[HN Gopher] A Nepali team has made the first winter ascent of K2 ___________________________________________________________________ A Nepali team has made the first winter ascent of K2 Author : eigenvector Score : 92 points Date : 2021-01-16 18:29 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.alpinist.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.alpinist.com) | Xenoamorphous wrote: | Just today we got the news here in Spain that a spanish alpinist, | Sergi Mingote, died while descending from K2. There were multiple | teams attempting this, then? | remus wrote: | I believe so. As I understand it (this is all third hand so | take it with a pinch of salt) there are other teams who are | waiting for another weather window to make an attempt. | schwax wrote: | https://www.alanarnette.com/blog/2021/01/16/winter-k2-update... | | > There are around 20 climbers aspiring to summit, and claim a | winter K2 summit. Some have acclimatized to Camp 3 but most | have only reached Camp 1. Some will end their effort based on | today's first summit, and citing rockfall danger, others will | still retain their motivation. We'll see what the final K2 | winter 2020/21 total is in a few weeks. | sebmellen wrote: | I've always wondered why we don't see sherpas holding all the | climbing records, given how much better adapted they are to their | environments than most other mountaineers. Maybe this is the | beginning of a new trend! The sentiment is at least echoed in the | article: | | > _In the 2015 newswire, Green quoted Dawa Gyalje Sherpa: "We are | hoping as young climbers, to take climbing in Nepal to a new | level. All of us have climbed much bigger mountains but always | with foreign climbers. We want to show that we are not just | porters on the mountain, climbing only for our livelihood, but we | are interested in climbing because we enjoy it, too.... We are | the young generation of Sherpa climbers but we are looking to the | future of Nepal and Sherpas also."_ | iamaaditya wrote: | I believe there is some form of memory bias or bias in | reporting by the media. If you look at the record books, you | will find that most records are held by Sherpas. For example, | more than 70 records for Mount Everest is held my Sherpas (or | other Nepalese climbers) [1], far more than climbers from any | other country. | | Apa Sherpa, one of the most prolific Sherpas, holds many | records [2]. Interesting fact he was Sherpa to Peter Hillary | (Edmund's son). | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mount_Everest_records | [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apa_Sherpa | PopeDotNinja wrote: | It's been said that history is written by the winners. I guess | you could also say history is written by the people who pay for | it. | krallistic wrote: | Its nice to see Nepal with this first winter books finally in | the history books. They done so much for mountaineering. | sonalr wrote: | Somewhat related, highly recommend this documentary. It really | shows the untold story of how hard of a life it is for a porter | in the Everest region of Nepal. This is such a great story, and | very well done by Nathaniel Menninger. | https://youtu.be/MxAU4wWG2Hs | intrepidhero wrote: | Sherpas were on all the big western expeditions that I know of. | Their names are just usually dropped when talking about it, | which is a shame. I recently read Krakauer's Into Thin Air and | appreciated that he treated the sherpas on the expedition as | fellow humans. They figured as important as anyone else in the | story. He was also careful when talking about past climbs to | mention all the climbers, sherpa and otherwise. | | Very interesting book for me. I knew (know?) very little about | mountaineering. | sebmellen wrote: | That's very nice to hear, and I'll check the book out. | | While on a cruise ship last July (well, 2019) I made friends | with a Nepalese security screw and we talked about Nepal and | their family occupations. It's very sad to hear of how | disposably sherpas are treated on the vanity tours by | unskilled foreign climbers. Basically the sherpas end up | dragging along their clients and they face outsized risk on | the way. | strstr wrote: | For a long time, both Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary | evaded the question of who summitted Everest first. They | reached the top as a team. | | Most of the "forgetting" seems to happen when it comes to | communicating about larger, less notable expeditions. | Someone wrote: | Larger? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_British_Mount_Ev | erest_exp...: | | _"The mountaineers were accompanied [...] by 362 porters, | so that the expedition in the end amounted to over four | hundred men, including twenty Sherpa guides from Tibet and | Nepal, with a total weight of ten thousand pounds of | baggage"_ | | I don't know the details of that expedition, but typically, | the sherpas make multiple trips up and down the mountain to | bring the necessary material up to height, so that those | paying can relatively comfortably acclimatize at height. | Climbing Everest almost always is a team effort. | | Even if you ignore those porters , those _"twenty Sherpa | guides from Tibet and Nepal"_ , IMO, deserve to be | mentioned there more than Jan Morris, who didn't make it | further up the mountain than 22,000 feet | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Morris). | | (and aside: ten thousand pounds of baggage seems very low | to me. That's less than 30 pounds per porter = I guess | that's what made it to the highest camp) | bitL wrote: | And yet Krakauer had no issues throwing a guy, who tried to | save some of the members of his team, under the bus when | Krakauer messed up, and turned a hero into a villain. | ceocoder wrote: | Jon Krakauer has responded to Anatoli Boukreev here[0], it | seems as like most things in life, there is more nuance | this than just hero villain dichotomy. | | [0] https://medium.com/galleys/a-postscript-to-into-thin- | air-e23... | ignoramous wrote: | For K2, it is usually the Pakistani porters from Gilgit- | Baltistan: