The allure of K2, the summit that makes you lose your mind

"K2 is not an evil being hiding out there in the Baltoro, waiting for us. It's just there, indifferent. It's an inanimate mountain of rock, ice and snow. Its savagery is due to all that we project onto it, as if we were blaming the summit for our own misfortunes", Ed Viesturs wrote after returning from K2. Viesturs, the first American to climb the planet's 14 peaks of over 8,000 meters, almost bent over backwards on the second highest mountain in the world, at 8,611 meters. "To try to reach the summit, we climbed despite the threat of bad weather. And in mountaineering, going up is optional, but going down is mandatory. On the way down I almost lost my life", he recalls. Every year the objects of climbers who lose their lives at K2 end up in an improvised memorial at base camp, where the name of the Catalan Sergi Mingote, the last victim of the "cursed mountain", as many call it, will now be added. "It's not cursed", Viesturs defends, who has dedicated a book to a summit that "is fascinating; it's perfect, it can make you lose control".

A perfect pyramid of beautiful snow and ice on the border between Pakistan and China, in the Karakorum area. An area so politically unstable, that for many years it was as hard to climb it as it was to get permission to get there. Unlike other summits, K2 didn't even have a name in the local language, as it was far away from any inhabited place. The mountain was first recorded in 1856 by an expedition led by British Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen, who worked in the service of an empire that wanted to control those borders. Thomas G. Montgomery, topographer of the team, named the summits of that area of the Karakorum with scientific spirit: K1, K2, K3, K4... in order of height. But he erred in his calculations, baptizing the summit that would later be baptized as Masherbrum as K1, a mountain that does not reach the 8,000 meters. Most of the summits named by Montgomery adopted other names over the years, such as Broad Peak (K3), Gasherbrum II (K4) and Gasherbrum I (K5). K2, on the other hand, continued with this name, even though the Chinese call it Chogori.

K2, together with Annapurna, is the summit with the highest average number of deaths among the brave who try to climb it. At K2 the death rate is almost 25%, exceeded only by 38% at Annapurna, the tenth highest peak on Earth. Curiously, Annapurna was the first 8,000th to be conquered, in the famous French expedition of Maurice Herzog, who had been part of the resistance against the Nazis, and Louis Lachenal, in 1950. It has since closed its doors. The K2 has not put up any facilities either. Sergi Mingote himself, who had already crowned it without oxygen and was now returning to try to be the first to climb without oxygen in winter, explained: "It is the summit that I look upon with the most respect. It attracts you. After you've been there, you understand its magic". The man from Parets del Vallès admitted to having a love-hate relationship with the summit where he lost his life, a few hours after an expedition from Nepal made the summit for the first time during winter, and one of the team members, Sherpa Nirmal Purj, did it without oxygen. Purj, the man who climbed all 14 8,000s in just six months, has led the Sherpas' summit emancipation, the indigenous people of Nepal who were condemned to carry the first explorers' luggage as they climbed the mountain with them, 100 years ago. Now they have made history again in K2.

The controversial Italian ascent of 1954

"K2 can make you lose your mind", Viesturs admits. The first dead mountaineer was Dudley Wolfe, who died in 1939 amid rumours of his tyrannical dealings with the Sherpas. K2 was first crowned by an Italian expedition in 1954, an adventure that would end up in court. Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli, the first climbers to reach the summit, would accuse young Walter Bonatti of having jeopardised their success. Bonatti would defend himself and end up winning the case, both in court and in public opinion, proving that Compagnoni and Lacedelli changed the last camp before attacking the summit, just when Bonatti, accompanied by the Pakistani climber Amir Mahdi, was bringing them oxygen tanks. Compagnoni would admit that they changed the camp to keep Bonatti, younger, away, anxious in case he could overtake them on the day of the summit attack. The change of location of the camp forced Bonatti and Mahdi to improvise the documented bivouac at the highest altitude, at 8,100 meters, in a small, snowy one meter space they created with an ice axe. Mahdi would lose his feet because of the cold. And Bonatti would return so disappointed that he became a legend by climbing the summits forever and ever alone, since he no longer trusted anyone. The glory of climbing a summit that "asks for more", according to Viesturs, made both Italians lose control. And, without wanting to, they made Bonatti one of the most admired names in modern mountaineering. In 1986, Polish Wanda Rutkiewicz would become the first woman to crown the K2.

The love-hate relationship with K2 has claimed the lives of some Catalans. In 1995, Jordi Anglès, from Terrassa, died due to a fall, a year after the first ascent of a Catalan, Juan Tomàs, who was accompanied by the Basques Alberto and Félix Iñurrategi, Juanito Oiarzabal and Enrique de Pablo. In 2004, Jordi Corominas made history by leading the second ascent by the route known as the Magic Line, opened in 1986 by the Poles Wojciech Wróż, Przemek Piasecki, and the Slovak Petr Bozik. If in 1986 Wróż would lose his life descending, in 2004 Manel de la Matta would die, who was descending accompanied by Òscar Cadiach after having decided not to follow Corominas. Cadiach would go up in 2012 and Ferran Latorre in 2014, an expedition in which his friend Miguel Ángel Pérez Álvarez, born in Barcelona, would lose his life.