AFP Published August 12, 2023
A porter hikes past K2, carrying gas stoves, live chickens and even lawn furniture for adventurers seeking an audience with the world’s second-highest peak.
URDUKAS CAMP: Under mountains that dagger the sky, a misfit caravan of Pakistani porters trudge towards K2 toting live chickens and lawn furniture for adventurers seeking an audience with the world’s second-highest peak.
It’s a dozen-day round trip, some 270,000 burdened steps in lopsided plastic loafers, tie-dye headbands and leopard-print pyjamas, climbing to a glacial perch under one of the most awing sights on Earth — the apex of the Karakorams 8,611 metres (28,251 feet) above.
Pakistan’s dragging economy spurs them into this risk, even as it drains the rewards. The wilderness is shrinking with the creeping advance of roads, promising safer routes but less work. The mountains romance their souls, even as the peaks and troughs punish their bodies.
Seven decades after K2’s first summit, the hardscrabble lives of the men shouldering expeditions up to such great heights are at a crossroads.
“I love the mountains,” says 28-year-old Yasin Malick, tasked with ferrying a crate of 180 eggs for a tour group joined by AFP journalists.
“My paternal grandfather, maternal uncle, father were all in this line of work,” he explains. “Now it’s my turn.” Yet in the same breath, he pledges the tradition won’t pass to younger generations: “I will carry loads till the day I die but I will not let them carry it.”
Different worlds
Tour operators typically quote between $2,000 and $7,000 for the trip starting in Askole — a village in the Gilgit-Baltistan region where jeeps end their muddling journeys and spill trekkers sporting neck pillows and parasols, as well as more hardbred mountain-climbers.
Porters — doing the dogsbody work carting luggage, dining tents and pantries of provisions — make something like Rs30,000 to Rs40,000 ($105 to $140) each trip in the four-month summer season, less than the price of high-end hiking trousers one firm recommends clients wear.
Over the past year, the purchasing power of that meagre wage has ebbed, with inflation standing at 28 per cent in July, as Pakistan came to the cusp of default before an IMF intervention offered some paltry relief.
“Now with this job, I’m finding it difficult to pay for household necessities,” said 42-year-old Sakhawat Ali. “I don’t have a choice but to come here and work hard.” But his tone lifts irresistibly as he describes the mountains.
“They each have different colours which allows me to witness different worlds,” he says.
Porters — all male, spread from young adulthood to pensionable age — report carrying up to 35 kilograms on the 2,000-metre ascent, much crammed in blue chemical storage drums lashed to metal backpack frames.
On the odyssey to Basecamp, hikers take a sauntering pace, pausing for picnics, as porters power ahead at sunrise on spartan diets of chai and chapati after a night under plastic sheet shelters.
Mules also carry a large share of the cargo and their desiccated corpses litter the half-formed trails.
“Sometimes it’s cold, sometimes it’s raining, sometimes the weather is harsh,” said porter Khadim Hussain.
“Young age has no match,” the 65-year-old says. “I wasn’t afraid of anyone, anything — there was no fear.”
“My age is not the same now: my age has passed.”
Published in Dawn, August 12th, 2023
K2 Climbers Criticized Over Continuing Ascent After Finding Dying Porter
One of the climbers, Kristin Harila, said she continued her summit of the mountain after finding a porter who fell from a cliff and later died.
“We decided to continue forward as too many people in the bottleneck would make it more dangerous for a rescue,” she said. “Considering the amount of people that stayed behind and that had turned around, I believed Hassan would be getting all the help he could, and that he would be able to get down.”
She added that her team passed Mr. Hassan again on the way down. By then, he was dead but her team was “in no shape” to recover the body, she said.
“You need six people to carry a person down, especially in dangerous areas,” Ms. Harila said. “However, the bottleneck is so narrow that you can only fit one person in front and one behind the person being helped. In this case, it was impossible to safely carry Hassan down.”
