
At around 3pm Nepali time (around 4pm Pakistani Time), we finally made it to Camp 4 on 15th Jan and our first reaction was winter K2 will be our and we hug each other because we knew we would make the summit next day.
I started talking on the radio and the other two Mingma walked further to check the crevasse which we don’t find in summer.
The crevasse at Camp 4 was not that big so we easily jumped, still our team put around 2 meters of rope for safety purposes.
The way from Camp 3 to Camp 4 usually takes 2-3 hours but we took more than 8 hours to find a way and fix the way to Camp 4.
In the beginning we never thought it would take that long but it took and we were lucky that we got one extra day in Camp 3 because weather changed, otherwise it was not possible to go Summit directly from Camp 3.
We talked a little bit about our luck and hard work before descending. Whenever we are on the mountain, we always pray to the mountain for our safety and we also pray for her to accept us.
The Goddess K2 accepted us this time.
When we started, everything went smoothly, the weather changed favoring our activities. When my legs were hurt and my partner Kili was sick, the weather was bad for a week which gave us plenty of time to recover.
When we started to climb for the Summit try, the weather was not good. 14th and 16th January were not showing well in the beginning but when we reached Camp 2, it changed to be the best days. When we were at Camp 2, the weather changed and 15th January was shown windy. The next day when we reached Camp 3, it was shown 15th Jan was good again and we could fix Camp 4 in good weather.
We would say we were very lucky on K2 this winter.
Spending a few minutes there, we started descending and got back to Camp 3 before it was dark.
Reaching back to Camp 3, we started discussing the plan because we didn’t have enough time to rest if we followed our previous plan of leaving at 11pm.
The weather on 16th January was fantastic weather so we planned to leave at 1am instead of 11pm considering 14 hours maximum to reach the Summit and back.
Source: Mingma G- FB