[HN Gopher] A Nepali team has made the first winter ascent of K2
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A Nepali team has made the first winter ascent of K2
Author : eigenvector
Score : 92 points
Date : 2021-01-16 18:29 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.alpinist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.alpinist.com)
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| Just today we got the news here in Spain that a spanish alpinist,
| Sergi Mingote, died while descending from K2. There were multiple
| teams attempting this, then?
| remus wrote:
| I believe so. As I understand it (this is all third hand so
| take it with a pinch of salt) there are other teams who are
| waiting for another weather window to make an attempt.
| schwax wrote:
| https://www.alanarnette.com/blog/2021/01/16/winter-k2-update...
|
| > There are around 20 climbers aspiring to summit, and claim a
| winter K2 summit. Some have acclimatized to Camp 3 but most
| have only reached Camp 1. Some will end their effort based on
| today's first summit, and citing rockfall danger, others will
| still retain their motivation. We'll see what the final K2
| winter 2020/21 total is in a few weeks.
| sebmellen wrote:
| I've always wondered why we don't see sherpas holding all the
| climbing records, given how much better adapted they are to their
| environments than most other mountaineers. Maybe this is the
| beginning of a new trend! The sentiment is at least echoed in the
| article:
|
| > _In the 2015 newswire, Green quoted Dawa Gyalje Sherpa: "We are
| hoping as young climbers, to take climbing in Nepal to a new
| level. All of us have climbed much bigger mountains but always
| with foreign climbers. We want to show that we are not just
| porters on the mountain, climbing only for our livelihood, but we
| are interested in climbing because we enjoy it, too.... We are
| the young generation of Sherpa climbers but we are looking to the
| future of Nepal and Sherpas also."_
| iamaaditya wrote:
| I believe there is some form of memory bias or bias in
| reporting by the media. If you look at the record books, you
| will find that most records are held by Sherpas. For example,
| more than 70 records for Mount Everest is held my Sherpas (or
| other Nepalese climbers) [1], far more than climbers from any
| other country.
|
| Apa Sherpa, one of the most prolific Sherpas, holds many
| records [2]. Interesting fact he was Sherpa to Peter Hillary
| (Edmund's son).
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mount_Everest_records
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apa_Sherpa
| PopeDotNinja wrote:
| It's been said that history is written by the winners. I guess
| you could also say history is written by the people who pay for
| it.
| krallistic wrote:
| Its nice to see Nepal with this first winter books finally in
| the history books. They done so much for mountaineering.
| sonalr wrote:
| Somewhat related, highly recommend this documentary. It really
| shows the untold story of how hard of a life it is for a porter
| in the Everest region of Nepal. This is such a great story, and
| very well done by Nathaniel Menninger.
| https://youtu.be/MxAU4wWG2Hs
| intrepidhero wrote:
| Sherpas were on all the big western expeditions that I know of.
| Their names are just usually dropped when talking about it,
| which is a shame. I recently read Krakauer's Into Thin Air and
| appreciated that he treated the sherpas on the expedition as
| fellow humans. They figured as important as anyone else in the
| story. He was also careful when talking about past climbs to
| mention all the climbers, sherpa and otherwise.
|
| Very interesting book for me. I knew (know?) very little about
| mountaineering.
| sebmellen wrote:
| That's very nice to hear, and I'll check the book out.
|
| While on a cruise ship last July (well, 2019) I made friends
| with a Nepalese security screw and we talked about Nepal and
| their family occupations. It's very sad to hear of how
| disposably sherpas are treated on the vanity tours by
| unskilled foreign climbers. Basically the sherpas end up
| dragging along their clients and they face outsized risk on
| the way.
| strstr wrote:
| For a long time, both Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary
| evaded the question of who summitted Everest first. They
| reached the top as a team.
|
| Most of the "forgetting" seems to happen when it comes to
| communicating about larger, less notable expeditions.
| Someone wrote:
| Larger? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_British_Mount_Ev
| erest_exp...:
|
| _"The mountaineers were accompanied [...] by 362 porters,
| so that the expedition in the end amounted to over four
| hundred men, including twenty Sherpa guides from Tibet and
| Nepal, with a total weight of ten thousand pounds of
| baggage"_
|
| I don't know the details of that expedition, but typically,
| the sherpas make multiple trips up and down the mountain to
| bring the necessary material up to height, so that those
| paying can relatively comfortably acclimatize at height.
| Climbing Everest almost always is a team effort.
|
| Even if you ignore those porters , those _"twenty Sherpa
| guides from Tibet and Nepal"_ , IMO, deserve to be
| mentioned there more than Jan Morris, who didn't make it
| further up the mountain than 22,000 feet
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Morris).
|
| (and aside: ten thousand pounds of baggage seems very low
| to me. That's less than 30 pounds per porter = I guess
| that's what made it to the highest camp)
| bitL wrote:
| And yet Krakauer had no issues throwing a guy, who tried to
| save some of the members of his team, under the bus when
| Krakauer messed up, and turned a hero into a villain.
| ceocoder wrote:
| Jon Krakauer has responded to Anatoli Boukreev here[0], it
| seems as like most things in life, there is more nuance
| this than just hero villain dichotomy.
|
| [0] https://medium.com/galleys/a-postscript-to-into-thin-
| air-e23...
| ignoramous wrote:
| For K2, it is usually the Pakistani porters from Gilgit-
| Baltistan: https://www.wionews.com/south-asia/pakistani-
| porters-the-uns...
