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A Norwegian mountaineer has denied allegations that members of her climbing team walked over a dying porter and did nothing to help him during their record-breaking ascent of K2 in Pakistan last month.
Kristin Harila, 37, insisted that climbers did everything they could to save Mohammed Hassan, after the 27-year-old married dad-of-three plummeted from a narrow ridge, but conditions were too dangerous to move him.
“It is simply not true to say that we did nothing to help him,” Harila told the Telegraph. “We tried to lift him back up for an hour and a half and my cameraman stayed on for another hour to look after him. At no point was he left alone.”
Harila, who, along with her Nepali Sherpa Tenjen (Lama) Sherpa, became the world’s fastest climbers to scale all peaks above 26,000 feet, was forced to defend her actions after drone footage emerged showing mountaineers clambering over Hassan on the snowbound peak.
Australian climbers Wilhelm Steindl and Philip Flämig, who were on K2 that day and captured the video, accused Harila and her cohorts of abandoning Hassan in pursuit of a new world record.
“He is being treated by one person while everyone else is pushing towards the summit,” Flämig told Austria’s Standard newspaper, referring to the recording. “The fact is that there was no organized rescue operation although there were Sherpas and mountain guides on site who could have taken action.”
Steindl argued that Hassan “was treated like a second-class human being.”
“If he had been a westerner, he would have been rescued immediately,” he added. “No one felt responsible for him. What happened there is a disgrace. A living human was left lying so that records could be set.”
Steindl, who claimed to have visited Hassan’s family after his death, said that the 27-year-old had no mountaineering experience but took the job of rope fixer in the K2 expedition to pay for his sick mother’s medical bills.
Harila, who published a detailed account of what happened on her official website Thursday, said that the porter was ascending one of the world’s deadliest peaks with no snowsuit, gloves or a supply of oxygen.
Harila made history on July 27 by becoming the speediest climber to scale all the world’s 14 highest mountains, accomplishing the feat in 92 days and breaking the previous record of 189 days set in 2019.
This year was her second attempt to set the record of becoming the fastest climber of the 14 peaks.
Harila said Mount K2, the last one on her list, was the most difficult one to conquer. K2 is the second-highest peak in the world.
After receiving a hero’s welcome at the Kathmandu airport in Nepal upon her return from the summit, Harila announced she was retiring from high peaks.
In her account of the events of July 27, Harila wrote that she had waited two weeks to comment on the fatal incident out of respect for Hassan’s family, but decided to share her side of the story to counter what she slammed as “misinformation and hatred that is now being spread.”
“I also feel angry at how many people have been blaming others for this tragic accident,” the trailblazing mountaineer wrote. “This was no one’s fault, you cannot comment when you do not understand the situation, and sending death threats is never okay.”
Harila argued that she, her Sherpa and especially her cameraman, Gabriel, did everything they could to rescue Hassan from what she said was “the most dangerous part of the deadliest mountain in the world.”
The mountain climber recounted how she and several teams were making their way through a dangerous part of the journey to K2’s summit, known as the “bottleneck,” when Hassan, who was walking ahead as part of a rope fixing team, “had fallen and was hanging on the rope between 2 ice anchors,” she wrote.
Harila said she does not know whether Hassan slipped, or whether a patch of snow collapsed beneath him.
By Harila’s estimates, Hassan had fallen almost 16 feet and ended up hanging upside down, with his stomach exposed to the snow and freezing temperatures.
Harila described in detail her team’s efforts to pull Hassan up. Since he did not have an oxygen mask to breathe more easily in the thin air, the climber’s cameramen gave him his and stayed with him.
“As we were trying to move Hassan up closer to the path, an avalanche went off around the corner where the fixing team was,” Harila wrote. “We got message that they had problems. At this stage, we decided to split up. Gabriel stayed with Hassan and his friend in the bottleneck.”
Harila recounted that after spending an hour and a half with Hassan, she and her Sherpa went ahead to see if they could assist the other team after hearing their distress call.
After learning that the fixing team was safe, Harila said she stayed back and asked other porters if they were turning around to where Hassan was, leading her to believe that more help was on the way.
“We decided to continue forward as too many people in the bottleneck would make it more dangerous for a rescue,” Harila explained. “Considering the amount of people that stayed behind and that had turned around, I believed Hassan would be getting all the help he could, and that he would be able to get down. We did not fully understand the gravity of everything that happened until later.”
Harila also addressed the images of people walking over the dying porters body, arguing that other climbers were just trying to get away from the “dangerous bottleneck” that lies at more than 26,200 feet above sea level.
Meanwhile, Gabriel, the cameraman who helped pull Hassan back onto the ridge, gave him more oxygen and hot water to keep him warm “as best as he could,” Harila wrote.
More than two hours into the harrowing ordeal, Gabriel noticed that he had almost no oxygen left, and Harila wrote that he “realized that if he himself wanted to come home that day,” he needed to fetch more oxygen from another Sherpa climbing up ahead.
“In total, I think Gabriel spent almost 2,5h with Hassan in the bottleneck while people were passing by,” Harila noted. “I don’t think people understood the gravity of what was happening with Hassan as they were climbing, and that is why we see they are stepping over him to reach safety on the other side.”
At the same time, the Norwegian and members of her team were continuing their ascent to the summit, believing, according to Harila, that Hassan was receiving all the necessary help
When Gabriel later joined the rest of the group at the peak, he told Harila that Hassan was still alive but in a bad shape and might not make it down K2. If was not until the mountaineers came down the mountain that they learned the porter had died.
Harila insisted that she and her team were “in no shape to carry his body down” — an effort that would typically requiring six people – given their own physical state and the treacherous terrain.
When the climbers reached base camp, Harila said she heard talk that no one had helped Hassan — even though she said they had “done their best.”
Harila also lashed out at those who have been sharing videos and photos of Hassan’s body on the ridge, saying that it was disrespectful.
“He was a person who was important to so many people and he should not just be remembered as a person who passed on K2,” the climber wrote.
Thaneswar Gurugai, the general manager of Seven Summits which organized Harila’s expedition, told the Telegraph that Hassan was suffering from frostbite and hyperthermia when he died.
Harila said that tragedyon K2 should serve as a reminder that “everyone that goes up a summit needs proper training, proper equipment and proper guidance” — something that Hassan apparently lacked.
She added that while the accident was in no way the man’s fault, “it shows the importance of taking all of the possible precautions so that we can help ourselves and others.”
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