If you were following WhereWillYouSki.com last summer, you’ll remember Karhu ambassador Dave Watson’s posts from Broad Peak and K2 as part of the K2 Tall Mountain Expedition (posts here). The draw of the Himalaya tugged hard on Dave again, and he went back this summer for another shot at skiing the peak. The trip is drawing to a close, and we’ll have more detail from Dave shortly, but here’s an excerpt of his latest update from EverestNews.com:

Hello all, The expedition is over. The team is in Skardu after the trek out over the Gondogoro La. George, Dave and Ali are sorting and repacking gear in the summer heat. Overall the expedition was very successful, all survived without serious injury.

This summer no one reached the summit of K2. Dave made it the highest on the mountain during the Aug 4 summit push. He and Mingma Sherpa fixed the bottleneck (finished by 9:30am), Louis R (Canada) led the traverse and Dave took over breaking trail with Vassily (Kazakh) belaying. The snow was chest deep, unconsolidated sugar. The slope angle was 45+ and progress was slowed to 20m per hour. At 2:30pm the choice was made to descend. The climbers started down from above the bottleneck with a height of 8350-8400 reached.

Dave downclimbed the rock step below the serac into the bottleneck. While clipped into the rope he took off his crampons and overboots, put on the skis, changed his frozen gloves, loaded the pack, adjusted the length of the ski poles, then dropped in.

He skied the bottleneck to the shoulder and then down to Camp4. The team slept another night at camp4. It was a difficult night with 1 sleeping bag for 3 climbers and super cold temps at nearly 8000m.

In the morning Dave skied to camp3 while George and Ali downclimbed and rapelled. They all decended (rappel/downclimb) the Black Pyramid together to camp2. The team packed up camp and rapelled the House Chimney. Dave then skied from the base of the Chimney down to ABC while George and Ali downclimbed. The team was in Base Camp that
afternoon.

While in base camp, the team regularly talked with Austrian speed climber Christian Stangl, who is a friend of Hans Kammerlander.

Was this the first descent of the bottleneck? Is there proof otherwise?

To read the rest of Dave’s updates, visit EverestNews.com and scroll down to the earlier posts. We at Karhu would like to say how proud we are of Dave’s accomplishments, and to have him safe and sound after such an incredible adventure!