Pakistani climber cleanses K2 as shrine to fallen father

Gazing up from K2 Basecamp, Sajid Ali Sadpara sees Earth's second-highest mountain, his father's final resting place, and a blight of litter on the furthest reaches of the natural world.

Sajid dons a down coverall stitched with Pakistan's green flag to scale the 8,611-metre (28,251-foot) spur of rock, clearing an icebound grotesquerie of spent oxygen canisters, mangled tents and snarled rope discarded over decades by climbers questing for the summit.

Over a week some 200 kilograms (400 pounds) of litter is hacked from the pinnacle's frozen grip by his five-strong team and ferried precariously back down, he says, a rare act of charity in one of Earth's most unforgiving environments.

It is a high-altitude tribute to Sajid's father, legendary climber Ali Sadpara, honouring the place where they bonded in nature and where his body remains after a 2021 father-son expedition fell foul of the "savage mountain".

"I'm doing it from my heart," Sajid told an AFP team at K2 Basecamp, where 5,150 metres of elevation labours breathing and avalanches tremor off an amphitheatre of surrounding slopes.

"This is our mountain," the 25-year-old said, sizing up the task above. "We are the custodians."

K2 was forged when India collided with Asia 50 million years ago, sprouting the Karakoram range of mountains across Pakistan's present-day northeastern Gilgit-Baltistan region.

It was named by British surveyors in 1856 -- denoting the second peak in the Karakoram range. Over time nearby mountains with alphanumeric designations became better known by names used by locals.

But sequestered up a glacial cul-de-sac on the Chinese border -- days from the faintest suggestion of human settlement -- K2 kept its foreboding moniker, stoking a reputation as a more wild, untamable and technically demanding ascent than Nepal's Everest, which stands 238 metres higher.

First conquered by Italians in 1954, its winter winds scourge up to 200 kilometres per hour and temperatures plunge to minus 60 degrees Celsius (minus 76 Fahrenheit).

But it also ignites primal passions with its archetypical triangular silhouette -- the shape of a peak a child might draw.

After two days on paths slit through valleys and four more across the Baltoro Glacier -- a 63-kilometre hulk frozen in a permanent storm swell and seamed with crevasses -- K2's first glimpse ripples frisson through hikers.

It stands like an altar at the end of a colossal aisle. Sundown deepens its rocky reliefs and burnishes snowy slopes to rose gold. Pilgrim paragliders come to whirl in its shadow.

One renowned wilderness photographer labelled this vista "the throne room of the mountain gods".

"We love it more than life itself because there's no place of such beauty on Earth," said Central Karakoram National Park (CKNP) warden Muhammad Ishaq.

Against this sublime backdrop Ali Sadpara stood out among a majority white, Western mountaineering elite as a domestic hero who rose from humble roots to scale eight of the world's 14 "super peaks" above 8,000 metres.

"Pakistan's name was raised high because of Ali," said 48-year-old Abbas Sadpara, an unrelated veteran mountaineer who guided the AFP team to K2.

Two years ago Sajid was attempting a perilous winter ascent of K2 with his father and two foreigners when illness forced him back.

The three men who carried on were later discovered dead below the "bottleneck" -- an overhang that looks like a frozen tidal wave on the final stretch before the summit.

Sajid recovered his father's body and performed Islamic rites at an improvised grave near Camp Four -- the last stopoff before the top.

He marked the spot with GPS coordinates before the mountain enveloped the remains at a height of more than 23 Eiffel Towers.

Sajid bears that loss with soft-spoken grace.

His voice, unbruised with emotion, is hard to make out in blaring Islamabad restaurants or the resort town of Skardu where a mural of his father looks on as expeditions jump off in growling jeeps.

But in the nearby village of Choghoghrong -- an oasis of golden cropland blotched with lavender bushes -- it resonates as he recounts the uncommon appreciation of the natural world his father handed down while they worked the land between summit pushes.

"This simple life and this natural life we spent here," Sajid said. "This whole world was my village."

"I am most connected with nature in this village," he said.

But K2 exerts a gravitational pull: a place of extreme risk but also the promise of absolute zen in the curious, adrenaline-addled climber's psyche.

"We want to be on mountains just for mental peace," Sajid said. "If we see any rubbish the feeling is totally different."

"K2 is more than a mountain for me."