“(I am) Grateful that I’m alive and ok,” Turkish mountaineer Gülnur Tumbat wrote on Instagram today. The professor of marketing, born in 1975, lives and works in San Francisco.
On Monday, she reached – with bottled oxygen – the summit of K2, the second-highest mountain on earth, as one of around 40 mountaineers from commercial expedition teams. Gülnur was the first Turkish woman to scale the 8,611-meter-high mountain in the Karakoram in Pakistan.
At that point, she probably had no idea how dangerous the final phase of her descent would be: from Camp 1 at around 6,000 meters down to the Advanced Base Camp (ABC) at around 5,300 meters. As reported, a Chinese climber died in a rockfall during this passage on Tuesday. Gülnur reports that a rescuer who tried to recover the Chinese woman’s body was also hit.
Continue reading “K2: “Rocks whizzing in all directions””
