A Pakistani porter’s body was found on the K2 mountain, a climbing organization reported on Tuesday. He passed away a year ago as other climbers achieved a record-breaking ascent.
During a night climb, Muhammad Hassan Shigri slipped and fell from the most treacherous pass. Before other climbers could pull him up and try to revive him, he was left hanging upside down on a rope.
He passed away on the “Bottleneck” pass while several climbers in various teams persisted in their ascent of the peak.
The climbers included Norwegian record-breaker Kristin Harila, who that evening became the fastest person to summit the world’s 14 tallest mountains with her Nepali guide Tenjin “Lama” Sherpa.
“The rescue team made history and turned the impossible into possible,” Karrar Haidri, Secretary of the Alpine Club of Pakistan told AFP of the recovery of Shigri’s body last Wednesday.
“Unprecedented rescue, first of its kind on K2,” he declared.
Five climbers under the direction of Pakistani high-altitude mountaineer Naila Kiani, who was contacted by Shigri’s family and supported by the Pakistani army, managed to accomplish the retrieval.
After being buried, Shigri’s body was given back to his family.
“We want to thank Naila Kiani and the porters who did this great job. To bring the dead body back was a big wish of the family,” his cousin Aslam Naz Shigri told AFP over the phone.
Harila stated that she and her colleagues “did everything we could for him” despite the fact that climbers were criticized at the time for trampling on Shigri’s body.
Shigri was determined to be unprepared with inadequate clothes and an untrained high altitude porter after an inquiry by the tourist department of the Gilgit and Baltistan provincial government. The examination also revealed that other climbers had made an attempt to rescue Shigri despite the dangerous conditions, but it was too late.
Porters are highly skilled individuals that specialize in the logistics of mountain climbing; they are also known as sherpas in the Himalayas.
Even on the most popular K2 routes, rescue attempts are risky operations, and bodies may remain undiscovered for months or even years until suitable weather conditions enable their retrieval by foot.
Although K2 is 238 meters shorter than Everest at 8,611 meters (28,251 ft) on the Pakistan-China border, it is regarded as more technically difficult.
Five of the world’s fourteen 8,000-meter-high mountains are located in Pakistan. This summer climbing season, four foreign climbers have died in different incidents after falling to their deaths on Pakistani mountains.
In July, French mountaineer Benjamin Vedrines set a new record for the fastest ascent of K2, taking 10 hours, 59 minutes, and 59 seconds. This time, he achieved the summit without using bottled oxygen, cutting the previous record in half.
