically has severe frostbite. They're lucky to have survived up to this point. It's like how much more risk are you going to take?

I get also at this point too, there is something like what, Shilloris about it or everything like that because McDonald's like, I'm going to try to get these guys out of here. But at the same time, realistically,

is that your brain not functioning correctly and saying like, I'm not going to be a huge help, especially by myself here. I don't know what, what am I going to do with these guys after I cut them down? Like, it's going to take so much time.

I'm going to be dead. He and, up refusing to leave. He ends up spending additional hours there, but right after basically Fringham, there's another shift in an avalanche. And at that point, too, like, is that just where you are, because McDonald was the first Irish guy to actually summit K2. But again, never lived to tell the tale. Seems like a pretty cool dude. No, of course, but what I'm saying is like, that's just, I'm trying to think of the, it's where you just get done doing something

and you're just like, are you fucking serious? Like all of that. Yeah. The one kind of cool thing, and not to spoil anything from the other episode, but there was a sat phone on the peaks, or on the summit, that Jeremy McDonald got a hold of

and got to call his wife from the summit saying that he had made it. Yeah. And that was the last time that they had ever talked, but talk about going out on an ultimate high, being able to tell your wife that you just made it to the top of K2. You never get to see it again. Like, it's very tough to kind of pair those two things up together.

Cass just kind of ends up walking into the sunlight. He just kind of takes off, walks the other direction, never to be seen again. There was a two-man team of these, or from this Norwegian team named Cass Vander, Grieveland and this French climber Auguste Abed.

Is that the cast you were talking about? She's Jerr walks off into the sunset. Never to be seen again. So this two-man team is Cass and then we'll go Auguste because that's his first name and the easier one.

They end up maneuvering together around the bottleneck and of course they will eventually run to the end of the rope but Cass ends up passing Hughes. is he's just having a tough time traversing this bottleneck, and Cass ends up running into no rope. Yeah, that's, I mean, the ropes get there, with that much weight, and in some situations it slices through it.

Yeah. But at the same time, the stuff that's knocking out, those ice things are only driven in so far into the ice, you know, the screws or the pittance or whatever. With something like that, there's not enough strength, you know, there's not a strong enough rope that's going to, stop tons of ice or hundreds of pounds from just ripping through there and taking everything out. Yeah.

I think this is that second shift that you were talking about, maybe. It ends up wiping Hughes basically off of the mountain. So Hughes is gone via avalanche again, or he just may have let go. Who's Hughes? The Frenchman. They got passed by Cass. Okay. every once in a while

these people are stuck on this mountain this guy named Wilco van Ruzin he ends up spending two nights on the mountain before he's rescued two whole nights bivouacked on this mountain he's rescued by this rescue team that has come up from Camp 4 I mean they've had two days to be able to try

and find him at this point I think it was three was it into the third day because he spent the first night in second night in so yeah it would have been the third day He bypasses the bottleneck. He ends up like wandering down the south face and then works his way back into camp three. That's how far off. Completely bypasses camp four and goes into camp three.

He created himself a new route. That's not the situation. I mean, if you have to, good for him, but that's not the circumstances you want to find yourself into where you. That needs to be a voluntary choice. Yeah. And by then, by day three, you have these other rescue parties that gone up and collected the survivors. Unfortunately, there were a lot of people that didn't survive. The second avalanche that happens from the Sarac, just anybody else that had a chance of being out there that was in that path was just going to be gone.

2008 is a tragedy. There's so much more to it. That's why we're going to a whole other episode on it. Well, it's 11 climbers dying within 48 hours. Yeah. nine just do these sarahc avalanches and from then you get another while until there's kind of a another semi-tragedy at this point so in 2021 there were they don't know how many people had gone to support staff or how many people were climbing but between one to 200 climbers visited k2

so i think there was 31 32 that went in 2008 and now there's a hundred to 200 climbers that are showing up. That's the thing too. That's even after the 2008 situation where for probably many years after that people are like, oh shit, like it's been a while since we were reminded that something like this can happen. There's nothing we can do about it. Maybe we chill for a bit, which is naturally going to happen in those situations. Oh yeah. Yeah. You get in January of 2021 that year, 10 Nepalese mountaineers end up submitting K2 for the first time in winter. So we finally have that day

that they're able to take the summit in wintertime. I see there's 10 of them that do it. They all actually join arms together and they all step onto the summit at the same time singing the Nepalese national anthem. It's incredible. That's how you want to be able to do it, especially when you're the Nepalese coming from the land of Everest.

Well, yeah, fuck it. This is your thing. The winter had this group of four. four climbers, Ali, Ali Sadapara, his son Said, and a man named John Snore, and Juan Pablo Moore end up leaving Camp Four for a summit attempt near the bottleneck. Saheed's oxygen regulator is faulty. They tell him that he has to return back to Camp Four. The three leave and continue on.

They disappear very shortly after that. So search parties from all of these different nations that are on the mountain are sending out all of these search parties. They're using infrared tech in the air at this point. I'm probably assuming drones. And then you have these ground searches and Saheed's out there searching for his dad for the rest of this climbing crew. And they couldn't find the missing trio until July 2021. All three of the bodies were found frozen by Sherpas in the area of the bottleneck. So they were leaving camp four

And on the way to the bottleneck when Saheed's regulator messed up and they sent him back to camp four They didn't even make it to the bottleneck before something had happened Hmm That's pretty crazy Yeah Because like that area I'm not saying it's easy or anything like that

But if they found them like all together In that area and it probably wasn't late Like what would prevent them from Yeah I don't know. They didn't really describe if they had passed it or if they were still below it. They would have to be, I would imagine they were probably like below it. Because right when you get out of the bottleneck, that's when you're on the traverse to go sideways across the face of that, that's Surok.

