It’s two hours after midnight. The extreme mountaineer Kristin Harila is trudging through the death zone on K2, the second tallest mountain in the world, following the beam of her headlamp.
To her left, the mountainside plunges almost vertically, hundreds of meters into the depths. Above her on the right is an enormous hanging glacier, known as a serac, groaning and cracking menacingly in the freezing cold.
She is only about 400 meters from the top. One final steep ascent and Harila will have reached her goal.
The Norwegian woman is aiming to complete a staggering, record-breaking project. Within just three months, she has climbed all of the highest mountains in the Himalaya and Karakorum. When she reaches the peak of K2, Harila will have summitted all 14 8,000-meter peaks on the planet, faster than anyone ever before.
Titelfotos: Florian Gaertner / DER SPIEGEL; Guglielmo Mangiapane / REUTERS
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 20/2025 (May 10th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL.
Chunks of ice are continually plunging down from the serac above, which is why Harila and her guide, Tenjen Lama Sherpa, are trying to get through the passage, known as the Bottleneck, as quickly as possible.
But suddenly, their path is blocked. In a narrow traverse, the track up the mountain has collapsed. Harila, as she recounts, looks down into the abyss, and freezes. A man is hanging there from a rope. He is upside down.
His legs are apparently injured. He lost his backpack in the fall and he is also no longer wearing gloves – at minus 20 degrees Celsius in the thin air of the death zone, at an altitude of 8,200 meters.
The man, a Pakistani expedition helper, is named Muhammad Hassan. He was part of a team of Sherpas that climbed up K2 to set fixed rope for the climbers attempting to make it to the summit on this day.
Harila stands motionless in the traverse. She can hear Hassan moaning in pain. And she has to make a decision. Between the man hanging there on the rope, a man she doesn’t know and who isn’t part of her team. Or the summit.
K2, with an altitude of 8,611 meters, lies in the Karakorum mountains in northeastern Pakistan on the border with China. It is revered by mountaineers – and feared. Since it was first climbed in 1954, 96 people have died on its slopes. Swept away by avalanches, killed by falling rocks in camps high on the mountain or frozen to death during the ascent. There have been falls in which entire rope teams have been wiped out.
Still, a steady stream of adventurers attempt the climb every year. No other 8,000-er has as much to offer mountain climbers as K2. Those who conquer the summit pyramid earn no small amount of respect in the world of alpinists.
In July 2023, tents belonging to 12 expedition organizers are set up at K2 base camp on the Godwin Austen Glacier. Some 200 climbers have booked the climb, more than ever before.
The women and men are from Europe, the U.S., Asia and South America, and they have each paid up to $70,000 for the tour. Among them are businesspeople who have never before set foot on an 8,000-meter mountain, professional mountaineers like Harila, a multimillionaire from China and a teenager from Nepal.
A high camp on the shoulders of K2.
Extreme mountaineer Kristin Harila climbed all 14 of the world's 8,000-meter peaks in just 92 days.
Base camp lies at an altitude of 5,150 meters, a provisional campsite at the end of the world, including field kitchens, lounge tents with internet access and even a bar serving beer.
July 2023 sees an unseasonable amount of snowfall up on the mountain. Sherpas and high-altitude porters climb up time and again to prepare the route and install fixed ropes for the clients.
The guests acclimatize to the altitude with short day hikes, getting ready for their ascents. After each one of these trips, young mountaineer-influencers report back to their followers, relating just how exciting it is to be deep in the Karakorum.
Kristin Harila arrives at base camp at the end of July. July 23 saw her standing on the 13th peak of her quest, the 8,051-meter tall Broad Peak, a neighbor of K2. She takes a short walk through the camp and then vanishes into her tent to gather the strength she will need for her last big performance.
Harila is from a town in northeastern Norway where the sun never climbs above the horizon in the winter and temperatures sometimes plunge to minus 20 degrees Celsius. In her youth, she was a successful cross-country skier and even qualified for the national team. After her sporting career came to an end, she worked as a manager in a number of different companies.
In 2015, she climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in Kenya and discovered her passion for high-altitude mountaineering. Four years later, she was ascending peaks in Nepal and the Andes. In 2022, she summited Mt. Everest for the first time. By then, she had begun approaching mountaineering like a competitive sport.
During one of her expeditions, she came up with the idea of trying to set a new record. She sold her apartment, started looking for sponsors and found an expedition organizer, Seven Summit Treks in Nepal, to organize her race through the death zone.
