Heading out the door? Read this article on the new Outside+ app available now on iOS devices for members! Download the app.
K2 (8,611m / 28,251ft) is the world’s second highest mountain, after Everest (8,848.9m), and has traditionally been considered the most difficult of the world’s 14 8,000-meter peaks. It has been referred to as The Savage Mountain since 1953, when American climber and physicist George Bell, who’d nearly perished in a six-man fall on the mountain, told reporters, “It’s a savage mountain that tries to kill you.”
Until recently, the mountain’s death-to-summit ratio has paid honor to that name. K2’s historic fatality rate has been above 20 percent, making it one of the most perilous high altitude mountaineering objectives in the world, comparable only to Annapurna I (8,091m), which historically had a death rate above 30 percent, and Nanga Parbat (8,126m), whose death-to-summit ratio traditionally hovers around 21 percent.
But while K2’s height and technicality have traditionally deterred the amateur mountaineers that flock to “easier” mountains like Everest, commercially guided expeditions have swarmed K2’s summit in recent years. Up until 2021, just 377 climbers had stood on its summit, and the one-year record was 62 summits in 2018. In 2022 alone, however, 200 people summited, 145 of them in a single 24-hour period, and only two climbers died. And 2023 saw one death for an estimated 112 summits. These years have drastically lowered the K2’s overall death rate from 25 percent in 2021 to approximately 13 percent—and they’ve led to a widespread reconsideration of K2’s viability as a guided trip. “The Everest model is now official on K2,” Himalayan chronicle Alan Arnette wrote in a July 2022 blog. “I [once] wrote that K2 would never become Everest … I was wrong.”
At the same time, however, the mountain remains dangerous. Overcrowding on the peak is becoming a concern, especially in the standard route’s technical sections—like the Bottleneck (see below)—which lend themselves to traffic jams.
Increased traffic from guiding companies has also heightened some of the ethical concerns that often accompany high-altitude climbing and labor. This was made especially apparent by an incident in July 2023, when a woefully under-equipped and under-trained porter named Muhammad Hassan collapsed high on the mountain. The media pounced at allegations that dozens of summit-blind climbers walked past Hassan while he lay dying; though later reports suggest that high-profile climbers like Kristin Harila did render aid. Pakistan’s government launched an investigation and ultimately banned Lela Peak Expeditions, Hassan’s employer, from guiding in the region for two years.
Guided or not, K2’s upper slopes are one of the least hospitable places on earth. And for anyone who wants to escape the crowds, the mountain is also host to nearly a dozen existing but rarely attempted routes, many of which climb from the mountain’s frighteningly remote Chinese side. There are also a number of potential first ascents awaiting the very best and bravest high-altitude climbers.
K2’s Climbing History
Survey and Name
Originally surveyed by the British Great Trigonometrical Survey of India in 1856, the mountain was christened K2 since it was the second main peak in the Karakorum that they mapped. The other principal Karakakorum summits were originally named likewise (K1, K3, K4, and K5), but the surveyors later cast around for local names, and today these peaks are known as Masherbrum (7,821m), Gasherbrum IV (7,925m), Gasherbrum II (8,035m), and Gasherbrum I (8,080m), respectively.
K2’s name, however, has stuck—in part because, thanks to the mountain’s remoteness, surveyors were unable to identify a local name. The name “Chogori”—a mashup of two Balti words that separately mean “big” and “mountain”—may have been invented by Western explorers in the early 20th century, but it seems to have little local usage. Chinese administrators in Xinjiang, however, call the peak “Qogir,” which they derived from “Chogori.” Early K2 expeditions
The 1902 Northeast Ridge Expedition
The first climbing expedition to K2 was in 1902 and was spearheaded by Oscar Eckenstein and notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, who was accompanied by Guy Knowles, Jules Jacot-Guillarmod, Heinrich Pfannl, and Victor Wessely.
The team approached the mountain from the Chinese side and attempted the Northeast Ridge, battling brutal weather during their 68 days on the mountain. They reached approximately 6,525 meters (21,407 feet) after five attempts, setting a record for the longest period spent at such a high altitude. Following the failed expedition, Crowley notably declared that the Southeast Spur (now called the Abruzzi Spur), not the Northeast Ridge, was the mountain’s most viable line of ascent. This was the route eventually used by the peak’s first ascensionist and is today considered its easiest route.
