Even if it is difficult, it makes no sense to turn a blind eye: Kazuya Hiraide and Kenro Nakajima paid for their adventure on K2, the second highest mountain on earth, with their lives. In consultation with the families of the two top Japanese climbers, the rescue operation on the second highest mountain on earth was halted yesterday – because the terrain where Hiraide and Nakajima had been located is too steep and too dangerous.
After contact with the Japanese was lost, the crew of a Pakistani rescue helicopter discovered two motionless bodies on the West Face last Saturday. The Pakistani authorities announced that Hiraide and Nakajima had apparently fallen from an altitude of around 7,500 meters. Rescue from the air was impossible at this point and rescuers had to climb up from the foot of the wall, they said. This operation has now been aborted.
Survival as good as impossible
Also because it is clear to everyone that the Japanese could not possibly have survived several nights in the open at this altitude – should they have survived their fall. Injured, unprotected, in temperatures in the double-digit minus range. Cases such as that of Indian mountaineer Anurag Maloo, who narrowly survived three days after falling into a crevasse on the eight-thousander Annapurna in spring 2023, are not called miracles for nothing.
En route in alpine style
Hiraide and Nakajima set off on their summit attempt a week ago. They had wanted to climb the extremely challenging West Face of the 8,611-meter-high K2 – on a new route, in alpine style, i.e. without bottled oxygen, without high porters, without fixed high camps and without fixed ropes. In the 70 years since the first ascent of K2 in 1954, this wall has only been mastered once: in 2007 by a large Russian expedition, after more than two months on the mountain, with rotating small teams, seven high camps and fixed ropes on almost the entire route.
The two Japanese had prepared specifically for their K2 project in recent years. In summer 2023, they first climbed the North Face of the 7,708-meter-high Tirich Mir, the highest mountain in the Hindu Kush, in alpine style.
Multiple Piolet d’Or award winners
The 45-year-old Hiraide and the 39-year-old Nakajima were regarded as one of the best performing rope teams in the world. The top duo were awarded the Piolet d’Or, the “Oscar of Mountaineers”, twice in recent years for their successes in the Karakoram: for their first ascent of the South Face of the 7,788-meter-high Rakaposhi in 2019 and for their first ascent of the Northeast Face of the 7,611-meter-high Shispare in 2017.
Hiraide received his first Piolet d’Or for the first ascent of the Southeast Face of the 7,756-meter-high Kamet in India in 2008, together with his partner Kei Taniguchi. She was the first woman to win the prestigious prize. Taniguchi died in a fall in Japan at the end of 2015 at the age of 43.