She got started in April 2023, and by the middle of July, she had managed to climb 13 of the 14 8,000-ers by the middle of July. Many in the mountaineering community were astonished by Harila’s courage, stamina and tenacity. But there were critics as well, because of the huge amount of logistical support she received, the number of oxygen bottles she went through and the fact that she sometimes flew by helicopter from one mountain to the next.
Here on K2, Harila is accompanied by Tenjen Lama Sherpa and other Sherpas, experienced mountaineers who, taken together, have climbed a number of 8,000-meter peaks. The team also includes weather experts, a cook, high-altitude porters, doctors and a cameraman.
K2 in the Karakorum is considered one of the most difficult of the world's 14 8,000-meter peaks to summit.
Kristin Harila with other climbers on the peak of Shishapangma in April 2023.
The men immediately set about making preparations for summit day. They have to hurry. According to the weather report, July 27 and 28 will see promising conditions. After that, a storm is expected to roll in.
But the fixed rope for the mountaineers to clip into during the ascent hasn’t yet been set from Camp 3, at an altitude of 7,350 meters, to the summit.
A team of Sherpas and high-altitude porter are assigned to take care of the job. All of the large expeditions make men available for the rope-fixing team.
Muhammad Hassan, who will later be fighting for his life in the death zone, is chosen by his expedition for the job. His task is to carry rope for the Sherpas.
There is a strict hierarchy among expedition helpers. As a high-altitude porter, Hassan is rather low down on that hierarchy. His job on the expedition team has been to carry oxygen tanks and other equipment from base camp up to the camps higher on the mountain.
Now, as a member of the rope-fixing team, he sees an opportunity to move up. If he does a good job, he might even be able to guide clients to the summit as a Sherpa in the future. The job high up on the mountain is a dangerous one, but Hassan isn’t afraid. He wants to prove himself so he can finally earn enough money for his family.
Hassan’s hometown is in one of the poorest regions of Pakistan. He lives with his family in a small, multi-family dwelling. Electricity comes from a generator and there is a communal kitchen with an open fireplace. His three young children do the washing up in the river flowing through the valley.
Muhammad Hassan, engaged as an expedition helper, was unfamiliar with the harsh conditions in the death zone.
Before he set off for K2, the Pakistani agency he works for sent him $765 to purchase the equipment he would need on the mountain, but he passed the money along to his wife instead. The down jacket he is now wearing for the climb has been borrowed from acquaintances, along with the insulated pants, crampons and harness.
Hassan stands to earn a $500 to $800 "carry bonus” for lugging the coils of rope up the mountain. He can hardly believe his luck. To earn the bonus, he has to carry the rope to an altitude of around 8,100 meters, but he apparently decides to take advantage of the opportunity and climb all the way to the top. He wants to demonstrate that he has what it takes to summit the mountain. His assignment to the rope-fixing team is his opportunity to prove himself as a mountaineer.
Muhammad Hassan tells his relative Hassan Shigri, who has also been assigned to the rope-fixing team, of his plan. Shigri is worried about his impetuous cousin, who has no clue what conditions are like high up in the death zone – about the extreme cold and the thin air, in which you slowly lose control of your senses as your organism begins shutting down and, ultimately, failing completely if you don’t get off the mountain quickly enough.
Shigri warns Hassan against trying for the summit, but he won’t be dissuaded. During their trips to the high camps, Hassan insists, he was faster than the Nepalese Sherpas.
To reconstruct what happened during the ascent to the top, DER SPIEGEL spoke with mountaineers who were on K2 that day in addition to consulting eyewitness accounts from those who experienced those dramatic hours in the Bottleneck. Kristin Harila, the Norwegian extreme climber, answered a long list of questions in writing and also made herself available for an extensive video call.
On the afternoon of July 25, the rope-fixing team starts out for Camp 3. The expedition teams begin their climbs about eight hours later – almost all of them at the same time.
A view of the K2 summit and the giant serac hanging over the traverse.
Mountaineers heading toward the summit of K2 in the dark.
A German climber is also part of the caravan. Cameraman Philip Flämig from Wiesbaden is filming a documentary for the Austrian broadcaster Servus TV. Flämig records the stages of the ascent. The climb begins after midnight, heading up through a frozen labyrinth, past towers of ice and deep crevasses.
There is a lot of freshly fallen snow on the steep flanks of the mountain, which is why the guides decide to skip Camp 1 and head directly up the ridge to Camp 2 at 6,760 meters, which is better protected from avalanches.
Step for step, the men and women fight their way up the mountain, gasping and coughing. Flämig, an experienced alpinist, calls out advice to those with less climbing experience. "Get your body close to the rock and hold on tight. There are plenty of good holds,” he tells them.