The Northeast Ridge wasn’t successfully climbed until 1978, when four Americans under the leadership of Jim Whittaker—Louis Reichardt, Jim Wickwire, John Roskelley, and Rick Ridgeway—finally navigated the long and corniced ridge. In the process, Reichardt and Ridgeway became the first two climbers to summit the mountain without using supplemental oxygen. And Jim Wickwire survived one of the highest exposed bivouacs in mountaineering history, spending the night in a shallow hole just 500 feet below the summit. (Reichhardt wrote an excellent report about the expedition in the American Alpine Journal.)
The 1909 Italian Expedition
Luigi Amedeo, an Italian polar explorer and Duke of the Abruzzi, led the second expedition to K2 in 1909, approaching the mountain from the south (Pakistani) side. When the team was driven back from the eponymous Abruzzi Spur after climbing to 20,500 feet, they retargeted their efforts on first the peak’s west and then northeast ridges but failed on both. The peak wasn’t tried again until 1938, when an American attempt led by Charles Houston reached 26,000 feet on the Abruzzi Spur only to be turned back by foul weather and dwindling supplies.
Death Comes to K2
During the 1939 American Karakoram Expedition to K2, Fritz Weissner and Pasang Dawa Lama climbed to within 600 feet of the summit (avoiding the Bottleneck feature by climbing the steep cliffs to its right), but the expedition ended tragically. Climber Dudley Wolfe was left stranded high on the mountain due to a series of miscommunications. Several attempts were made to rescue him, and though the rescuers reached him on their second attempt, Wolfe was dehydrated and hypoxic and refused to accompany his rescuers on a descent. During a third and final attempt to get him off the mountain, three Sherpas, Pasang Kikuli, Pasang Kitar, and Phinsoo, disappeared high on the mountain. Their bodies were never found.
Another American expedition in 1953, led again by Houston, saw the team trapped for 10 days at 25,590 feet amid a violent storm. During the storm, one of the men, Art Gilkey, developed thrombophlebitis, a life threatening blood clot condition caused by altitude. The team immediately gave up on the summit and began trying to get Gilkey to safety. They wrapped him in a sleeping bag and began lowering him through snow and 80mph winds. During that first day, Pete Schoening made one of most famous belays in mountaineering history, catching a six-man fall on a hip belay. Shortly after that, however, Art Gilkey—still in his sleeping bag—simply disappeared. Some believe that he was swept off the mountain by an avalanche. Others conjecture that he untied from the rope and slid himself off the mountain in order to make the descent safer for his teammates.
The first ascent of K2
K2 was finally summited on July 31, 1954, by Italian climbers Lino Lacedelli and Achille Compagnoni via the Abruzzi Spur. The expedition was led by Ardito Desio and also included Pakistani colonel Muhammad Ata-Ullah, Hunza porter Amir Mehdi, and prominent climber Walter Bonatti. One member, Mario Puchoz, died of pneumonia.
Though successful, the expedition created one of the great dramas of high altitude climbing history, when Compagnoni and Lacedelli established their high camp (Camp IX) at an elevation nearly 1,000 feet higher than originally agreed with Mehdi and Bonatti, who were to portage Compagnoni and Lacedelli’s oxygen tanks up to high camp prior to their summit bid. By the time Mehdi and Bonatti reached the new drop point, it was too dark to descend, and the pair were forced to bivy in the open, without sleeping bags, at 26,000 feet. Both men survived, but Mehdi was hospitalized for months and lost nearly all of his fingers and toes to frostbite. It was later indicated that Compagnoni deliberately moved camp, fearing that Bonatti would otherwise carry on and summit first himself. Check out Bruce Hildenbrand’s “High Crimes On K2”, which was published by Climbing in 2022.
K2 did not see a second ascent until 23 years after Desio’s expedition, when Ichiro Yoshizawa led a Japanese team to the summit, also by the Abruzzi Spur, on August 9, 1977.
The first winter ascent of K2
K2 was the last 8,000-meter peak to see a winter ascent, which was considered one of the greatest prizes in high altitude mountaineering. The first winter attempts were in 1987 and 1988, years that saw 13 Polish climbers, seven Canadians, and four Britons shivering on the mountain’s wintry slopes. All of them failed. As did every other attempt for the next three decades. Finally, in January 2021, a 10-person Sherpa team led by Mingma Gyalje Sherpa and Nirmal “Nims” Purja took advantage of an almost mystically good weather window (summit winds were less than 10 mph, and the temperature was a relatively balmy -40 degrees Fahrenheit) and sung Nepal’s national anthem on the summit. Nims Purja was the only climber not using supplemental oxygen.
