Pakistani climbers recover porter’s body a year after K2 summit
A year after a Pakistani porter died during a record-breaking ascent on K2, a mountaineering federation revealed Tuesday that climbers discovered his body. After falling from the most dangerous pass during a night climb, Muhammad Hassan Shigri was left dangling upside down on a rope until fellow climbers could pull him up and revive him.
He died on the “Bottleneck” pass as dozens of climbers in different teams headed to the top.
Norwegian record-breaker Kristin Harila and her Nepali guide Tenjin “Lama” Sherpa became the fastest to summit the world’s 14 tallest mountains that night. “The rescue team made history and turned the impossible into possible,” Pakistan Alpine Club Secretary Karrar Haidri told AFP of Shigri’s body recovery last Wednesday. A”unprecedented rescue, the first of its kind on K2″ Five climbers led by Pakistani high-altitude mountaineer Naila Kiani, contacted by Shigri’s family and supported by the Pakistan Army, accomplished the retrieval.
Shigri was buried by his family. We applaud Naila Kiani and the porters for their excellent work. “The family wanted the body back,” his cousin Aslam Naz Shigri told AFP by phone. Climbers were chastised for stepping over Shigri’s body, but Harila stated her team “did everything we could for him”. The Gilgit and Baltistan provincial government’s tourist agency discovered that Shigri was unprepared and an unskilled high-altitude porter, and that some climbers tried to save him but were too late.
Porters, called sherpas in the Himalayas, are trained mountaineering logistics experts. Even on the most regular K2 routes, rescue missions are high-risk, and bodies might be left behind for months or years until the weather allows for foot recovery. K2, on the Pakistan-China border at 8,611 metres (28,251 ft), is 238 metres shorter than Everest but more difficult. Five of the world’s 14 8,000-meter mountains are in Pakistan. In separate instances on Pakistani mountains this summer, four Western climbers died. In July, French mountaineer Benjamin Vedrines set a new record for quickest K2 ascent without bottled oxygen in 10 hours, 59 minutes, and 59 seconds.
