Pakistan's Ali Sadpara: The Climber Who Never Came Back From K2

 

Mohammad Ali Sadpara will be remembered as a versatile climber by the international community of mountaineers, and a hero in his native Pakistan.

He is the only Pakistani to have climbed eight of the world's 14 highest mountains, and he made the first ever winter ascent of the world's ninth highest peak, Nanga Parbat.

On Friday 5 February he went missing along with two others - Iceland's John Snorri and Chile's Juan Pablo Mohr - while trying to climb K2, the world's second highest peak at 8,611m (28,251 ft) and also reputedly the deadliest.

His son Sajid was also a member of the team and the idea was for the father-and-son duo to summit K2 without oxygen, a feat never done before in winter. But Sajid had to turn back from a spot called the Bottleneck - also known as the "death zone", some 300 metres from the top - after he felt sick.

He has since helped military-led rescue teams scour the mountain for signs of his father and the other two men - but there has been no trace of any of them. The military want to resume the search, weather permitting, using a high-altitude C-130 aircraft and infrared technology to spot possible shelters on the peak.

But Sajid doesn't hold out much hope.

"I'm thankful to everyone organising a search, but it's unlikely that they are alive by now. So the search should be to recover their bodies," he said earlier this week.

- bbc.com