Savage Summit – Jennifer Jordan

Introduction

Though not quite as tall as Everest, it is far more dangerous. Located at the border of China and Pakistan in the remote Karakoram Range, K2 has some of the harshest climbing conditions and weather of any place in the world. At the beginning of the 2004 climbing season, 90 women had successfully summitted Everest, but only five female climbers had reached the peak of K2. Today, each of those brave pioneers is dead.

In 1986 Polish climber Wanda Rutkiewicz became the first women ever to reach the top of K2 and was followed to the summit that same year by French climber Liliane Barrard and British climber Julie Tullis, both of whom died on their descent. Then in 1992, the summer that Rutkiewicz perished on Kangchenjunga, French alpinist Chantal Mauduit summitted K2, and survived, only to die six years later on another 8000 meter peak. Finally in 1995 British climber and mother Alison Hargreaves reached the top but was killed shortly after starting her descent.

These courageous, remarkable women can no longer tell their stories of defeating the ferocious mountain. Jennifer Jordan, a journalist and filmmaker, tells the haunting, compelling, and often tragic stories of how these women lived and died on the mountains they pursued.

Mothers and daughters, wives and lovers, poets and engineers, the female pioneers of K2 were complex personalities in the controversial world of high altitude mountaineering, and their lives and deaths are a reminder of the high price climbers often pay to follow their dreams.