That same winter season, however, the Savage Mountain reasserted itself. Famed Spanish climber Sergi Mingote fell to his death while acclimatizing around Camp 1. Bulgarian Atanas Skatov fell to his death while descending from Camp 3. And then, finally, three especially strong climbers—Pakistan’s Ali Sadpara, Chile’s Juan Pablo Mohr Prieto, and Iceland’s John Snorri—froze to death near the Bottleneck after getting caught in a storm. Though their remains were found the following summer (by Sadpara’s son), it is still unclear whether they summited.
The first ski descent of K2
While most of K2’s greatest firsts occurred in the 1980s and ‘90s (see the list of K2’s routes below), the 21st century hasn’t been without a few mind-boggling accomplishments—one of which was Polish ski mountaineer Andrezej Bargiel’s audacious summit-to-glacier ski descent of K2.
The mountain doesn’t exactly lend itself to good skiing; the continuous 50+ degree slopes are frequently interspersed with cliff bands, seracs, routine rock and icefall, and avalanche-prone gullies, and there’s no straightforward skiable line. Still, large sections of the mountain had been skied; in 2014, Luis Stitzinger, who passed away on Kanchenjunga in 2023, skied from Camp 4 to the mountain’s base via the Kukuczka-Piotrowski, also sometimes called the Polish Route, though he had to remove his skies to downclimb a 200-meter section of rock.
But after clicking into his skis on K2’s windy summit, Bargiel did not remove them. He descended the Abruzzi Spur through the Bottleneck (a section first skied by Dave Watson in 2009) before veering onto the South-Southeast Spur (Cešen Route) and negotiating the insanely exposed Messner Traverse (using a rope as protection for 10 especially heinous meters), which allowed him to access the Polish Route. From there, he skied a steep, crevasse-ridden glacier down to basecamp. He climbed and skied without supplemental oxygen. The AAJ has an excellent editorial about it.
Related: When A Climber Dies on K2, Is Anyone to Blame?
K2’s Climbing Routes
While nine of the 14 other 8,000-meter peaks (including Everest) are located in the Himalaya, K2 is located in Pakistan’s Karakoram Range, on the border of the Pakistani-Kashmir region Gilgit-Baltistan and a section of Kashmir administered by China as part of Xinjiang autonomous region. Climbers, therefore, deal with wildly different permitting systems depending on whether they climb the mountain from China or Pakistan.
Though K2 has more than a dozen routes (some of which overlap each other), the overwhelming majority of its ascents—and nearly all its recent ones—have come from via the Abruzzi Spur, which is considered its safest. We have listed only a selection of the routes and variations below. The East Face of K2 has never seen an ascent, in part due to the instability of its ice and snow formations. Neither has the direct North Face.
Abruzzi Spur
By far the most popular route on K2 is the Abruzzi Spur, also called the Southeast Ridge, which begins on the Pakistani side of the mountain. It was first attempted by the 1909 Italian expedition and was used for the peak’s first ascent in 1954. More than 75 percent of all successful K2 ascents are made via this route, which follows a ridgeline beginning at around 17,700 feet. It presents several technical and exposed sections, including the 100-foot crack House’s Chimney named for American climber Bill House, who successfully led it in 1938, and the Black Pyramid, a large arete protruding from the main spur. Another well-known feature is the Bottleneck, a steep couloir approximately 1,300 feet below the summit, which is overhung by a number of unstable seracs. Even though it’s considered the easiest of the routes, the mountain’s consistent steepness and formidable winds make it the hardest “trade route” on the 8,000-meter circuit.
The Cešen
K2’s second-most-popular route is the Cešen—also called the Basque Route and the South-Southeast Spur—which runs just west of the Abruzzi Spur and connects with it at the Shoulder (7,700 meters) roughly 60 percent of the way up the mountain, after which climbers follow the Abruzzi through the Bottleneck to the summit. The route was pioneered by Slovenian climber Tomo Česen, who soloed the line in 1984, though there is some controversy about whether he actually summited. Because the Česen avoids some of the technical obstacles like House’s Chimney and the Black Pyramid lower down on the Abruzzi, it is sometimes considered safer, but the line is significantly steeper and has rockfall and avalanche risks of its own.
