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Ask a room full of climbers which mountain scares them most, and plenty won't say Everest — they'll say K2. Rising 8,611 meters (28,251 feet) in Pakistan's Karakoram range, it is the second-highest peak on Earth, just 238 meters short of Everest's summit. But altitude alone doesn't explain the mountain's reputation. K2 has one of the steepest, most technical profiles of any 8,000-meter peak, and historically, for roughly every four climbers who have reached its summit, one has died trying. Climbers simply call it the Savage Mountain.
Unlike almost every other major peak, K2 never picked up a lasting local name before 19th-century British surveyors got to it first. The "K" stands for Karakoram, and it was simply the second peak the Great Trigonometrical Survey measured in the range — a placeholder label that was never meant to last. Somehow it did, and a filing code from a 19th-century survey team outlasted every attempt at something more poetic.
K2's remoteness kept it largely unexplored by Western mountaineers until 1902, when a British-Swiss expedition that included the famously eccentric Aleister Crowley made the first real attempt on the mountain — and failed, as everyone else would for the next half-century.
It wasn't until 1954 that an Italian expedition led by Ardito Desio finally put two climbers, Lino Lacedelli and Achille Compagnoni, on the summit. Their success came only after a supporting climber, Mario Puchoz, died of pneumonia on the mountain — an early, grim preview of the toll K2 would keep taking on the climbers who followed.
Every other mountain above 8,000 meters had been climbed in winter conditions by 2020 — except K2. That changed in January 2021, when a team of ten Nepali climbers, led by Nirmal Purja and Mingma Gyalje Sherpa, reached the summit together, closing out one of mountaineering's longest-standing challenges.
Very few visitors ever attempt the summit itself — for trekkers, the real draw is the approach to K2 Base Camp via Concordia, a natural amphitheater where four of the world's fourteen 8,000-meter peaks (K2, Broad Peak, and both Gasherbrums) come into view together. Guides and climbers have nicknamed it the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, and it's hard to argue with them once you're standing there.
K2 sits deep in the Karakoram range, one of the most heavily glaciated regions on Earth outside the polar circles. The approach follows the Baltoro Glacier, a river of ice more than 60 kilometers long, flanked the entire way by jagged granite spires and hanging seracs.
There's no easy way to see K2 up close. The trek to Base Camp starts in Askole, the last village with road access, and takes roughly seven to ten days on foot each way — no roads, no huts, no shortcuts. Most groups go between late June and early September, the only real window before the high passes close with snow.