Experienced mountaineers have complained in recent years that overcrowded mountain paths in Nepal — with too many inexperienced climbers — have contributed to avoidable deaths.
Climbing guides are also increasingly leaving the industry, driven off by the dangers of the job and a scant safety net for the families of those guides who die or who are left disabled.
In June, Gelje Sherpa and other guides rescued a Malaysian climber on Mount Everest at an elevation nearly as high as K2’s peak, abandoning their own climb and
One of the climbers, Kristin Harila, said she continued her summit of the mountain after finding a porter who fell from a cliff and later died.
Kristin Harila and her guide, Tenjin Sherpa, in Kathmandu, Nepal, this month.
Credit...Niranjan Shrestha/Associated Press
By Chris Cameron
Aug. 12, 2023Updated 5:20 p.m. ET
A Norwegian climber defended her decision to continue a record-breaking series of climbs last month after encountering an injured porter who later died during her ascent of K2, the second-highest mountain in the world.
The climber, Kristin Harila, became one of the two fastest people — along with her guide, Tenjin Sherpa — to ascend all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter mountains in three months and just under a day, surpassing what was already considered an exceptional record of six months and six days set by the Nepalese climber Nirmal Purja in 2019.
But two other climbers who were on the mountain on that day, July 27, said that Ms. Harila, her team and other climbers ignored an injured man — Muhammad Hassan, a 27-year-old father of three from Pakistan — because they wanted to reach the summit rather than abandon their climb to attempt a rescue.
Mr. Hassan fell from a particularly dangerous stretch of the climbing trail on K2 known as the bottleneck and later died.
“There was no rescue mission,” Wilhelm Steindl, an Austrian climber who provided video footage of other climbers stepping over Mr. Hassan on the narrow mountain path, said in an interview with Sky News. “Seventy mountaineers stepped over a living guy who needed big help at this moment, and they decided to keep on going to the summit.”
The authorities in Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan region, where a portion of the mountain is located, identified Mr. Hassan as a “high-altitude porter.” They said they were investigating whether “adequate efforts were made to rescue” Mr. Hassan, whom Ms. Harila said was part of another team.
The authorities said they would examine the conditions of Mr. Hassan’s climbing gear and “ascertain who authorized him to climb with equipment that might have been insufficient for such high-altitude expeditions and his level of experience.”
People frequently die summiting the tallest mountains in the world, including Mount Everest and K2. The treks are so dangerous that the bodies of fallen climbers are sometimes left behind, and some are never recovered.
Weather conditions on K2 the day of Mr. Hassan’s death were so severe that many climbers, including Mr. Steindl, turned back.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Steindl said that Mr. Hassan could have been saved if Ms. Harila and others had abandoned their climb.
“There is a double standard here,” Mr. Steindl said. “If I, or any other Westerner, had been lying there, everything would have been done to save them. Everyone would have had to turn back to bring the injured person back down to the valley.”
Ms. Harila said in a statement on her website that she and her team did everything they could to save Mr. Hassan. She added that “it is truly tragic what happened, and I feel very strongly for the family.”
Ms. Harila said she and her team spent hours trying to rescue Mr. Hassan after discovering him hanging upside down from a rope after he had fallen off the cliff.
Ms. Harila also said that Mr. Hassan seemed to be “not properly equipped” to climb the 28,251-foot-tall mountain, noting that he had no gloves, no oxygen mask and no down suit when they found him.
In Ms. Harila’s account, a group of Sherpas ahead of them told her that they were turning around, and “as we understood it that meant there was more help going to Hassan.”
Another member of Ms. Harila’s team who helped to pull Mr. Hassan back on the trail gave him his own oxygen, Ms. Harila said, and stayed with him until the team member himself began to run out of oxygen.
By Chris Cameron
Aug. 12, 2023Updated 5:20 p.m. ET
A Norwegian climber defended her decision to continue a record-breaking series of climbs last month after encountering an injured porter who later died during her ascent of K2, the second-highest mountain in the world.
