K2 2017 Season Coverage: More K2 Summit Attempts – Update 2

After hosting 12 people on the summit of K2 on 28 July 2017, another few independent climbers are going to give it a go.

UPDATE 2: IT’S OVER

Andrzej Bargiel : Time to go home

UPDATE 1: It seems it’s over for all. Both  Fredrik Sträng’s  and Andrzej Bargiel  have posted on their social media that conditions feel too dangerous. Plus the Polish team training for a winter attempt turned back.

Yesterday’s joy today’s frustration. I was very happy to work and climb together with the polish team and climb for summit attempt.

Every member in the polish team turned around and it was only me and Ali left on the mountain. With no fixed ropes between camp 3 and camp 4, I decided to turn around the point was that we together should fix the ropes to camp 4.

We are now back in BC and I am disappointed and we don’t know what to do next. The last attempt to climb the mountain has to be made in the next days if we want to make it safe. /Fredrik 

and from Andrzej:

Hi guys! We’re back in the base camp… It wasn’t our day. Early on Janusz Gołąb had to turn around and get back to the camp. He was struggling with an infection for a couple of days and as it turned around he didn’t fully recover. Along with Kuba Poburka we kept on going. It was pretty warm today what quickly increased the avalanche danger. Boulders and stone were falling down on our head. Kuba got hit by a small one, but he’s all right. We’ve decided there is no sense to risk it. Safety first.Unfortunatelly it looks like I won’t ski down from K2 this year… well sometimes you gotta lose the battle to win the war. It’s very likely we’ll come back.

New Attempts

 Fredrik Sträng’s home team posted:

The forthcoming plan is to get ready for another summit attempt within a couple of days. It’s all depending on the weather. This time the route of ascent will probably be the Cescen route due to bad conditions on the Abruzzi.

Andrzej Bargiel who wants to ski down from the summit of K2 posted:

Meanwhile we’re getting ready to leave the base camp. The forecast shows a good weather window after the weekend. Tomorrow early in the morning together with Kuba Poburka i Janusz Gołąb we’ll start the hike. We want to reach camp III where we’ll spend a night. Then we’ll move to camp IV and if the weather holds good we plan the summit attack for Tuesday.

 Climbers Descend

The summit team lead by Mingma G. of Dreamers Destination were supposed to be descending from Camp 4 at 25,080’/7600m on 29 July. 

Two climbers have their GPS trackers going: Vanessa O’Brien at GPS tracker and Icelander John Snorri Sigurjónsson at GPS tracker

Vanessa’s tracker still shows her at Camp 4 and John’s shows he is at K2 base Camp. There are numerous explanations for Vanessa’s position including her device ran out of battery power, it was not turned on, or she left it with another climber for some reason or finally she lost it.  I know I dropped my SPOT device while descending House Chimney sending panic through all my followers.

We will see what the real story is .

Update: looks like both Vanessa and John at now at Base Camp.

Best of luck to all the new attempts and congrats again to the summiters.

Climb On!
Alan
Memories are Everything