Video: Vanessa O’Brien Tells Us Why Climbing K2 is Harder Than Everest

If you want to know the differences between climbing K2 and Everest, why not ask someone who has done both? In this video, alpinist Vanessa O’Brien breaks the two mountains down for us and tells us exactly why climbing K2 is so much harder.

As it turns out, the challenges for climbing the world’s second highest peak start with just trekking to Base Camp, which is much more challenging than making the walk to EBC. But from there, things only get more difficult as you’ll see in the clip above.

As the more than 100+ climbers head up for a summit push on K2 this week, keep these things in mind. K2 is getting more commercialized, but it hasn’t been completely tamed yet.

Kraig Becker