Just before Camp 2, they all have to climb up through a 30-meter gap known as "House’s Chimney.” The passage has been made easier with a fixed rope ladder, but a traffic jam develops nonetheless.
"I mean, this is a ton of fun,” says Flämig, grinning into the camera as if he was on a day hike in the Alps. Other climbers seem anxious, happy to be additionally secured with a rope by their Sherpas.
Teams in commercial expeditions are usually completely random groups of people. Bankers and blue-collar workers, experienced mountaineers and total beginners, braggarts and stoics. For a few weeks, they put their fates in each other’s hands, hope for decent weather and place their trust in the expertise of the guides, who do their best to calm the fears of their guests as they skirt yet another deadly drop-off.
As the customers get closer to the top, summit fever begins to kick in. Fear and doubt are replaced by an overwhelming desire to get to the top at all costs. Some lose all common sense. Every year, tragedies occur because climbers who are completely exhausted simply refuse to descend. And time and again, summit fever has led mountaineers to leave weakened comrades behind.
At Camp 2, the Sherpas have to free the tents from the snow that has fallen. The clients enjoy the view of the Godwin Austen Glacier far below. Harila has also arrived. They enjoy a dinner of granola bars and dehydrated astronaut food.
After a rest, the teams head out in the middle of the night for Camp 3. Snow is falling, the wind has grown stronger, and the sound of avalanches can repeatedly be heard.
Flämig, the cameraman from Wiesbaden, films the column of climbers. "They all want to get to the summit. All of them. And they are all clipped into a single rope. It’s crazy,” he says into the microphone. He zooms in, showing a wobbly anchor that has been pounded into the rock and is holding the fixed rope.
View of the Godwin Austen Glacier.
"They don’t understand just how crazy this is,” says Flämig.
At Camp 3, at an altitude of 7,350 meters, the climbers collapse into the tents that have already been prepared for them. They are now breathing supplemental oxygen from bottles. Sleep is out of the question. The wind is whipping the sides of the tents.
Kristin Harila begins her ascent to the summit at around 8 p.m. Muhammad Hassan, meanwhile, is higher up on the mountain with the rope-fixing team, heading towards the Bottleneck.
The Sherpas have hardly taken any breaks at all during the ascent and Hassan is feeling the altitude. He is exhausted. One Sherpa tells him that he should turn back if he can’t continue. But Hassan decides to keep going anyway.
Once they get to the Bottleneck, the Sherpas install the fixed rope using ice screws. Hassan waits a bit lower down, sitting in the cold for over an hour until the work has been completed. He then starts climbing up after them.
Hassan is eager to rejoin his group. At the end of the crossing beneath the serac, he steps on a small cornice, a snowdrift that has formed above the abyss. And it collapses under his weight. He has no chance to react.
The fixed rope he has clipped into breaks his fall, but two anchors pull out of the ice, so that he is now hanging on the wall five to six meters below the traverse.
Hassan tries to climb back up to the traverse, but he slips down again. He gets tangled up with his crampons and is now hanging upside down in the rope.
Harila arrives at the traverse at around 2 a.m. She and her team have left the other expeditions behind. Her cameraman, Gabriel Tarso of Brazil, is filming the summit push with a camera attached to his helmet. The grand finale.
Climbers in the Bottleneck high up on K2.
The site of Muhammad Hassan's accident. More than 70 mountain climbers walked past him on their way up the mountain.
At 2:15 a.m., Harila reaches the site of the accident. She can see Muhammad Hassan hanging there in the light of her headlamp. One of her team members tries to climb down to him – and almost falls himself.
Harila and her guide, Tenjen Lama, stand there staring downward for several minutes. They can see that the man’s clothing shifted in the fall and that his bare stomach is now exposed to the cold. The fixed rope has wrapped around his leg. He is no longer able to free himself.
Harila says to her guide: "We have to help him.”
2:30 a.m.: Tenjen Lama tries to pull Hassan up, but he is unable to. More and more climbers have begun stacking up behind them in the traverse. "What’s wrong?” they call out. "Why have you stopped?”
A couple of climbers try to push past Harila, but Tenjen Lama screams at them: "Go back!” If someone else falls into the fixed rope now, additional ice screws could fail and a group fall could be the result.
2:45 a.m.: Hassan Shigri, the cousin of the fall victim, has left the rope-fixing team and climbed back down to the site of the accident to help his relative. He watches as Harila’s cameraman, Gabriel Tarso, descends to the victim. The Brazilian manages to turn Muhammad Hassan around so that he is no longer hanging upside down.
Hassan seems listless and he is babbling. He has to get off the mountain. Otherwise, he has no chance of surviving.