Yeah. But the sad stuff's got to end and the fun accomplishments that have happened on K2. So the first ascent without supplemental oxygen, we've talked about it, it's such a big deal. That's our American boys, Luke Ricard, and Rick Ridgeway in 1978. You have the first female ascent, the Polish climber, Wanda Rukowitz that you were talking about. Julie Tulles and Lelaine Barard all do it in 1986. Unfortunately, there were some. Julia and yeah.

Casualties there. The first complete ski descent, I didn't know that this was real. Pretty insane. This Polish mountaineer named Andres Bargiel. in 2018 summit down to base camp it's so far and there's so many areas

where you have to you would think you'd have to take your skis off so what's nuts about this is normally the descent is three days four days okay seven hours I want to say

I think he skied down in seven hours it just cruised it's so no no but like what's nuts is that was never possible the only reason that that's possible is it's a it was a huge risk because the areas that he had to go down were like avalanche risks the ones that he could actually ski down

he had someone running a drone doing scouting of the entire area like before he started to go down everything and was going in front of him to make sure that there were areas you know if there were crevasses he needed to avoid so you know, this is only something that could be done recently.

With a drone or something to be able to watch the path. And it's crazy to watch the video because you can see them like chopping down parts of the mountain like on ridges. Oh, you have like where ice and so. Stone right next to him. He had to go down the bottleneck on skis. Just incredible. So that would have I think been. And here's the thing.

He didn't, they said he never took the skis off. But that doesn't mean that going down the bottleneck on skis. He wasn't had, it's like he just bombed the tube. No, not there. He had the rope and he was just on the skis lowering himself down it. Pretty fun to watch. So the most summits, this is nuts. This guy named Mingma David Sherpa.

He holds a record for the most K2 summits was six. He was up in 2014, 2018, 2012, 2021. July 22nd, 2022. he also goes back up later on and he summits twice in 2022. He has this speed ascent, 14 hours and 22 minutes that he ends up making it up. Then he goes once more in 2023. In 2022, this was crazy. Shurring Sherpa went up and back in 20 hours and 18 minutes.

up and back so far uh july 28th 2024 there's a french alpinist name benjamin verdines or verdrines and he might have the biggest balls of anybody that we've ever talked about yeah it's it's pretty hard to say not or just a low self-preservation instinct so he climbed all the way to the 8,611 meter peak from this advanced base camp which basically means that he started right at the bottom of the abruzy spur he climbs in 10 hours 59 minutes and 59 seconds all solo climb no supplemental oxygen so the previous record had been like 22 hours to get up there so he destroys it by half and then he's got to be tired because he did it so quickly So instead of taking the three or four days to hike down the mountain,

no joke, this motherfucker unpacks a paraglider and fucking paraglides off the peak of K2, full James Bond style. And I want to say it was a seven-minute ride. God, that's not very long, but it probably felt pretty long. Probably felt like forever just floating down.

Well, the thing is, is the air is so thin up there that there's a very specific way you have to have the, and the material it has to be made out of to actually catch and hold that wind. Oh, they said it takes, sorry, under 30 minutes to drop from the peak all the way down to the base camps. So. But that's the thing. You didn't used to be able to, and I don't know how many people have done this. Should have looked that up. But he went up there and then was down in base camp sleeping in his warm sleeping bed.

with a hop meal and all that kind of stuff, half an hour after standing on the fucking peak of K2. That's nuts. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that it was Red Bull that sponsored him, so I bet his landing in that 10 at base camp was pretty good. He probably had everything that he had ever wanted up there on that mountain. That's a crazy leap to make, to jump off the second highest peak in the world,

and trust a hang glider base. Yeah, a parachute to get you down safely. That video goes very differently if there weren't some calculations. Oh, Jesus. Or if the wind shifts, because wind shear can happen, everything blow you right into the side of the mound or something.

Yeah, it'll bring you right back to earthquake. I mean, since kind of the issues that have occurred, 2021, K2's been pretty heavily commercialized the sense that there's now like a very specific number of guide companies that actually kind of run everything. It's a central authority that has run all the lines and everything like that to ensure that as much as they can avoid it, bottlenecks, you know, bottlenecks in the bottleneck don't happen, delays. They have it timed out to where people can now go in waves. They try to make it as safe as the Savage Mountain can possibly be.

But, you know, you're still got to be just partially insane. saying to even attempt this thing. Regardless of how many safety measures or preparation has been put in place, you've still got to be certifiably or certifiably nuts, right? You also have... But in a good way. We'd love to talk to you. Yeah, for sure.

You also have the kind of ever-impending climate change. I mean, it's going to make the mountain more unpredictable because these are different times and different temperatures and weather patterns that people may not have seen up there. before. And so everything kind of gets thrown as far as, when does the season start now, when is it in now? Yeah. That kind of seems to have gone away because we've gotten some winter since. But it's almost right for a potential disaster that nobody sees again. We've gone a little ways since the last major one. Yeah. I don't know. You just have to get complacent, though. That's the biggest thing. But I think the whole reason that they saw between 80 or 89, then 2008 and

2021 is it like this shit isn't working we need to do something differently and you know hopefully it sticks this time to where you know they avoid these types of disasters but again this is all nature that's the risk when you're going up there that's why people do it because if there's no risk involved then you'd probably get a lot of people not not want to even you know there's no accomplishment to it the same thing that draws people to the mountain is the same reason that they shouldn't be there Yeah. Humans are weird, man, right? Yes, we are.

Yes, we are. All right. You got anything else? No, it was a great episode. I'm hoping that we got some more mountains eventually. Oh, yeah. Like, we looked at the death list. Now we have more mountains to look at

and why they kill people so often. True. All right, well, we hope you guys enjoyed the episode. You got another long one, and we'll catch next time. Peace.