K2

From the valley floor at Askole the last roadhead, the route to K2 base camp winds through terrain that makes the term 'road' meaningless: boulder fields, glacier moraine and river crossings that take days to traverse on foot, all beneath walls of granite and ice that grow more vertical as they approach the sky and that seem to belong to a different planet from the dusty brown foothills.

The first clear sight of K2 itself, a sheer pyramid of ice and rock rising from the Godwin-Austen Glacier, is a moment mountaineers describe as a physical shock, because the scale of the mountain exceeds what photographs have prepared you for, and the summit disappears into cloud with a regularity that reinforces how rarely the mountain shows itself clearly.

K2's pyramid shape is deceptively simple: each of its faces presents a different set of problems — the Abruzzi Ridge, the Cesen Route, the Black Pyramid — and above 7,500 metres the mountain enters the death zone where the body begins to die from hypoxia and exposure times collapse to hours, making every decision a matter of survival.

The mountain's weather is notoriously unpredictable, with storms that can develop within hours and that claimed more lives on K2 than on Everest in proportional terms, earning it the nickname the Savage Mountain among the first generation of Himalayan climbers who understood what it was asking of those who attempted it.

Base camp on the Godwin-Austen Glacier sits at 5,000 metres and is accessible by a multi-day trek from Skardu or by helicopter; even here the thin air makes conversation difficult and the cold is a constant presence, and the glacier's movement beneath the tents is a reminder that this landscape is alive in ways that low-altitude environments are not.

The climbing season runs from June through August when the weather windows are longest, but even in this period successful ascents require weeks of acclimatisation and a team that can function coherently at altitudes that would incapacitate an ordinary person, making the successful summit of K2 one of the rarest achievements in human experience.

The 2021 successful winter ascent by a Nepali team ended decades of debate about whether K2's summit was achievable in the most extreme season, and demonstrated that the mountain still holds unsolved problems that push human capability to its limit, with the ascent costing one team member's life in the final stages of the climb.

K2 is the second-highest mountain on Earth and widely regarded as the most technically difficult and dangerous of the eight-thousanders, offering mountaineering challenges that even experienced climbers find confronting.

The Karakoram landscape — glaciers, granite walls, high-altitude desert — is visually extraordinary and accessible to non-climbers through the trek to base camp.

The mountain's summit has been reached by fewer than 500 people in total; it remains a place of genuine remoteness and risk in an era when most places have been photographed and mapped.