K2 2019 Summer Season Coverage – Avi on K2 Stalls Ropes, No Injuries. More Broad Peak Summits

K2 from camp 4 in 2014 by Alan Arnette

A small avalanche on K2 has delayed the rope fixing team by a couple of day but no injuries were reported. he Broad Peak summit list from Kobler was released. Look for K2 summits to slip to Friday though the weekend f the weather holds.

Big Picture

A small avalanche occurred near the Bottleneck that will delay progress a day or so. The major downside is that it might bunch too many teams together on their oust after working so hard to spread everyone out. This from Dawa Sherpa of Seven Summits Treks whose Sherpas are fixing the ripe from C4 to the summit

Bit change on schedule, the team of Seven Summit Treks is now planning to make summit push on 18th July 2019, as all climbing members who were with Seven Summit Treks are at C4 today.

Today small avalanche hit the Bottle Neck and our 5 Sherpas who were leading on fixing ropes were swept almost 50m down, minor injured but all are safe now at Camp 4. Tomorrow again the fixing team will progress toward summit and all climbing members will follow to the summit on 18th July.

The teams on their summit push now include:

Česen

Adrian BallingerCarla Perez and Ecuadoran Topo Mena are on their last acclimatization rotation but will take the Česen until it meters with the Abruzzi.

Abruzzi:

Nirmal Purja Purja Purja and team are on GI &II

Broad Peak – Summits

I got a nice update from Billi Bierling with the Kobler & Partner team on their BP summit:

Here is the list of the people who summited Broad Peak with Kobler & Partner on 14 July 2019. We all summited between 9.30am and 12noon. Kobler & Partner team had 100% success with this. The weather was perfect. There was hardly any wind and the route was pretty busy that night – not sure how many people summited that day but there was a long line of head torches. Our team headed out from C3 (6,950m) at 7pm on 13 July and most of us took 24 hours to return back to C3.

It was a great success and even though Broad Peak is more a LOOOONG PEAK and i have never had such a long summit day it was a great achievement for all of us. I know that many people say that the 12th highest peak in the world is one of the easier ones, but I would dispute that. The distances, especially on summit day (almost 1,100m) are huge.
Thanks for publishing the names:
Billi Bierling (German/Swiss) (no supplemental oxygen)
Lydia Bradey (NZ)
Dean Staples (NZ)
Andreas Neuschmid (Austrian) (supplemental oxygen)
Stefan Sieveking (German)
Jürgen Diez (German) (no supplemental oxygen)
Ket Hazledine (NZ)
Dominika Dillier Degelo Switzerland)
Christoph Miesch (Switzerland) (only emergency oxygen on descent)
Dani Arnold (Switzerland) (no supplemental oxygen)
Carolin Hess (German) (no supplemental oxygen)
Maksim Cherkasov (Russia) (no supplemental oxygen)
Mauricio Fernandez Serna (Mexico)
Norbert Ludwig (Germany)
Lukas Marganski (Poland)
Jonas Salzmann (Switzerland) (no supplemental oxygen)
Euan Wilson (NZ) no supplemental oxygen
Lale Sherpa
Karma Sherpa (no supplemental oxygen)
plus five Pakistani high altitude porters

GI &II – More Planned

Matthew Randall & Matt Gorbett are on their summit push hoping to ski down – No updates, meanwhile other have sumitted during this time I believe.. Denis Urubko and Pipi Cardell are on a new route on GII. The most recent update fro today.

The “hunting” has officially begun. Marco and Ali, two polish mountaineers, sergi mingote with his porter, Denis during acclimation for his goal, have recently reached C2 (6.400 M) of Gasherbrum 2.
The Picture of the photo refers to the c2 and was taken in the previous rotation. Tomorrow they focus on c3 and in the evening they will start their attempt to
Update:
The “hunt” has officially begun. Marco and Ali, two Polish mountaineers, Sergi Mingote with his porter, Denis in the acclimatization phase for his goal, have recently reached C2 (6,400 m) of Gasherbrum 2.
Tomorrow they will point to C3 and in the evening they will start their summit attempt.

Also, Marco Confortola with Ali Durani have competed two rotations and are back at base camp.

And according to a July 9 post by Alex Gavin, he and Don Bowie are on the move GII but not ready to summit as there are not using Os:

Climb On!
Alan
Memories are Everything

Share this post:

5 thoughts on “K2 2019 Summer Season Coverage – Avi on K2 Stalls Ropes, No Injuries. More Broad Peak Summits

  1. The last news are that the K2 summits are postponed/abandoned because of neck deep snow above Bottleneck.

    1. The Madison Mountaineering site confirms the group have descended to base camp and it appears they’ll be going home soon due to heavy snow and risk of avalanches close to the summit. Too bad but probably the wise choice.

      1. Fredrik Sträng has posted on Facebook. He’s disappointed having to abandon third(?) year in a row, especially given the great weather…

  2. Wow. I guess getting swept 50 meters by an avalanche isn’t enough to scare people. I remember Adrian’s photos of avalanches and their last scramble at 2am to get down.

    I hope for the best.

Comments are closed.