https://www.wionews.com/south-asia/pakistani- | porters-the-uns... | | > _Their names are just usually dropped when talking about | it, which is a shame._ | | Reminds me of Amir Mehdi's story: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amir_Mehdi#K2_(1954) | jariel wrote: | They may be culturally and physically acclimatized to mountains | in every way, but not likely to the notion of | 'mountaineering/climbing' in the romantic sense. | | After all it serves no purpose, requires development of new | tech, money etc.. | | I don't think anyone doubts they couldn't have done it long ago | were some local ruler to have made it a priority. | | I wonder if they thought the original European 'explorers' to | be completely mad. | | So that leaves the question: the mountains were 'right there' | and they had innate ability, so why didn't they 'just do it', | and have the routes all mapped out for centuries already? Is I | think the rhetorical question that unpacks a lot of things. | sebmellen wrote: | That is an interesting question. I think the most obvious | answer is that exploration is predicated on a certain level | of technological advancement, below which it is completely | unreasonable. If you don't have a food surplus and some | academic establishment and governance and trade routes, | exploration is an unreasonable vanity project. _Guns, Germs, | and Steel_ grazes this topic. | | As Nepal develops further, I expect to see more of these | sorts of headlines. | beerandt wrote: | Let's not dismiss nation-state exploration with having an | overly indulgent hobby. | | Establishing and mapping boundaries, demonstrating military | abilities, and even finding/protecting the trade routes you | speak of, all required exploration on a large scale. | | Not to mention things like establishing trade and a | friendly presence with locals, establishing surveillance | posts, and my personal favorite, surveying the geoid, as a | means to better ICBM guidance. | | Military always makes reason, and I suspect that might also | be at play in Nepal. | spanktheuser wrote: | It's also predicated on the existence of an economy which | provides ample leisure for some while others labor | ceaselessly at the edges of poverty. There's a reason the | Indian sub-continent lacked a food surplus, academic | establishments, strong governance etc. Great Britain looted | an estimated $45 billion from its Indian colonies during | the 173 years of its rule. | vijaykcm wrote: | There was a post on it earlier: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25803599. | PopeDotNinja wrote: | I'm an American, and I visited Pakistan on a whim back in | September. I was able to spend a few days in the north. I can | only say the north of Pakistan is incredible. There's nothing | that prepares you for seeing 8000+ meter mountains for the first | time. | | There's no shortage of people offering tours, but I made my own | plans. I rented a Toyota Hilux 4x4 for 4 days at $50/day, and | they insisted I hire a driver because they didn't trust me to | drive solo (which in retrospect was wise of them because of | language barriers, road conditions, police/military checkpoints, | etc.). The driver quoted me a rate of $3/day (not a typo). I | drove from Islamabad to Hunza and back in 3 days (I could only | get one day off work, lol). It was way too much driving, but the | trip was still incredible. | | To make the trip extra fun, I had the worst case of food | poisoning w/ diarrhea that I've ever had for the entire time. I | developed that the night before I was scheduled to drive off. So | in the morning I picked up some Imodium and baby wipes, and just | stopped every hour or two. I somehow managed to avoid shitting in | my pants, but I don't know how. Nearly every bathroom in | Pakistan, which might just be a hole in the ground, has a | handheld bidet, which is a power washer for your backside. No | matter how messy it got, I also walked away from a pit stop with | a fresh backside. | | Here's some pictures of the traveling, sans pit stops... | | https://photos.app.goo.gl/tZ3scbSFbPbxQCpG7 | TCS_ wrote: | That poor driver... | | +1 for those pictures! Incredible scenery | PopeDotNinja wrote: | I gave him a really nice tip :) | latchkey wrote: | Sounds like an epic adventure, right before everything went | nuts! | | In SE Asia, we call it a "bum gun". Cannot live without it and | you won't use TP ever again. Easy to order off Amazon. | ericjang wrote: | Thank you for sharing the photos ! Some of the poses are pretty | funny :) | jrumbut wrote: | Driving tours like that are an amazing way to travel. It takes | away that feeling of needing to jam in as many things as | possible and you can just live and take in the sights for a | while. | SubiculumCode wrote: | We need to start living on Mars, if only to give climbers new | mountains to climb. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mountains_on_Mars_by_h... | wbl wrote: | Olympus Mons is an essy climb with life support because it | isn't very steep. | Synaesthesia wrote: | Olympus Mons is almost the size of France and is 21 km high. | Gentle slope but still, quite a hike. | SubiculumCode wrote: | Interesting, but how Texas turned into France has to be the | bigger story ;) | SubiculumCode wrote: | that said. I'd put it on my cv. | NickNameNick wrote: | I think it's going to be a while before we see | | "First ascent of Olympus Mons without supplemental oxygen" | Syzygies wrote: | I met Charles Houston, leader of the first two American | expeditions on K2. He approached me to have me explain the | mathematics of card shuffling, and I traded an hour listening to | him explain the medicine of altitude sickness (which helped me | later on some modest climbs). | | He was on the wrong end of "The Belay" on the second climb, but | survived. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Snead_Houston | Ayesh wrote: | I follow @nimsdai on Instagram, he took the initiative for this. | Very nice content if you like that sort of content. | | He (and I'm sure the others are too) are some real-life super | humans! ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-01-16 23:00 UTC)