Pretty. (Note the talus slopes in the foreground.) To get an idea of the difficulty of the mountain, this is from Wikipedia:
The first woman to reach the summit was Wanda Rutkiewicz, of Poland, in 1986. The next four women to reach the summit were all killed in climbing incidents — three of them died descending from K2 itself, among them fêted British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves in 1995, and Rutkiewicz herself died on Kangchenjunga in 1992. This led to the legend that K2 carried a "curse on women".
...
After Eun-Sun Oh in 2007, Cecilie Skog became the tenth woman to have summitted successfully (on 1 August 2008) but her husband, Rolf Bae, who was climbing with her, died during the descent along with 10 other climbers in the 2008 climbing accident.
So, has anyone skied it? Almost.
Last August, an American named Dave Watson made a nearly-successful attempt. He got to within 400 meters of the summit, managing to reach the top of the deadly "Bottleneck" of K2, and skied down from there. He was the first person to ski the Bottleneck, and this isn't too surprising. The Bottleneck is a narrow, steep (50-60 degrees) slope. Dangerous seracs hang over one side of the route. Seracs are blocks of ice, formed in glaciers, that look like this:
In steep routes, their main purpose appears to be falling at unpredictable times and squashing people. The biggest accident on K2 occurred in 2008 and killed eleven climbers, and six of these deaths were due to falling seracs at the Bottleneck. Two of the serac-related deaths were due to a serac cutting ropes and stranding people in the "death zone." The death zone (where the Bottleneck is) is the altitude at which the air is so thin that the body uses oxygen faster than it can take in oxygen. It's the altitude at which death is guaranteed if you get stranded there by, say, falling seracs.
Back to Dave Watson. He reached the top of the Bottleneck in the death zone next to the wall of seracs amid "chest deep" snow (first-hand account here). It was getting late, so he skied down K2 from the top of the Bottleneck. To quote from that source:
"As all of the other climbers were rappelling down the ropes, Watson prepared for his first turn down the 60-degree face, 10,000 feet above the team's basecamp. "Committing to that first turn," he writes, "was incredibly exciting." "
Hmm. No kidding.
After reaching base camp and realizing he wasn't dead yet, Dave Watson decided he was going to try to ski from the summit this year: 2010. Be sure to look for news of his next attempt. (Only so many times you can try this sort of thing before luck catches up to you and you get killed by a falling serac... knock on glacier.)
The sport of climbing mountains and skiing down is called ski mountaineering, and it's reasonably common on the less-technical mountains. I've seen ski mountaineers on Mount Adams, WA, and would like to try skiing that route myself. But there are, obviously, those who go ski mountaineering on the insanely technical mountains as well.
Kit Deslauriers was the first person to ski down the seven summits (the highest point on each continent), beating out Davo Karnicar by less than a month. Kit Deslauriers has an excellent website with pictures of her ski mountaineering. Click here to see the photos.
I'll leave you with a couple of pictures of ski mountaineering on Everest. Note the oxygen mask in the second photo.
