Sometimes people who climb mountains get into trouble. Up in the rarefied air above 8000 meters, things can go wrong, and go wrong quickly. Even on lower mountain, a slide down the slope isn’t sledding, it’s a plummet toward death. To combat that, mountaineers are trained to self-arrest, a technique where the climber plunging down the mountain flips onto his stomach and attempts to bury an ice axe in the snow to slow his descent. If it works, he lives, if not, he dies.
In one of those moments that is forever capitalized, The Belay saw American climber Pete Schoening watch in horror as the five men below him on the line climbing K2 all lost their footing and began a plunge off the world’s most dangerous mountain that would surely kill all six of them.