“(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.
Many were hit by rocks
Due to the high risk of rockfall, her team from the Nepalese operator 14 Peaks Expedition initially decided to descend to ABC during the night, according to Tumbat. The hope was that the night frost would stop the rockfall. But things turned out differently, as Gülnur describes: “Horrible night. Horrible morning. After a few hours of waiting, started descending again with the first light but conditions were not better.
Continued to rappel after rappel constantly looking up to avoid falling rocks. Pasang yelling constantly to look up. My teammate’s helmet got cracked. Many people got hit. I took a few hits on my legs (big chunk of ice hit me in the shoulder higher up too). Rocks whizzing in all directions and many near misses. I don’t remember being this scared for my life and praying this much for it.”
According to Gülnur Tumbat, there were still a few climbers attempting to safely reach ABC from Camp 1 early this morning.
Tumbat completed her collection of the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on each continent, at the end of 2023 – the first woman from Turkey to do so.
Unusually warm
During this summer season, commercial expeditions reported unusually high temperatures in the Karakoram – climate change is making itself felt. Rockfall became a constant issue, not only on K2.
At the end of July, former German biathlon star Laura Dahlmeier was hit by a large rock on the six-thousander Laila Peak, located about 30 kilometers southwest of K2. The 31-year-old did not survive the accident.
