K2 has a much greater allure to me than Everest.  While Everest is tallest, K2 is steeper, more remote, and has much harsher weather.  But it's in that "gotta win the lottery first" bucket list.

 

Everest is a 5k color run, and K2 is Badwater. (Well maybe not quite, and I don't know jack about mountaineering, but you get the idea.)

I just watched a documentary on Netflix called The Summit, about the 2008 expedition on K2. Due to bad weather and a series of incidents, 11 people died out of 28. Overall, there has been about one death for every 4 who have summited.

Those are terrible odds of survival, and easily avoided!

 

Those are terrible odds of survival, and easily avoided!

Step 1 - don't do it. 

 

Just watch this movie Berto. Then you don't have to go.

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grv3d55FOkk

 

And then watch this one.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvVoO5cKiSk

Haha!

K2 was a good movie.  Best lines for me were....

"I didn't make the world the way it is Harold..."

Harold: "We all make the world the way it is."

Vertical Limit I didn't like.  Palm-sweaty entertaining and dramatic, but not realistic.  Not even Usain Bolt can sprint in boots and crampons to jump over a crevasse at 8,000 meters.  Oh yeah, at the end of that clip, a human body will bounce off the ground after a fall that long.... and how I do know these things? 

Did you watch Everest? I thought it was pretty good, but no idea how realistic it was.

Not sure if I did, which means if I did see it, it didn't leave much of an impression.  A lot of these movies, the scenery is the main attraction for me.  It's very difficult to envision what it's really like to be there from a movie.  Books are much more descriptive.  In Maurice Herzog's book Annapurna, he describes fingers and toes rolling around on the floor of a train ride back, because they had to be amputated from frost bite.

Ok, now I really need to get off my arse....

Edit - John Krakauer's book Into Thin Air was total crap, IMO.  Reading it, I can totally see how it pulls you into believing everything he said.  However, it was so biased and misrepresenting of people (he had to have protagonists and antagonists), that it forced Anatoli Boukreev, who is very humble and quiet, to write a book to rebut Krakauer's account.  I don't know of any accomplished mountaineer who would stand behind Krakauer.  OTOH - I did enjoy his book Into the Wild about a kid venturing into his demise in Alaska.  True or not, it was a good read.

  

Edit - John Krakauer's book Into Thin Air was total crap, IMO.  Reading it, I can totally see how it pulls you into believing everything he said.  However, it was so biased and misrepresenting of people (he had to have protagonists and antagonists), that it forced Anatoli Boukreev, who is very humble and quiet, to write a book to rebut Krakauer's account.  I don't know of any accomplished mountaineer who would stand behind Krakauer.  OTOH - I did enjoy his book Into the Wild about a kid venturing into his demise in Alaska.  True or not, it was a good read.

I enjoyed Into Thin Air, but I guess I didn't know any better than to believe it. And like I said, I am not any kind of mountaineering buff, I just enjoy a good story. Fortunately I read it such a long time ago, that when I saw Everest, I didn't remember who was going to die.

That's why climbers (1) gradually acclimatize themselves, and (2) use supplemental oxygen.

 

I get it. But still must be incredibly hard.

Yeah that's an understatement. Altitudes over 8000m are called the "death zone", because supposedly your body cannot physically acclimatize to it. That's where they get into a lot of trouble. I never want to do anything in my life that involves entering something called the "death zone"

Being indecisive is the worst.  I can’t decide whether to run inside or outside tomorrow...