Polish Route
When Reinhold Messner dismisses a route as “suicidal,” you know it’s rough stuff, and that’s exactly what he said of K2’s South Face before Jerzy Kukuczka and Tadeusz Piotrowski climbed it in 1986. The Polish Route, also sometimes called the Kukuczka-Piotrowski, begins in Pakistan, on the Southwest Pillar, before deviating rightward and launching up the center of K2’s extremely exposed and avalanche-prone South Face, joining the Abruzzi Spur just 1,000 feet below the summit. In a 1986 American Alpine Journal article, Kukuczka describes how, after making the first ascent, he and Piotrowski descended via the Abruzzi Spur over several grueling days; dehydrated, exhausted, and hypoxic, they fatefully forgot their rope at one of their bivouacs, which meant that when Piotrowski somehow dislodged both his crampons, he fell to his death. The Polish Route is so prone to avalanches and collapsing seracs, it has not received a second ascent—though Andrzej Bargiel did utilize large sections of it during his 2018 ski descent.
The Magic Line
Widely considered one of K2’s hardest and most aesthetically impressive routes, the Magic Line (as Reinhold Messner dubbed the South-Southwest Pillar) was briefly attempted in 1979 by an international team that included Messner and the great Italian soloist Renatto Casarotto; but the team had limited time on the mountain, and when it became clear how technically demanding the route was going to be, Messner insisted that they shift to the better-known Abruzzi Spur, which they used to make the mountain’s fourth ascent.
Casarotto returned in 1986, an astonishingly busy year on K2, and attempted the Magic Line alongside an American team, an Italian team, and a Polish-Slovakian team. The Americans and Italians did some crucial rope fixing lower on the route but decided to walk away after two of the American climbers, John Smolich and Alan Pennington, were killed when a boulder fell from the ridge above them and caused a large avalanche. Cassarotto then made three attempts on the mountain, reaching 8,300 meters before being turned around by bad weather; on his descent, just an hour above base camp, he fell 40 meters into a crevasse. After managing to reach his wife at basecamp by radio, he was rescued, but he died of his injuries shortly afterward.
Two weeks later, a Polish-Slovakian team composed of Wojciech Wroz, Przemyslaw Piasecki, and Petr Bozic made Magic Line’s first ascent. While rappelling through the Bottleneck on the Abruzzi Spur, Wroz, who was descending last, made a still-unidentified error and fell to his death. His teammates dedicated their climb to the four climbers who died in 1986 trying to accomplish it. Thirteen climbers died on K2 that year.
Since then, Magic Line has seen just one other ascent, by Spanish climber Jordi Corominas, who summited alone in 2006 after his teammates turned back. Climbing’s editor at the time, Dougald MacDonald, called it, “The most impressive ascent of a remarkable season.”
The West Ridge
The West Ridge (also sometimes called the Southwest Ridge) was first attempted by a British team led by Chris Bonnington in 1976, but they turned around after one of the climbers, Nick Estcourt, was killed in an avalanche. It was first climbed to the summit by a Japanese team in 1981, using supplemental oxygen. Remarkably, Japanese climber Matsushi Yamash*ta halted his effort just 150 meters below the summit, worried that his slower pace would hinder his teammates’ chances. Thanks to him, Japan’s Eiho Chtani and Pakistan’s Nazir Sabir reached the summit, after which all three returned safely to basecamp.
Since then, the West Ridge has been climbed just two more times. The line is still awaiting a pure alpine-style ascent, despite a 2021 effort by Piolet D’or-winning alpinists Graham Zimmerman and Ian Welsted, who abandoned their effort after astonishingly warm temperatures made the climb too dangerous. “I knew that the climate crisis was affecting these mountains,” Zimmerman said afterwards, “but I can’t say that I anticipated getting scorched off the second highest peak on the planet.”
