The Madison Mountaineering K2 expedition team has made the difficult decision to end our climb and head home due to exceptionally high objective hazard. At the same time, we are proud to have completed another successful mountain cleanup. Over the course of our season in the Karakoram, five volunteers and 20 members of our staff removed a total of 605.6 lbs (274.7 kg) of waste from just below K2 Base Camp on the Godwin Austen Glacier, to the upper end of Advance Base Camp at the base of the Abruzzi Spur. This effort was spearheaded by our K2 climber, Ryan Mitchell, and implemented through our Madison Mountaineering Foundation, a 501(c)3 organization.
Our successful cleanup was a highlight during an otherwise challenging Karakoram season. Throughout the K2 climbing period from June into August, unusually warm and dry weather created challenging and hazardous conditions on the mountain. Since our first K2 expedition in 2014, we’ve typically found the route blanketed in snow from Advanced Base Camp upward. This year, even after extending our expedition by nearly two weeks in hopes of new snowfall, the route from Advanced Base Camp to Camp 1 remained bare, with loose rock underfoot. Without snow to hold it in place, rockfall became a constant threat throughout the season. In the interest of safety, we’ve chosen to step away for now—and return to the mountains when conditions are right. Expedition leader, Terray Sylvester checks in with this dispatch from the Karakoram:
Hello from Chuspang Camp, below Laila Peak (6096m/20,000ft)! This is a wrap-up dispatch for the 2025 Madison Mountaineering Karakoram expeditions.
Today we trekked here from K2 Base Camp (4968m/16,300ft). It was a spectacular day — clear skies gave us excellent views of the surrounding high peaks as we hiked down the Baltoro Glacier through Concordia (4570m/14,993ft), then over the Gondogoro Pass (5585m/18,323ft) and down to our grassy, alpine tent site.
On August 9, we aborted our summit push on K2 (8611m/28,251ft) and descended back to base camp from Camp 1 (6065m/19,900ft). It was a hard decision. We turned around due to the high rockfall hazard on the Abruzzi Spur from Camp 2 (6700m/21,980ft) down.
This season has been unusually warm and dry in the Karakoram. Normally the route from Advance Base Camp (5303m/17,400ft) to Camp 1 is almost entirely snow-covered. This season, most of it was steep, loose rock, exposed by lack of snow, and by ice retreating from the east side of the Abruzzi. The route on up to Camp 2 was also in relatively bad shape, which matters because rocks can fall from near Camp 2 down roughly the length of the route. Since arriving in base camp in early July, we’d hoped that fresh snow would stabilize the lower mountain. But although we extended our expedition by nearly two weeks while waiting for a summit window, almost no snow fell below 6,500m over the course of the season. Precip fell as rain instead. The dry conditions made it very challenging to effectively manage the objective hazard and provide an adequate margin of safety for our team — even considering the relatively high amount of risk that any ascent of K2 entails. Throughout the season, numerous minor rockfall-related injuries and many near misses — and one very sad fatality related to loose rock — underscored the danger.
So, overall it was a tough season in the Karakoram. We tried to respect the conditions on the mountains, and heed the very good advice that getting to the summit is optional, while coming home safely is mandatory. We’re looking forward to returning to Pakistan next year — hopefully after a wetter winter!
In addition to these expedition dispatches, you can also follow our teams as they make their attempts on the world’s most formidable mountains on:
– Amazon Alexa devices with the Madison Mountaineering Flash Briefing skill:
- Enable the skill and add to your flash briefing to hear our daily audio expedition updates on select expeditions. Just say, “Alexa, play my flash briefing.“
– Instagram:
