K2, triumph and tragedy

K2 is the second highest mountain in the world, at 8611 metres only a couple of hundred metres lower than Everest and is one of the most unrelenting and testing of the worlds 8000-metre peaks.

Jim Curran came to K2 as a climbing cameraman with an unsuccessful British expedition, but stayed on through the climbing season. This is his account of the dramatic events of that summer, a story of ambitions both achieved and thwarted on a mountain which all high-altitude climbers take the most pride in overcoming. In 1986 K2 took its toll of those ambitions.

Curran vividly describes the moments that contribute to the exhilaration of climbing on the world's most demanding mountain, and he assesses the tragedy of that summer with compassion and impartiality.

K2, "the savage mountain", is the second-highest peak in the world - and the most difficult to climb. In 1986, it was the site of both dazzling triumph and great loss as twenty-seven men and women reached the top but thirteen died trying. Curran was there to record it all in words and photographs: courage and obsession, luminous success and thwarted ambition.