Mohammad Ali Sadpara will be remembered as a versatile climber by the international mountaineer community and a hero in his native Pakistan.
He is the only Pakistani to climb eight of the 14 highest mountains in the world and made the first winter climb to the ninth highest peak in the world, Nanga Parbat.
On Friday, February 5, he disappeared along with two others – Icelandic John Snorri and Chilean Juan Pablo Mohr – while trying to climb K2, the second highest peak in the world at 8,611 m (28,251 feet) and also allegedly the most deadly.
Their son Sajid was also part of the team and the idea was that the father and son pair would reach the top of the K2 without oxygen, a feat never done before in winter. But Sajid had to return from a point called the Bottleneck – also known as the “death zone”, about 300 meters from the top – after he felt bad.
He has since helped military-led rescue teams search the mountain for signs of his father and the other two men – but there is no trace of them. The military wants to resume the search, weather permitting, using a high-altitude C-130 aircraft and infrared technology to locate possible shelters at the peak.
But Sajid doesn’t have much hope.
“I thank everyone who is organizing a search, but it is unlikely that they are alive now. Therefore, the search must be to recover their bodies, ”he said earlier this week.
How did Mohammad Ali Sadpara start to climb?
Mohammad Ali Sadpara was born in 1976 in Sadpara, a village in one of the river valleys in the Himalayan Baltistan region, in the extreme north of Pakistan.
Livestock is the main source of livelihood in the region, and young people in the region also work as porters with western climbers and adventure tourists who frequent the region every year.
Sadpara finished high school in the village and his father, a low-class civil servant, later moved with his family to the city of Skardu, where Sadpara studied until high school before starting to climb.
Nisar Abbas, a local journalist, relative and friend of Sadpara since the days of his village, describes him as being extraordinary since childhood.
“He had the physique and habits of an athlete and was also good at studying. He never failed classes. As the older brother never did well at school, the father really wanted to give him a good education and so he moved him to Skardu. “
Due to the family’s financial limitations, he moved on to climbing around 2003 or 2004.
“He was an instant success with tour operators because the expeditions he led were mostly successful. He gained worldwide fame in 2016, when a team of three men of which he was a member became the first to reach Nanga. Parbat in winter.
Hamid Hussain, a Karachi-based Skardu tour operator who has known Sadpara since 2012, has similar memories.
“He was brave, nice and very friendly,” he says. “And he was doing very well physically. We walked together on many occasions and, although there were times when we ran out of breath and passed out, he still ran down the steep slopes and shouted back at us, asking us to be quick.”
On one occasion in the winter of 2016, during a hike from the Sadpara valley to the Deosai alpine planes, when icy winds caught them in a snow-filled canyon and made their spines shiver, they saw him gently climb the slope and start dancing over the summit.
There Sadpara had been through difficult situations before and knew the risks.
“I lost 12 of my 14 colleagues in the mountaineering business. Two of us remain,” he said in an interview in 2019. “So, my friends now always ask me, Ali, when are you going to die?”
Why reach K2 without oxygen?
One theory is that he was working as a high altitude loader for John Snorri and had to comply with the agreement he had signed with him.
But that was just a ruse, says Nisar Abbas. Weeks earlier, Sadpara had openly expressed his willingness to make the attempt after a 10-member Nepalese team led by the famous Sherpa Nirmal Purja became the first to reach the top of K2 in the winter.
And in order to set a new record, Sadpara wanted to do that too – but without oxygen. And he also wanted his son to be there when that happened.
His son Sajid told the media that they started with about 25 to 30 climbers, locals and foreigners, but they all came back before reaching the 8,000 meter point.
Sajid’s own condition worsened when they hit the Bottleneck.
“We had loaded an oxygen cylinder in our emergency equipment. My father told me to take it off and use it a little. It will make me feel better.”
But while Sajid was preparing the cylinder, the mask regulator leaked.
Meanwhile, his father and the two foreigners continued to climb the Bottleneck. His father then looked back and shouted for Sajid to continue climbing.
“I shouted that the cylinder had leaked. He said, ‘don’t worry, keep going up, you’ll feel better’. But I couldn’t muster the strength to do it and decided to go back. On Friday. It was the last time that I saw them. “
When asked why Sadpara insisted that he continue, Sajid said: “The Nepalese had done this weeks before and he wanted to do it too, because K2 is our mountain.”
What could have happened?
Sajid says he saw the three men climb the neck at the top, which means they probably made it to the summit.
Experts say that most accidents happen during the descent, because even a slight loss of balance can cause someone to fall into the abyss.
Those who knew Sadpara doubt that he made such a mistake.
People in his village still remember more than one occasion when a goat Sadpara cared for in the mountains got hurt and, instead of slitting his throat, as others would, he carried it over his shoulders and went down to pick it up to the village vet.
They suspect that he probably didn’t make it back because one or both of his partners had an accident and he kept trying to find a way to save them.
We will probably never know.
People in the region are waiting for a miracle.
But, as his son says, given the hostile environment, low oxygen and winter temperatures reaching -80 ° C, there is little chance that the men could have survived a week at more than 8,000 meters.
“This did not happen in the history of climbing, so we can only hope for a miracle,” Sajid Sadpara told the BBC.