ISLAMABAD: The Alpine Club of Pakistan said on Tuesday a 19-year-old Pakistani had become the youngest person in the world to scale K2, the world’s second tallest peak.
In January this year, a team of climbers from Nepal become the first mountaineers in history to successfully complete a winter attempt on the summit of K2. Located on the Pakistan China border, K2 was the only mountain over 8,000 meters that had not been summitted in the winter.
“Good News! Received the confirmation from K2 Base Camp,” Karrar Haidri, the secretary of the Alpine Club, said in a statement. “That Shehroze Kashif has summited K2 8611-M.”
It’s a “new world record,” Haidri said: “Youngest In The World to stand on top of K2 8611-M at the age of 19 years.”
First climbed in 1954 by Italian Achille Compagnoni, K2 is notorious for its sleep slopes and high winds, and in winter its surface becomes slick ice.
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.
In February this year, during the winter ascent of K2, Pakistan’s famed climber Muhammad Ali Sadpara, 45, John Snorri, 47, of Iceland, and Juan Pablo Mohr, 33, of Chile, went missing 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 (28,251 ft) high K2.
On Monday, the Alpine Club said the bodies of the three climbers had been found.
“The dead bodies of Muhammad Ali Sadpara, John Snorri, Juan Pablo Mohr found near the bottleneck of K2 8611-M,” Haidri said in a statement. “It is very difficult to bring the dead bodies down from the high altitude. Army Aviation is helping in this regard.”
Snorri’s body will be moved to Iceland as requested by his wife, Haidri said. The mother and sister of Mohr had already decided to bring back the body to their country, he added.