|
| > _Their names are just usually dropped when talking about
| it, which is a shame._
|
| Reminds me of Amir Mehdi's story:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amir_Mehdi#K2_(1954)
| jariel wrote:
| They may be culturally and physically acclimatized to mountains
| in every way, but not likely to the notion of
| 'mountaineering/climbing' in the romantic sense.
|
| After all it serves no purpose, requires development of new
| tech, money etc..
|
| I don't think anyone doubts they couldn't have done it long ago
| were some local ruler to have made it a priority.
|
| I wonder if they thought the original European 'explorers' to
| be completely mad.
|
| So that leaves the question: the mountains were 'right there'
| and they had innate ability, so why didn't they 'just do it',
| and have the routes all mapped out for centuries already? Is I
| think the rhetorical question that unpacks a lot of things.
| sebmellen wrote:
| That is an interesting question. I think the most obvious
| answer is that exploration is predicated on a certain level
| of technological advancement, below which it is completely
| unreasonable. If you don't have a food surplus and some
| academic establishment and governance and trade routes,
| exploration is an unreasonable vanity project. _Guns, Germs,
| and Steel_ grazes this topic.
|
| As Nepal develops further, I expect to see more of these
| sorts of headlines.
| beerandt wrote:
| Let's not dismiss nation-state exploration with having an
| overly indulgent hobby.
|
| Establishing and mapping boundaries, demonstrating military
| abilities, and even finding/protecting the trade routes you
| speak of, all required exploration on a large scale.
|
| Not to mention things like establishing trade and a
| friendly presence with locals, establishing surveillance
| posts, and my personal favorite, surveying the geoid, as a
| means to better ICBM guidance.
|
| Military always makes reason, and I suspect that might also
| be at play in Nepal.
| spanktheuser wrote:
| It's also predicated on the existence of an economy which
| provides ample leisure for some while others labor
| ceaselessly at the edges of poverty. There's a reason the
| Indian sub-continent lacked a food surplus, academic
| establishments, strong governance etc. Great Britain looted
| an estimated $45 billion from its Indian colonies during
| the 173 years of its rule.
| vijaykcm wrote:
| There was a post on it earlier:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25803599.
| PopeDotNinja wrote:
| I'm an American, and I visited Pakistan on a whim back in
| September. I was able to spend a few days in the north. I can
| only say the north of Pakistan is incredible. There's nothing
| that prepares you for seeing 8000+ meter mountains for the first
| time.
|
| There's no shortage of people offering tours, but I made my own
| plans. I rented a Toyota Hilux 4x4 for 4 days at $50/day, and
| they insisted I hire a driver because they didn't trust me to
| drive solo (which in retrospect was wise of them because of
| language barriers, road conditions, police/military checkpoints,
| etc.). The driver quoted me a rate of $3/day (not a typo). I
| drove from Islamabad to Hunza and back in 3 days (I could only
| get one day off work, lol). It was way too much driving, but the
| trip was still incredible.
|
| To make the trip extra fun, I had the worst case of food
| poisoning w/ diarrhea that I've ever had for the entire time. I
| developed that the night before I was scheduled to drive off. So
| in the morning I picked up some Imodium and baby wipes, and just
| stopped every hour or two. I somehow managed to avoid shitting in
| my pants, but I don't know how. Nearly every bathroom in
| Pakistan, which might just be a hole in the ground, has a
| handheld bidet, which is a power washer for your backside. No
| matter how messy it got, I also walked away from a pit stop with
| a fresh backside.
|
| Here's some pictures of the traveling, sans pit stops...
|
| https://photos.app.goo.gl/tZ3scbSFbPbxQCpG7
| TCS_ wrote:
| That poor driver...
|
| +1 for those pictures! Incredible scenery
| PopeDotNinja wrote:
| I gave him a really nice tip :)
| latchkey wrote:
| Sounds like an epic adventure, right before everything went
| nuts!
|
| In SE Asia, we call it a "bum gun". Cannot live without it and
| you won't use TP ever again. Easy to order off Amazon.
| ericjang wrote:
| Thank you for sharing the photos ! Some of the poses are pretty
| funny :)
| jrumbut wrote:
| Driving tours like that are an amazing way to travel. It takes
| away that feeling of needing to jam in as many things as
| possible and you can just live and take in the sights for a
| while.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| We need to start living on Mars, if only to give climbers new
| mountains to climb.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mountains_on_Mars_by_h...
| wbl wrote:
| Olympus Mons is an essy climb with life support because it
| isn't very steep.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Olympus Mons is almost the size of France and is 21 km high.
| Gentle slope but still, quite a hike.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Interesting, but how Texas turned into France has to be the
| bigger story ;)
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| that said. I'd put it on my cv.
| NickNameNick wrote:
| I think it's going to be a while before we see
|
| "First ascent of Olympus Mons without supplemental oxygen"
| Syzygies wrote:
| I met Charles Houston, leader of the first two American
| expeditions on K2. He approached me to have me explain the
| mathematics of card shuffling, and I traded an hour listening to
| him explain the medicine of altitude sickness (which helped me
| later on some modest climbs).
|
| He was on the wrong end of "The Belay" on the second climb, but
| survived.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Snead_Houston
| Ayesh wrote:
| I follow @nimsdai on Instagram, he took the initiative for this.
| Very nice content if you like that sort of content.
|
| He (and I'm sure the others are too) are some real-life super
| humans!
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(page generated 2021-01-16 23:00 UTC)