Scaling world's most lethal mountain

K2 (Mount Godwin-Austen) is the 2nd highest peak in the world. It has never been climbed in winter.

The mountain rises glistening from an encasement of glaciers in the far reaches of the Karakoram. Pyramid-shaped, an austere link to eternity, K2 (the second highest mountain peak of the world) yields only to Everest in height and is deadlier. Its walls are vertiginous no matter the approach.

Only the most experienced climbers attempt ascents, and for every four who crawl to its peak, one dies. And then there is winter. Fourteen of earth’s mountains exceed 26,247 feet, and climbers have reached the peak of 13 in winter. The K2 is the forbidding exception. Ten Polish climbers hope to make history by reaching the summit next winter.

These men will hike through knee-deep snow to a base camp at 18,645 feet. Atop K2’s near-vertical slopes, glacial icefalls dislodge car-size hunks of ice. Winds at the summit reach hurricane strength, and temperatures can fall as low as minus 80 degrees. This is the way of the Polish climbers, who for reasons of history and culture have earned reputations as the greatest climbers of the Himalayas in winter. They are prisoners of their dreams.

Janusz Golab is a long-limbed lion of a climber. He is 49, and he will be one of those charged with making it to the summit of K2 next winter. To scale K2 in winter is not such modest madness. He has children and a girlfriend, and he appears filled with a love for life. It so happens he enjoys its deadly challenges. He has climbed in Antarctica, Greenland and the Himalayas. “Winter is the best season.”

He shrugs. “It’s more challenging. It’s obvious it’s the best.” There’s so much to unpack about this climb to the most hostile tip of the planet, a mountain that is 28,251 feet high and sits in the Karakoram range on the border of Pakistan and China. There are the technical and strategic challenges, and the task of picking a team in the individualistic world of high-altitude climbing.

The blue-eyed Krzysztof Wielicki, who at 67 is among the most accomplished Himalayan climbers alive, will lead the K2 expedition. He remains limber and lively in his seventh decade, with a second wife and young children. He has climbed three Himalayan peaks in winter, including Everest, and has the bowlegged amble of a man with little left to prove.

By the time the Poles reached Asia in great numbers, climbers from other nations had scaled all the 26,247 feet peaks. The Poles decided to climb those peaks in winter or by risky new routes. The audacity of their ascents was legendary. Their ranks produced the first woman to summit K2 and the first man to scale three giant peaks in winter. That climber and a partner scaled K2 in summer along a route so dangerous, even suicidal — it passed beneath unstable ridges of ice — no one else has attempted it. To this day, it is known as the Polish Line.

But it came at a cost — they were trapped by swirling tempests; died of altitude sickness; slipped and catapulted into the abyss. There is no field of athletic achievement where death rides so insistently on your shoulder. It is tempting to wonder if these men harbour a romance with two lovers, life and death. Wielicki was renowned for his solo ascents of Himalayan peaks. His stamina was unmatched.

I put the question of death’s allure to him and he shakes his head. He wanted to live, always, even if along the serrated edge of a knife. He noted an axiom of climbing: A young climber is the most endangered, as he does not know enough to worry. To that, he adds another: An older climber should not draw too much comfort from mastery of technique. That can prove a frail shield against the merciless randomness of the Himalayas. “You need luck,” he says. “Everyone makes mistakes.”

On the mountain, climbers escape into concentration as pure as a monk’s repose. Life becomes detail: Click into the rope and unclick; secure boot crampons and dig for footholds. There is a whack of the ice pick and another one, and one after that. They scale 27,000-foot-high puzzles. Sometimes climbers go a day or two without food; sometimes they fail to notice.

Kacper Tekieli has a mischievous smile, and is a philosophy major with a love of mountain literature. At 32, he has built a mountaineering reputation, although he cannot afford to give up working as a barista in the old quarter of Krakow. He watched a friend slip to his death last year in the Himalayas; he’s not sure he needs K2. Tekieli talks of the singular focus needed to summit a Himalayan peak in the maw of winter. The universe narrows to a metre or two.

“There’s something mystical. It’s not about the mountain, which is inert. It’s you. It’s what you discover about yourself in all those hours of concentration.” No one can be certain how a body will react at the top of the world. At K2 base camp, the air has half the oxygen found at sea level. At 26,000 feet, climbers enter the Death Zone; it is devilishly difficult to breathe, and the heart strains to pump blood. When climbers reach the summit, their breathing will be a shallow, fast pant. They will vomit and suffer dehydration and begin to hallucinate.

Wielicki recalls a past-exhaustion night on a solo Himalayan climb. He huddled inside a tiny tent and made tea for two: himself and his companion, whose presence was no less intense for being imaginary. “I felt him,” he said. “And, of course, he was not there.”

Northern loner
The K2 is a northern loner; it sits 1,287 km northwest of Nepal’s grand Himalayan peaks, exposed to winds that gust from the Arctic Circle. In February, its walls are colder and more wind-blasted than those of Everest. All of which brings us to climbing strategy. The Poles mastered the dominant expedition style a half-century ago. It requires a willingness to subsume ego in the collective. If a team numbers 10 climbers, six will take the role of worker bees, laying pitons and ropes and tents at camps higher on the mountain. How to prepare excites debate. I talk about this with Adam Bielecki, 33, married with a toddler and another baby on the way, he began climbing as a teenager. He is one of the elite, and a candidate to join the summit team.

He overflows with ambition and chafes at old ways. Bielecki favours a bottom-of-the-world strategy to prepare: Send summit climbers to Chile, where it is summer, and climb a 22,000-feet Andean peak. Stay put until bodies accommodate to the thin air. Then fly to Pakistan and trek quickly to base camp. “All we need is three days of good weather and we will get to the top of K2,” he says. “It can be a revolution in high-altitude climbing.”

The younger generation of climbers views Bielecki’s strategy as a good gamble, but Wielicki sounds unconvinced. He sees a young climber too sure of himself. “You need super luck to come from South America and find the weather to your liking,” he says. He offers a thin smile. “You cannot rely on super luck.”

Days later, Wielicki, the old legend, and I watch snow fall on a frozen lake. He acknowledges the age of winter climbing could draw to a close. Danger weighs on him as it did not decades ago. His wife is adept on cliffs, and he twitches as she moves up a rock face. He is pleased his children have not inherited his passions. And yet, god, that mountain. It’s the allure of that diamond-hard and deadly pyramid in the deepest reaches of the Karakoram range.