Ali Sadpara hails from a small village in Skardu, Gilgit-Baltistan. Lacking better training opportunities, he began his hobby of mountaineering as a porter and travelled with certified mountaineering teams but only went to the last base camp with their luggage and returned.

After that, he started his journey and climbed many famous peaks. In 2019, he climbed the world’s fifth-highest peak at 8,485 meters in Nepal. He is the first Pakistani mountaineer to have climbed seven mountain peaks above 8,000 meters in the world.

Muhammad Ali Saddapara and two foreign climbers, John Snorri from Iceland & John Pablo from Chile, set out from Base Camp III to reach the summit between Thursday and Friday night.

They were expected to head to K2 in the winter on February 5 but lost contact with base camp on Friday night.

Muhammad Ali Sadpara, Sajid Ali Sadpara and John Snorri had earlier left to reach the summit of Pakistan’s K2 on January 24, but after reaching 6,831 meters on the afternoon of January 25, due to bad weather conditions, they had left the mission and returned to base camp and in February they again announce to scale the K2 peak.

“After 8,000 meters, the base camp did not receive any signals from Ali Sadpara and his foreign colleagues,” said Karar Haidari, a senior official at Alpine Club Pakistan.

Helicopters flew up to 7,000 meters yesterday to trace the three climbers after they lost contact with the base camp, but no trace was found and today (February 7) the rescue mission was resumed but so far no trace found.

Note that, while K2 evokes the spirit of ‘adventure’ in the hearts of climbers who conquer high peaks, this peak is considered to be even more terrifying than Everest, the highest peak in the world.

One in four climbers seeking to reach the summit fails and lost their lives. The death toll on K2 is 29 per cent, compared to 4 per cent on the world’s highest peak, Everest.

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