Anatoli Boukreev - K2

K2

In 1993, Boukreev reached the summit of K2 via the Abruzzi Spur, where he shared the summit with two other men from his team, Peter Metzger and Andy Locke. K2 is the second-highest mountain on Earth after Mount Everest.

With a peak elevation of 8,611 metres (28,251 ft), K2 is part of the Karakoram range and is located on the border between Pakistan and the China. K2 is also referred to as the "Savage Mountain" — notable for its steep pyramidal relief, dropping quickly in almost all directions, and the inherent danger in climbing it.

When Boukreev and the other two climbers began their descent just after sundown, another climber from their team, Reinmar Joswig, was ascending and near the peak. Boukreev would later write that he did not feel the emotions of victory in that moment on top of K2's peak because he was physically and emotionally spent. Boukreev found himself in a dangerous position. He had expended too much energy placing fixed lines along a narrow, steep portion earlier that day. But since the team wanted to push on to the summit that same afternoon, rather than return to their tents to sleep and make a summit bid the next morning, Boukreev acquiesced. Boukreev would later write:

During my years of training as a ski racer, and then as a mountaineer, I had learned how to wring out the last of my energy for a finish. But this is dangerous in mountaineering, because the summit is not the finish of your competition with a great mountain. To survive you must be able to get down from the forbidden zone.

The danger facing Boukreev on K2 is that the summit felt like the finish line. He would later write that he felt like a "squeezed lemon", and didn't have anything left for the descent. Relying heavily on intuition and his previous mountaineering experiences, Boukreev slowly made his way down the steep rock and ice of the mountain. A crampon kept coming off of his boot, and another moment he had to use his ice axe to arrest falling and sliding into the abyss. Eventually he made his way to the tents at the highest elevation camp. His German teammates Peter Metzger and Reinmar Joswig never appeared however, and had each fallen to their deaths somewhere along the route.