Pakistani rescuers saved one climber stranded on K2 yesterday and tried to help another after a catastrophic ice avalanche on the world’s second-highest peak killed 11 mountaineers.
Three South Koreans, two Nepalis, two Pakistanis, a Serbian, an Irishman, a Norwegian and a Frenchman were killed when a chunk of ice swept away ropes near the summit of the 8,611m peak on Friday, officials said.
Officials said that a Dutch climber was rescued by helicopter and a missing Italian had been located but was still stuck on the mountain, widely acknowledged by climbers to be more difficult to scale than Everest.
PHOTO: EPA
“At least 11 climbers have died. This is one of the worst incidents in the history of K2 climbing,” Sultan Alam, a Pakistani mountaineering guide, told reporters from the peak’s base camp, located at an altitude of 5,200m.
The exact number of climbers affected remains unclear but Alam said he was aware of 17 whose ropes were swept away, with 11 dead, two stuck on the mountain and three back at Base Camp.
“One Dutch was rescued by helicopter from K2 this morning while an Italian is still at an altitude of 7,200 meters,” Alam said as the roar of a helicopter could be heard in the background.
Another chopper went up to help the Italian but could not touch down and returned after a brief contact with the climber, Alam said.
“Our four high altitude porters left a while ago and it is expected that they will bring the Italian climber down this evening,” he said.
The avalanche happened when a pillar of ice broke away in a steep gully known as the Bottleneck about 396m below the summit and swept away fixed lines used by the mountaineers as they made their descent.
“The three mountaineers who survived are suffering from severe frostbite,” said Alam, who works for Adventure Tours Pakistan, which operated one of the expeditions caught up in the disaster.
“They are badly affected and it appears that at least one of them would have his hand and leg chopped off. This is what our high altitude doctors believe,” he said.
The incident was the worst since 1986 when 12 climbers died, said Nazir Sabir, a Pakistani mountaineer who scaled K2 in 1981.
The pyramid-shaped K2, which sits on the border between Pakistan and China in the Karakoram range, is considered by mountaineers to be by far the hardest of the 14 summits over 8,000m to scale.
Italian climbers Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli first scaled the mountain on July 31, 1954. Between that first ascent and last year, there were 284 successful ascents and 66 fatalities.
In the same period, Everest was summited 3,681 times, with 210 deaths.
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