Using a pulley, Tarso sets up a block and tackle. As 3:30 a.m. approaches, he and Shigri are able to heave Muhammad Hassan back up to the traverse. He gives him hot tea and puts his mask on Hassan, giving him oxygen.
To now bring Hassan down the mountain, the teams would have to stop their ascents. All of the climbers would have to descend and the Sherpas would face the challenge of rescuing Hassan from the traverse, with ropes, ice screws and blankets. There would have been plenty of oxygen on the mountain for such a rescue. The expedition teams always have extra bottles along for their customers.
Hassan would likely suffer significant frostbite. But he would at least have a chance at survival.
But none of the teams waiting at the traverse take the initiative. Nobody makes any move to start a rescue operation.
And by this point, Kristin Harila and her Sherpa have left the site of the accident. They have continued on their way to the top.
Harila has made her choice. For the summit. One last slope and she will have done it.
What Harila doesn’t realize is that the story of her record and the fate of Muhammad Hassan became inextricably intertwined at the Bottleneck. Both wanted to reach the peak of K2. Hassan was eager to prove that he could keep up with the Sherpas from Nepal. Harila needed the mountain for her record. Hassan helped set up the fixed rope for Harila to clip into. When he ran into trouble, she kept going.
Mountaineer Kristin Harila: "We all knew there was nothing more we could do for him."
She saw no possibility that the porter could still be saved.
During her video call with DER SPIEGEL, Kristin Harila showed footage that her cameraman had taken in the Bottleneck. Muhammad Hassan can clearly be seen in the video, hanging from the fixed rope. Radio messages can be heard. You get an impression of just how steep the terrain is.
The situation was dangerous, says Harila. Challenging and chaotic. At around 3 a.m., she says, she heard about an avalanche over the radio. Out of concern for the rope-fixing team higher up, she says, she and Tenjen Lama decided to check on the men. "We had also done what we could in the Bottleneck.”
But the rope-fixing team wasn’t in trouble. So why didn’t she return to the accident site to help out? Why did she continue onward to the summit?
"The return route had been blocked by the queue of other climbers. It would have been more dangerous to descend and turn back in the traverse where subsequent teams were still ascending than to continue to the summit. Each expedition team uses different radios, so it is not possible to communicate with the other teams. This is also why it was impossible to communicate to the teams ahead that there had been an accident," Harila wrote to DER SPIEGEL.
The decision "to make it to the summit was based on the dangerous conditions that day and on reports of problems with the rope-fixing team higher up, not on a desire to set the record.”
3:45 a.m.: A chain reaction begins in the traverse. Even as Gabriel Tarso, the Brazilian cameraman, is kneeling down next to Hassan, the other mountaineers begin trudging past. One after the other, they make their way past the injured porter. None of them offer assistance. Shigri, Hassan’s cousin, will later say that one of the climbers stepped on his leg with his crampons. Another demanded that he get out of the way.
At one point, Muhammad Hassan grabs the leg of a man stepping over him. But the climber pays no attention and continues on his way.
Tarso is stunned. Nobody seems to care about the dying porter. He looks at Shigri and says: "Brother, it’s just me and you. There’s nothing more we can do here.”
Following dramatic events up on the mountain, controversy frequently erupts about what exactly happened. The thin air makes it difficult to think clearly and witnesses often provide contrasting accounts. When accidents happen, there are almost never pictures or video footage.
This time, though, is different. Philip Flämig, the German cameraman, is about 200 meters below the traverse at 4 a.m. on the day of the accident. He sees that some climbers are turning back because of the traffic jam in the traverse and he has also decided to go no further. The rumbling of an avalanche that narrowly missed him a short time before is still echoing in his ears.
Before heading down, though, Flämig wants to take a few more shots of the summit. He sends up a drone that he has been carrying in his backpack, a Mavic 3, which can fly at altitudes of up to 9,000 meters.
Shortly before sunrise, he steers the drone towards the mountainside and films the climbers at the traverse. On the tiny monitor of his controller, Flämig can’t see exactly what is going on at the Bottleneck. But like a flying eye, the drone’s camera records the scene.
By 5:30 a.m., Flämig has used up the last of his batteries and he descends to Camp 3. After a brief rest, he continues all the way down to base camp. There, he has a look at the drone footage on his laptop – and realizes what he has filmed.
Muhammad Hassan is clearly visible lying in the traverse. In the snow next to him is Hassan Shigri, who is massaging his cousin’s shoulders. You can see climbers moving past them on their way up. You can see that Hassan is moving his legs. The timestamp on the recording reads 5:31 a.m. By that time, Muhammad Hassan has been exposed to the cold for three-and-a-half hours.