The West Face
When it was first climbed in fixed-rope siege-style (but without supplemental oxygen) by a large Russian team in 2007, the West Face was the first completely independent first ascent on K2 since 1986. The Russians’ direct line up the imposing 8,500-foot tall wall involves serious rock climbing, drytooling, and snow-climbing at high elevation. The route’s first crux is a 3,000-foot cliff called the Bastion, which ends above 25,000 feet. After that, typical K2 rigors—snowy couloirs, steep ice, and relentless wind—keep the difficulty consistent. Members of the Russian expedition likened the wall to what they’d found during previous expeditions to the North Face of Jannu and the Direct North Face of Everest, both in 2004. Eleven Russians summited during the expedition, a testament to the effectiveness of their controversial rope-fixing tactics. Lindsay Griffin, writing for Alpinist, described the West Ridge as “almost certainly the hardest route on the mountain.” It is unrepeated, but two of Japan’s strongest alpinists, Kazuya Hiraide and Kenro Nakajima, plan to attempt the West Face in alpine style in the summer of 2024.
Northwest Ridge
First climbed by France’s Pierre Beghin and Christophe Profit in 1991, the Northwest Ridge route begins on the Northwest Ridge proper before angling across the Northwest Face and joining with the North Ridge (first climbed by the Japanese in 1982) where they intersect at 7,800 meters. Writing about the unsuccessful 1995 American Expedition, John Culberson noted that, “The Northwest Ridge is a very long route, but offers some very good climbing, safe camps, and is free from the crowds.” His team was stormed off the upper mountain during their summit attempt. Interestingly, they also had a problem with ravens stealing their food caches from their higher camps: “Apparently there was so much snow in the valley,” he wrote, “that the birds were forced to forage on the upper wind-blown slopes.” Hearty birds. The Northwest Ridge remains unrepeated.
Northwest Face
First climbed by a Japanese team in 1990, the Northwest Face begins at the K2 Glacier and climbs the Northwest Ridge (see above) before deviating onto the Northwest Face and following rock and snow terrain until it intersects with the North Ridge route (see below) at 7,700 meters. The summiting climbers were Hideji Nazuka and Hirotaka Imamura. Their route is unrepeated.
The North Ridge
Described by legendary alpinist Steve Swenson as “one of the most striking lines on the mountain,” the North Ridge of K2 (also occasionally called the North Pillar) is a stunning rising arete that leads unbroken from the intensely remote North K2 Glacier to just below K2’s summit. It’s rarely climbed, in part because accessing it requires fording the hazardous Shaksgam River, and in part because the climbing is more challenging than it is on the Abruzzi.
The North Ridge was first climbed by a large Japanese team in 1982, and climbed again by an Italian the following year, but has seen just a handful of repeats over the decades—including an alpine-style ascent by Greg Child, Steve Swenson, and Greg Mortimer in 1990 (though they did make use of several hundred feet fixed ropes already in place on the mountain) and another alpine-style ascent by Kazakh superstars Serguey Samoilov and Denis Urubko in 2007. It was most recently climbed by Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, who became the first woman to summit all 14 8,000-meter peaks without supplemental oxygen.
Northeast Ridge
The Northeast Ridge begins on the Chinese side of the mountain and charts a long and snowy course to its intersection with the Abruzzi Spur, just below the Bottleneck. It was first attempted in 1902 by Oscar Eckenstein and Aleister Crowley, who managed to climb to a height of 6,525 meters. Seventy-four years later, a Polish expedition managed to traverse the entire ridge, but they were forced to retreat from the higher mountain due to bad weather. The Northeast Ridge was finally climbed to the summit on September 6, 1978, by Americans Louis Reichardt and James Wickwire, who were followed the next day by John Roskelley and Rick Ridgeway. It was the fourth team ascent of the mountain and the first that did not use the Abruzzi Spur.
Is K2, the Savage Mountain, indeed getting less savage?
If you’re heading up the trade route, with the support of guides, the answer is an unequivocally “Yes.” But there’s plenty of adventure remaining on the peak. And even K2’s trade route is still a serious endeavor.
Basic facts and figures
- Elevation: 8,611 meters/28,251 feet
- Range: Karakorum, Kashmir, Pakistan/China
- First ascent: July 31, 1954.
- First ascensionist: Lino Lacedelli and Achille Compagnoni
- Cumulative successful summits: 800 (approximate)
- Cumulative deaths: 96
- Approximate death-to-summit ratio: 11:100
- Average cost to climb: $30,000
This article is part of Climbing’s online archives documenting climbing’s greatest mountains, such as Everest, and its pioneering practitioners such as Marc-Andre Leclerc.
