The 1986 K2 Disaster — Thirteen dead across a single brutal season

Across the 1986 climbing season on K2, the second-highest mountain on Earth and one of the deadliest, thirteen climbers died in a succession of avalanches, falls, illness and exhaustion — the worst single year the mountain had then seen. The toll was not one accident but a chain of them, culminating in a five-day storm in early August that trapped a group of climbers at the high camp on the Shoulder, around 8,000 metres, and killed five of them as they tried to descend. The mountain, in the Karakoram on the China–Pakistan border, stands at 8,611 metres.

The deaths spanned the whole season rather than a single day. In late June an avalanche on a new American route killed two climbers, John Smolich and Alan Pennington; days later the French pair Maurice and Liliane Barrard disappeared on the descent from the summit. July took the Polish climber Tadeusz Piotrowski, who fell after a hard new route on the south face, and the Italian soloist Renato Casarotto, who died in a crevasse fall at the foot of the mountain after retreating from a solo attempt. In early August the Polish climber Wojciech Wróż fell from the fixed ropes and a Pakistani high-altitude porter, Mohammad Ali, was killed by rockfall. Then the storm closed in.

The final phase, the August catastrophe on the Shoulder, became the season’s defining horror. Several climbers who had summited on 4 August were pinned at the top camp by a storm with winds reported above 160 km/h, without food or fuel, for roughly five days. As they finally tried to descend on 10 August, weakened and snow-blind, five died: the British climber and filmmaker Julie Tullis, the British climber Alan Rouse, the Austrians Hannes Wieser and Alfred Imitzer, and the Polish climber Dobrosława Miodowicz-Wolf, known as Mrówka (“the Ant”). The Austrian Willi Bauer and the Austrian filmmaker Kurt Diemberger survived, gravely frostbitten. The season also recorded the first ascents of K2 by women — Wanda Rutkiewicz and Liliane Barrard on 23 June, and Tullis on 4 August — achievements bound, in Barrard’s and Tullis’s cases, to the same mountain that killed them.