It is in the nature of the humans to challenge their personal abilities and push the limits of their strength and resilience to achieve seemingly impossible tasks for a sense of achievement. Perhaps that is why every generation of the human race surpasses the previous one in some way or the other, making a piece of history of its own.
In the mountaineering Nepalese Sherpa community, conquering gigantic and formidable mountains is like an old tradition. Even on the highest peak of the world, the story of mountaineering is written with the frozen breaths of the brave Sherpas who believed their abilities to be greater than the heights that threatened them. In the Mount Everest area, the Sherpa community accounts for 40 percent of the mountain-climbing deaths.
Yet for the Sherpas, a fitting tribute to their height-conquering ancestors is the persistent zeal to scale more heights and achieve more superhuman-like feats. One such feat pulled off by 10 Nepali Sherpas is the summit of K2 during wintertime. Apart from being the world’s second highest mountain, the K2 peak has been the only one of the 14 peaks exceeding 8000 meters that had never before been climbed during the harsh Himalayan winter.
On January 16, the peak of the K2 in Pakistan was reached by a team of 10 seasoned mountaineers, including Nirmal Purja, a Gurkha and UK Special Forces member who had previously summitted all 14 peaks situated above the 8000-metre mark over a span of just six months.
The team left their high camp at around 1 AM via the Abruzzi Spur, braving bone-chilling temperatures as low as -40 degree Celsius. However, there were low winds and the conditions were favourable for the expedition. Although the K2 peak had been scaled by many mountaineers since its first successful summit 66 years ago, attempts at conquering the peak in the winter season had been unsuccessful on multiple occasions. There had been as many as six attempts in the past to reach the top of K2 in the winter season.
While Western mountain climbers hogged the limelight in the history of mountaineering, the Sherpas were the actual heroes of these expeditions, being the indispensable seasoned assistants. Without the Nepalese Sherpas to guide the Western climbers, many of the world’s most remarkable mountain expeditions would have failed.
This new achievement by the Sherpas brings much deserved glory and recognition to their unparalleled but often downplayed contribution to the history of mountaineering.
The team made it to the peak around 5 PM and assembled to sing the Nepalese national anthem before making a safe descent. Before the formidable K2 peak, Nanga Parbat was the most recent 8,000-metre-plus peak to be summitted in winter. That had happened in 2016. Now five years later, with the wintertime summit of the K2 peak, the humans have collectively completed the feat of conquering all 14 peaks in all seasons.
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