Winter on K2

K2 is the second-highest mountain on earth and the hardest of the great peaks to climb. For the whole history of the sport, one prize remained: no one had ever climbed it in winter. In the winter of 2021, that changed, and the season that claimed the last great first also took five lives.

On 16 January 2021, a team of ten Nepali climbers stood together on the summit in the killing cold and sang their national anthem. It was one of the proudest days in the history of mountaineering, and it belonged to the climbers whose people had made so much of the sport possible and had so rarely been credited. Weeks later, on 5 February, three climbers went for the summit and never came down: John Snorri of Iceland, Muhammad Ali Sadpara of Pakistan, and Juan Pablo Mohr of Chile. Ali Sadpara's son Sajid turned back near the Bottleneck when his oxygen failed, and that failure saved his life. In the summer, he climbed back up to find his father.

Built entirely from the public record, the contemporary reporting, the season analyses, and the accounts of the survivor and the families, this book tells the whole season honestly. It credits the Nepali team with the triumph that is theirs. It gives the three lost climbers their names and their dignity. And it refuses to invent a final scene for men who passed beyond the reach of any witness.

Clear, fair, and deeply human, this is the story of the winter that answered the last great question in mountaineering, and of what it cost. Triumph and tragedy, in one season, on one mountain, held together.