ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN - IN THE world of big mountain climbing, there are two types of ultimate challenge.
The first is Everest, the world's highest mountain and as such a must for any Himalayan peak bagger, assuming they can also put up with the crowds of big-spending adventure tourists, piles of garbage and queues at the summit.
The other is K2, an altogether different proposition where the odds of getting to the top and making it down alive are roughly the same as surviving a game of Russian roulette.
Although just a couple of hundred metres lower than its bigger brother, K2 is considered by far the harder peak to summit and descend safely.
An almost perfect pyramid visible hundreds of kilometres away, the 8,611 metre peak dominates the Karakorum range, towering over northern Pakistan and the Takalamakan desert of China's far west.
It takes a hard two weeks' walk along the Baltoro glacier, almost devoid of life and home to some of the world's most spectacular rock formations, to even get to the parched base camp.
Unlike Everest, there is no straightforward route up the mountain - even the standard southeast ridge ascent via the Abruzzi Spur was described by the late Polish climbing legend Jerzy Kukuczka as the 'least suicidal way up'.
The further up the climber gets into the 'death zone' - or an altitude where the human body starts to die from lack of oxygen - the more technical the climbing becomes.
Statistically, the mountain is five times more dangerous than Everest - which by comparison is viewed by hardened climbers as more of a high-altitude plod, at least by its standard route.
Between its first ascent in 1954 and the 2007, there were 284 successful ascents of K2 and 66 fatalities.
In the same period, Everest was climbed 3,681 times with 210 deaths.
'You can be the best mountaineer in the world but with K2 there's a lot of luck involved. You have to be mentally prepared not to come back,' legendary French mountaineer Pierre Beghin, who scaled the peak in 1991, said before his death on another mountain a year later.
Climbing K2, he said at the time, was like 'doing the Grandes Jorasses' - a technical icy, rocky peak in the Mont Blanc massif of France - 'but ten times over with only half a lung'.
Apart from its steep slopes of sheet ice and rock - where a slight slip can send a climber sliding several vertical kilometres - there is also the added risk of changing weather.
Meteorological conditions in the Karakorum range are notoriously unpredictable, and several seasons have seen frustrated teams never get beyond base camp because of impossible weather.
Once high on the peak, there is also the risk of a sudden burst of jet stream winds that can rip a mountaineer from an exposed ridge and into a free fall to the glacier below.
K2's most deadly year came in 1986 when 13 lives were lost.
Over the years it has claimed the lives of some of the world's most accomplished mountaineers, including Britain's Nicholas Estcourt, Alan Rouse, Julie Tullis and Alison Hargreaves, American Rob Slater and France's Lilliane and Maurice Barrard.
Still, each year a few dozen of the world's best climbers - and none of the corporate types who throng Everest - take the challenge.
'K2 is a mountaineer's mountain,' the late Jean-Christophe Lafaille of France, another K2 summiteer, once said. 'It pushes you to the absolute limit, mentally and physically.' -- AFP
