1. K2 is the World’s 2nd Highest Mountain at 8,611m (28,251ft) after the Mount Everest at 8,848m (29,029ft) which tallest mountain in the world by 237m (778ft).
2. There are only 14 mountains that reach 8000m (26,247ft) or above and K2 is one of them.
3. K2 got its name when in 1856 Thomas George Montgomerie – a British officer working for the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India – spotted two prominent peaks and named them K1 and K2. ‘K’ standing for Karakoram. K2 appeared not to have a local name and stuck. While K1 has a name in local language and is called Masherbrum.
4. K2 is also called Mount Godwin-Austen in honour of Henry Godwin-Austen, an early explorer of the area. The Royal Geographical Society rejected the name but it was still used. Local name used is Chogori, derived from two Balti words, chhogo (big) and ri (mountain).
5. George Bell called it the Savage Mountain after his expedition in 1953. Messner called it ‘The Mountain’s Mounatin’
6. No one has yet summited K2 in winters. It remains the only eight-thousander to have never been climbed in winter.
7. One in four or five K2 summiteers die on the mountain. This is a summit-to-death rate of around 22%. On Everest, this rate is estimated to be 3%. Annapurna is the only eight-thousander with a higher death rate.
8. The first serious attempt to climb K2 was undertaken in 1902 by an Anglo-Swiss expedition. They spent 68 days on K2 and reached a maximum altitude of 6,525m (21,407ft).
9. The first summit of K2 was on 31st July 1954 by Italians Lino Lacedelli and Achille Compagnoni. The climb later become controversial with accussation from team members.
10. It was 23 years until K2 was summited for a second time. In 1977, a Japan-Pakistan joint expedition summited.
11. Ashraf Aman, the first Pakistani to climb K2. He was part of the second team to successfully summit K2
12. Less then 500 people have ever reached the K2 summit.
13. K2 can be reached from China but it is usually climbed from the Pakistan side where the mountain is located. The base camp is at 5,150m (16,896ft).
14. The first woman to summit K2 was Polish climber Wanda Rutkiewicz on 23rd June 1986.
15. The last 611m stretch of the mountain is known as ‘the death zone’. Above 8,000m, the air is so thin it is insufficient to sustain human life for long without supplementary oxygen.
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