Sport Reinhold Messner on the K2 accident
“Alpinism no longer takes place here, but tourism”
Status: 12:24 p.m. | Reading time: 4 minutes
“Here egoism has triumphed and empathy has died”
After the circumstances of the death of mountain porter Mohammed Hassan became known on K2, criticism increased because of the failure to provide assistance. “If an accident happened earlier, everyone broke off and tried to come to the rescue,” says mountaineering legend Reinhold Messner in the WELT interview.
Mountaineers climb in rows over a dying girder just before the summit of K2. Could his life have been saved? Quite possible, says an expert. Mountaineering legend Reinhold Messner laments a decline in morals.
A Nepalese and a Norwegian climbed all 14 eight-thousanders in record time. It took them 92 days, according to a spokeswoman for the Guinness Book of Records (Guinness World Records). Tenjen Lama Sherpa and Kristin Harila set the record on July 27th. Most recently they were on the eight-thousander K2 in Pakistan. On the day of their triumph, a Pakistani mountain porter had an accident there and died. Criticism increased because of possible failure to provide assistance.
“It’s hard not to blame yourself in situations like this,” said the Norwegian in an interview with WELT AM SONNTAG, in which she describes the drama in detail and reports of death threats: “I also feel angry when I see how many people are now blaming others for this tragic accident. It was nobody’s fault. And you can’t comment on something like that if you don’t understand the situation on the ground. And sending out death threats is never okay.”
Read the detailed interview with Kristin Harila here:
The Pakistani mountain porter Mohammed Hassan fell on K2 and finally died at an altitude of about 8200 meters. His death sparked an outcry after videos emerged showing him alive at the scene. Hassan was the first fatality on K2 this season, according to the tourist board in the northern province of Gilgit-Baltistan.
Climbers die again and again on the Himalayan mountains. The 8611 meter high K2 in Pakistan is the second highest mountain on earth and is considered to be far more challenging than Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world. Reasons include the steep route and the risk of avalanches. Only 300 people have climbed the K2 so far.
“Rescue at 8000 meters and above is absolutely possible”
The extreme mountaineer Lukas Furtenbach, who himself offers expeditions to the K2 with his company, told the ORF that it had never happened on the second highest mountain in the world that mountaineers had to climb over corpses. The situation is different on the highest mountain on earth, Mount Everest. There you “actually always pass the corpses of deceased mountaineers, they are already cleared out of the way so that you don’t have to climb over them.”
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The big difference to the current case is that the carrier was still alive. Furtenbach believes that he could have been saved. “Rescuing people who have had an accident at 8,000 meters and above is absolutely possible nowadays and is also done regularly,” said the mountaineer. The man should have been brought to around 7,000 meters, from where he could fly out with a helicopter.
Climbers ignore dying porters
As dozens of alpinists scale K2, a Pakistani porter lies dying. Instead of doing everything to save the man, the climbers simply ignore him. Now there is a storm of indignation – and a Norwegian world record holder is being criticized.
Probably the most famous mountaineer in the world also commented on the case. Reinhold Messner said to WELT: “Here egoism triumphed and empathy died. If an accident happened in the past, everyone broke off and tried to come to the rescue.” One reason for this is “that there is no longer alpinism on the big mountains, but tourism”. Messner continues: “The factual reports are worse than anything I feared. There are far too many inexperienced people on this mountain. A mountain that you can now book in a travel agency.”
Sharp criticism of Harila’s record
Even apart from the drama on K2, the performance of the Norwegian Harila in the mountaineering scene is controversial. For example, there was criticism that she did not set the record without but with bottled oxygen, and that there was a great deal of logistical effort – for example with approaches to the base camp by helicopter. It was also criticized that the mountaineer was moving on routes that were already known, as reported by the website “Alpin.de”. The first and fastest person to climb all 14 eight-thousanders without oxygen bottles was the American Ed Viesturs, according to Guinness World Records. He would have made the ascents between 1989 and 2005.
Pakistani porters before the summit of K2
Credit: AFP/JOE STENSON
“Kristin Harila has achieved what I actually thought was impossible in the last few weeks,” said Billi Bierling, head of the “Himalayan Database” chronicle, which records all ascents of the expedition mountains, according to “Alpin.de”. “The way Kristin and her Sherpas climb the high mountains no longer has anything to do with alpinism or the ethics of the classic mountaineering style – but it fits into our time.”
The German mountaineer Ralf Dujmovits was also critical: “Unfortunately, under the flimsy guise of ‘inspiring women and demonstrating that they are just as strong as men’, Kristin is trying to perform a feat that is absurd and that very few – due to a lack of knowledge about correlations relevant to height – to be able to classify them correctly.”