Flämig’s drone also films Kristin Harila still ascending further up the mountain. At 10:45 a.m., she reaches the summit, and with that, she has reached the tops of all 14 8,000-meter peaks in just 92 days. A world record.
She makes a video for her fans following along on Instagram. "We have reached summit number 14,” she says, smiling into the camera. Crystals of ice are flying in front of her face. She thanks her Sherpas, her supporters and her sponsors.
Her cameraman Gabriel Tarso arrives at the summit about 40 minutes after Harila. He could no longer stay with Hassan because he was running out of oxygen, and he would have put himself in danger as well. Tarso will later say that he climbed without oxygen for part of the ascent until he reached a Sherpa who had an extra bottle for him.
In total, around 70 climbers reach the summit of K2 on this morning. That, too, is a record. Selfies are taken. High fives exchanged.
During the descent, they all pass the site of the accident again in the afternoon. By then, Muhammad Hassan is dead.
Mountains are not lawless spaces. There, too, an obligation exists to help those in need to the degree possible. In commercial expeditions, though, the willingness to exhibit solidarity vanishes quickly. Such tours aren’t cheap, after all.
On the other hand, mountaineers in the past have repeatedly surpassed themselves in extreme situations. Just two weeks before the accident on K2, a Mexican group on Broad Peak left behind a Pakistani porter who was suffering from altitude sickness just below the summit. The man would almost certainly have frozen to death if the Austrian mountaineer Lukas Wörle had not found him lying in the snow. Wörle broke off his ascent and dragged the porter out of the death zone, thus saving his life.
K2 victim Muhammad Hassan didn't have a guardian angel that day on K2.
The family of Muhammad Hassan, the high-altitude porter who died on K2. The youngest son never had a chance to meet his father.
Muhammad Hassan had no guardian angel, nobody to take pity on him. He was useful for as long as he could carry equipment for the mountain climbers. Once he fell, though, he became an impediment. A burden.
The mountain tourists didn’t feel responsible for the high-altitude porter who had run into trouble. They had booked a trip up K2. And the Sherpas were focused on doing their job and getting their clients to the top of the mountain. Because they only get a bonus for summits.
Ultimately, Hassan was just a bit of collateral damage on an otherwise immensely successful summit day.
When Kristin Harila returned to base camp late in the evening of July 27, there was a brief fireworks display for the queen of the mountain, a standard ritual following successful summits.
About two weeks after the drama on K2, the first stories about the events at the Bottleneck began appearing in newspapers. Then, Flämig’s drone footage went viral. The image triggered an outcry. Media outlets across the world expressed outrage at the "Shame on K2.”
Mountaineering legend Reinhold Messner lamented that the behavior of the climbers marked a low point in the unscrupulous business of high-altitude mountaineering. On the 8,000-ers, ego had triumphed over empathy, Messner said.
Harila felt the full brunt of the events on K2. Critics accused her of prioritizing her record over the life of the porter and she was bombarded with hateful comments on social media.
During her video call with DER SPIEGEL, Harila spoke calmly and matter-of-factly about what happened. And she defended her actions. Saving people in the death zone is always extremely difficult, she pointed out. The critics, she said, have no idea how dramatic the situation was for everybody. Hassan hadn’t received enough mountaineering training and wasn’t adequately equipped to be climbing on K2, she said, adding that she and her team did everything they could to help the porter. But "no one could have survived the situation Hassan was in,” she wrote in a response to DER SPIEGEL.
The climbers who were in the traverse at the time cannot be blamed, she insisted. "We all knew there was nothing more we could do for him.”
Pakistani officials investigated the accident. In their report, they wrote that Muhammad Hassan did not have the necessary know-how to be on K2 and his equipment was inadequate. Still, they noted, the climbers at the Bottleneck had perhaps prioritized their ambition over Hassan’s life. "All the alpinists were purely focused on their long-awaited summit push and all members had tunnel vision,” the investigators wrote.
The Brazilian Gabriel Tarso became the tragic hero on K2. He tried to save Hassan. But he was unable to do so without help.
K2 has brought Kristin Harila no happiness. Her record is overshadowed by ongoing debates in the mountaineering world about whether she did everything in her power to save Muhammad Hassan.
Because in late July 2024, his body was recovered. Eight high-altitude porters from Pakistan demonstrated that it was possible to bring a person down from the dangerous Bottleneck. The men climbed up to the traverse, chopped Hassan’s body out of the ice, lowered it down with ropes and then carried it down the mountain.
Hassan’s wife, who was widowed by the accident, now must raise their children by herself. Three of her sons are now in school. The fourth never met his father.
He was born six months after the accident on K2.
