SKARDU: Sajid Ali Sadpara, the son of Pakistan’s iconic high-altitude mountaineer Muhammad Ali Sadpara, left Skardu, Gilgit Baltistan, on Sunday to summit the K2 mountain and find the remains of his father who went missing while attempting to scale the world’s most dangerous peak in winter.
Sadpara, Iceland’s John Snorri and Chile’s Juan Pablo Mohr were last sighted on Feb. 5, at around 10 a.m., at what is considered the most difficult part of the climb: the Bottleneck, a steep and narrow gully just 300 meters shy of the 8,611-meter-high K2.
On Feb. 18, Sajid announced the end of a rescue operation for them saying that his father was “no more.”
Sajid’s four-member expedition will try to find out what happened to the climbers.
“This expedition has its own significance as the main objective is to get any clue or evidence as to what happened to them,” expedition organizer Asghar Ali Porik, head of the Pakistan Association of Tour Operators, told Arab News on Saturday evening as all preparations for the summit were finalized.
Sajid confirmed in a tweet on Friday that he would be accompanied by filmmaker Elia Saikaly.
“Elia Saikaly is making a film on the lives of Muhammad Ali Sadpara, John Snorri and Sajid Ali Sadpara,” Porik said.
In a press conference on Thursday, Sajid said it would take his team some 40 days to climb the world’s second-tallest mountain.
“We will shoot a documentary on the lives of my father and John Snorri during this mission,” he told reporters at the Islamabad Press Club. “I know my father is not alive anymore, but I want to go to K2 and find out what happened to him.”
Nestled along the China-Pakistan border, K2 is the world’s second highest peak and its most deadly mountain, with immense skill required to charter its steep slopes, high winds, slick ice and ever-changing weather conditions. Of the 367 people that had completed its ascent by 2018, 86 had died. The Pakistani military is regularly called in to rescue climbers using helicopters, but the weather often makes that difficult.
Earlier in January, a team of 10 Nepali climbers made history by becoming the first to ever scale K2 in winter. Sadpara and his expedition members were making their second attempt at climbing K2 this winter in a season that had already seen three other climbers die in the area.
