K2 Basecamp (Pakistan) (TIP): Gazing up from K2 Basecamp, Sajid Ali Sadpara sees Earth’s second-highest mountain, his father’s final resting place, and a blight of litter on the furthest reaches of the natural world.
Sajid dons a down coverall stitched with Pakistan’s green flag to scale the 8,611-metre (28,251-foot) spur of rock, clearing an icebound grotesquerie of spent oxygen canisters, mangled tents and snarled rope discarded over decades by climbers questing for the summit.
Over a week some 200 kilograms (400 pounds) of litter is hacked from the pinnacle’s frozen grip by his five-strong team and ferried precariously back down, he says, a rare act of charity in one of Earth’s most unforgiving environments.
It is a high-altitude tribute to Sajid’s father, legendary climber Ali Sadpara, honouring the place where they bonded in nature and where his body remains after a 2021 father-son expedition fell foul of the “savage mountain”.
“I’m doing it from my heart,” Sajid told an AFP team at K2 Basecamp, where 5,150 metres of elevation labours breathing and avalanches tremor off an amphitheatre of surrounding slopes.
“This is our mountain,” the 25-year-old said, sizing up the task above. “We are the custodians.”
K2 was forged when India collided with Asia 50 million years ago, sprouting the Karakoram range of mountains across Pakistan’s present-day northeastern Gilgit-Baltistan region.
It was named by British surveyors in 1856 — denoting the second peak in the Karakoram range. Over time nearby mountains with alphanumeric designations became better known by names used by locals.
But sequestered up a glacial cul-de-sac on the Chinese border — days from the faintest suggestion of human settlement — K2 kept its foreboding moniker, stoking a reputation as a more wild, untamable and technically demanding ascent than Nepal‘s Everest, which stands 238 metres higher.
First conquered by Italians in 1954, its winter winds scourge up to 200 kilometres per hour and temperatures plunge to minus 60 degrees Celsius (minus 76 Fahrenheit).
But it also ignites primal passions with its archetypical triangular silhouette — the shape of a peak a child might draw.
After two days on paths slit through valleys and four more across the Baltoro Glacier — a 63-kilometre hulk frozen in a permanent storm swell and seamed with crevasses — K2’s first glimpse ripples frisson through hikers.
It stands like an altar at the end of a colossal aisle. Sundown deepens its rocky reliefs and burnishes snowy slopes to rose gold. Pilgrim paragliders come to whirl in its shadow.
One renowned wilderness photographer labelled this vista “the throne room of the mountain gods”.
“We love it more than life itself because there’s no place of such beauty on Earth,” said Central Karakoram National Park (CKNP) warden Muhammad Ishaq. (AFP)