Men’s Journal Magazine has become the latest to weigh in on the K2 tragedy from the beginning of August. In their latest issue they published a story entitled The Killing Peak that takes another look at the events that occurred on the mountain that lead to 11 deaths.
Much of what is revealed in this article comes from interviewing Wilco Van Rooijen and Marco Confortola, two of the survivors. The tale is a harrowing one, almost from the beginning, as the climbers go from enjoying a beautiful sunset on the mountain, to fighting for their lives not long afterwards. The rest of the story is about their harrowing descent and the aftermath of their climb.
The article does a good job of explaining the situation and the lure of K2 for mountaineers. They discuss how dangerous it is in reference to Everest, with the usual statistics of how relatively few summits there have been in proportion to the number of deaths.
For the most part, the story doesn’t break a lot of new ground, although it does continue the trend we’ve seen in recent articles to fill in some of the details that have been missing in the story before this.
The inevitable comparisons to Everest 1996 are also made, although the situations seem increasingly difficult to connect. Aside from the staggering number of deaths in both events, there seems to be little else they have in common.
That said, this is still a good read. It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly 2 months already since the horrible news first broke. It seems like it’s been much less than that to me, and yet with that passage of time, we’ve been able to get articles like this one that help to fill in the gaps.
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