Why K2 Brings Out the Best and Worst in Those Who Climb It

By Simon Worrall, National Geographic :
K2 is "a savage mountain that tries to murder you," as indicated by American climber George Bell. Transcending the Karakoram Range along the Pakistan-China fringe and battered by appalling climate, this pyramid-formed mountain has dependably been a definitive test for the world's best mountain climbers—and the memorial park of a considerable lot of their desire. In 2008, in the most noticeably bad mischance in its history, 11 climbers died attempting to climb K2.

While making a narrative for the BBC, Mick Conefrey was sufficiently fortunate to meet some of the pioneers who endeavored to overcome the mountain, first summited by Italian Ardito Desio's group in 1954. Conefrey's book, The Ghosts of K2: The Epic Saga of the First Ascent, draws on those meetings, and in addition recently discharged journals and letters, to take us inside the fixations, fights, and demonstrations of bravery that K2 motivates in the individuals who set out to climb it.
Talking from his home in London, Conefrey clarifies why K2 draws out the best and most exceedingly awful in climbers, what climber Charles Houston implied by the expression "The Brotherhood of the Rope," and how the principal man to endeavor K2 wound up on the collection front of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.