The climber, Kristin Harila, became one of the two fastest people — along with her guide, Tenjin Sherpa — to ascend all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter mountains in three months and just under a day, surpassing what was already considered an exceptional record of six months and six days set by the Nepalese climber Nirmal Purja in 2019.
But two other climbers who were on the mountain on that day, July 27, said that Ms. Harila, her team and other climbers ignored an injured man — Muhammad Hassan, a 27-year-old father of three from Pakistan — because they wanted to reach the summit rather than abandon their climb to attempt a rescue.
Mr. Hassan fell from a particularly dangerous stretch of the climbing trail on K2 known as the bottleneck and later died.
“There was no rescue mission,” Wilhelm Steindl, an Austrian climber who provided video footage of other climbers stepping over Mr. Hassan on the narrow mountain path, said in an interview with Sky News. “Seventy mountaineers stepped over a living guy who needed big help at this moment, and they decided to keep on going to the summit.”
The authorities in Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan region, where a portion of the mountain is located, identified Mr. Hassan as a “high-altitude porter.” They said they were investigating whether “adequate efforts were made to rescue” Mr. Hassan, whom Ms. Harila said was part of another team.
The authorities said they would examine the conditions of Mr. Hassan’s climbing gear and “ascertain who authorized him to climb with equipment that might have been insufficient for such high-altitude expeditions and his level of experience.”
People frequently die summiting the tallest mountains in the world, including Mount Everest and K2. The treks are so dangerous that the bodies of fallen climbers are sometimes left behind, and some are never recovered.
Weather conditions on K2 the day of Mr. Hassan’s death were so severe that many climbers, including Mr. Steindl, turned back.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Steindl said that Mr. Hassan could have been saved if Ms. Harila and others had abandoned their climb.
“There is a double standard here,” Mr. Steindl said. “If I, or any other Westerner, had been lying there, everything would have been done to save them. Everyone would have had to turn back to bring the injured person back down to the valley.”
Ms. Harila said in a statement on her website that she and her team did everything they could to save Mr. Hassan. She added that “it is truly tragic what happened, and I feel very strongly for the family.”
Ms. Harila said she and her team spent hours trying to rescue Mr. Hassan after discovering him hanging upside down from a rope after he had fallen off the cliff.
Ms. Harila also said that Mr. Hassan seemed to be “not properly equipped” to climb the 28,251-foot-tall mountain, noting that he had no gloves, no oxygen mask and no down suit when they found him.
In Ms. Harila’s account, a group of Sherpas ahead of them told her that they were turning around, and “as we understood it that meant there was more help going to Hassan.”
Another member of Ms. Harila’s team who helped to pull Mr. Hassan back on the trail gave him his own oxygen, Ms. Harila said, and stayed with him until the team member himself began to run out of oxygen.
“We decided to continue forward as too many people in the bottleneck would make it more dangerous for a rescue,” she said. “Considering the amount of people that stayed behind and that had turned around, I believed Hassan would be getting all the help he could, and that he would be able to get down.”
She added that her team passed Mr. Hassan again on the way down. By then, he was dead but her team was “in no shape” to recover the body, she said.
“You need six people to carry a person down, especially in dangerous areas,” Ms. Harila said. “However, the bottleneck is so narrow that you can only fit one person in front and one behind the person being helped. In this case, it was impossible to safely carry Hassan down.”
Experienced mountaineers have complained in recent years that overcrowded mountain paths in Nepal — with too many inexperienced climbers — have contributed to avoidable deaths.
Climbing guides are also increasingly leaving the industry, driven off by the dangers of the job and a scant safety net for the families of those guides who die or who are left disabled.
In June, Gelje Sherpa and other guides rescued a Malaysian climber on Mount Everest at an elevation nearly as high as K2’s peak, abandoning their own climb and
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