K2: The Impossible Descent | movie | 2020 | Official Trailer - video Dailymotion

On July 22 2018, a Polish ski mountaineer clicked into his bindings at an altitude of 8,611m to make history. Follow And | dG1fM3N1UGptalhnTGM

Transcript

00:00All of a sudden, your whole body switches.

00:11You're starting over from scratch because you're not climbing anymore.

00:15You're using different muscles, you're using different brain waves, different fear pathways.

00:22When you're in big mountains, in the Himalayas, in the Karakoram, there's a lot of snow.

00:52There's potential for massive avalanches, class 4 or 5 avalanches that would take out of town.

00:58You just don't know what's going to happen. It's a very unstable environment.

01:07No go right side yet.

01:10I had to cut the route with the climbers.

01:13There were a few people I could potentially blame.

01:22It's a very delicate balance, which means that your capacity to assess your terrain

01:30and your level of situational awareness has to be at a very, very elite level.

01:40You know, of course, we're at very high altitudes.

01:43Lack of oxygen makes decision-making quite difficult.

01:46Your brain feels foggy or like when you are drunk.

01:49And so this adds a lot of risk to everything you do.

02:00The thing about K2 is if the snow is firm, pretty much every single place on K2,

02:06if you fall, you will go to the bottom. There is nowhere to stop.

02:13This means that any small mistake will be fatal.

02:37I have already spent several hours above 8,000 meters.

02:44I have to move on.

02:46Soon I will face the most dangerous part of the route.

02:49The grass from Messner.