IF THE CRITERION you use to measure the majesty of mountains is simple math, then the greatest peak on earth is Everest; at 29,035 feet, it surpasses K2 by 785 feet. If popularity is the gauge, the answer seems equally obvious: More than 1,600 people have been to the top of Everest, claiming all manner of "firsts," including but by no means limited to: the first one-legged summiter, the first one-armed summiter, the first person to sleep on the summit, the first live TV broadcast from the summit, the first person to make five summits in five consecutive years, and the first husband-andwife team to fling themselves off the summit in a tandem paraglider. This year, another 262 climbers have reached the highest point on the planet as of press time. And in 2008, the Chinese intend to carry the Olympic torch to the top on their way to Beijing.
By comparison, in the last 50 years, only 196 climbers have made it to the top of K2. This past summer, another 55 gave it a shot as six expeditions—from Kazakhstan, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic, plus one international group —converged on the south side of the mountain. Among them were some of the strongest mountaineers in the world, including the Czech climbers Radek Jaros and Martin Minarik, as well as Segarra and Ponce de Leon, who returned for another try. None of them reached the summit.
It was the second summitless year in a row, a statistic that, at least by the standards of Everest-level success, seemed to confirm K2's stature as the lesser giant. But among professional mountaineers who tackle the world's most formidable peaks, things look a bit different.
"People are drawn to Everest because everyone can understand the idea of 'the highest mountain on earth,' " says Greg Child, an Australian mountaineer and author who has summited both Everest and K2. "Christ, my grandmother can understand that. Unless you're on the inside of climbing, however, it's almost impossible to fathom an obsession with the second-highest. But K2 just has something about it. Partly it's the shape and beauty and symmetry of the thing. And partly it's the infamy—the stories of what's happened to people who've tried it: how fucked up they've become and how many have died. K2 is simply not an amateur's mountain."
K2's difficulties begin with its remoteness, reflected by the fact that the Balti hill people don't even have a name for the mountain. It was dubbed K2—K for Karakoram and 2 for the second peak in the range to be identified—by the British mapmaker T.G. Montgomerie in 1856. "Just the bare bones of a name," wrote the Italian alpinist Fosco Maraini in his 1959 book Karakoram: The Ascent of Gasherbrum IV. "All rock and ice and storm and abyss. It makes no attempt to sound human."
There are only two ways to reach K2. To get to the north side, which straddles the border between China and Pakistan, you first must fly to Islamabad, then drive 500 miles northeast to Kashgar, in China's Xinjiang province, then travel by jeep across the southern fringe of the Taklimakan Desert, then transfer to camels and caravan over the brown, broken wastes of the Shaksgam Valley. The more "accessible" southern approach requires slogging 40 roadless miles up the Baltoro Glacier in northern Pakistan.