The Italian ambassador to Pakistan confirmed the death of two climbers, one British and one Italian, who had been missing on Nanga Parbat (the killer mountain) while climbing. The bodies of both missing climbers found dead on Pakistan’s Nanga Parbat.
The bodies of the two missing climbers ( Daniele Nardi and Tom Ballard ) were located at an altitude of nearly 20,000 ft, on a part of the mountain known as the Mummery Spur.
Ali Sadpara, head of the rescue team, said the bodies of the two climbers had been found near Camp Three on Nanga Parbat and their bodies were in a dangerous part of the mountain from where it was not possible to retrieve them.
The biggest mistake
The biggest mistake made by the team was to choose the most dangerous route to reach the top, discovered by George Memory, instead of the Diamer face.
This route has frequent blizzards and avalanches. This is the suicidal route; whoever wants to commit suicide should take this route.
According to sources, the first accident happened to Tom and Daniel above base camp when an avalanche destroyed their camp and they both fell into a Crevice.
The high-altitude porter, Rehmatullah Baig was just behind the team, so, he saved them. He pulled them both out of the Crevice and refused to go further with them. The avalanche destroyed the camp as well as all equipment.
The “Mummery Spur”
The “Mummery Spur,” is named after Alfred Mummery, a mountaineer who was killed by an avalanche in 1895 while trying to scale the peak.
Nanga Parbat is known as the “Killer Mountain” because while trying to climb it, a very large number of people died.
Hundreds of mountaineers, most of them from Europe, each summer attempt to scale half a dozen peaks in the region, but only a few make the attempt in winter.
Search and rescue mission
Karrar Haidri, secretary of the Alpine Club of Pakistan, said that Pakistani authorities have done everything they could to find the climbers. But now we’ve got the very bad news that our Missing climbers found dead on the Nanga Parbat in Pakistan.
Despite the closure of its airspace amid tensions with neighboring India over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, Pakistan dispatched helicopters carrying four rescuers led by Spanish mountaineer Alex Txikon. He said their efforts were hampered by foul weather.
Tom Ballard and Daniele Nardi
Ballard, 30 years old, is the son of the famous British climber, Alison Hargreaves, who in 1995 became the first woman to climb Mount Everest without help but died later that year as she descended from the top of Pakistan’s K2, the second-highest mountain in the world.
Nardi, 42, from Rome, had tried many times to climb Nanga Parbat in winter. This time, they had taken the path of ascent which no one had succeeded before
After finding two “silhouettes” using a high-definition telescope, Spanish climber Alex Txikon later found the bodies on the Mummery Spur trail, at around 5,900 m (19,356 ft).
Mr. Pontecorvo has released a video on Instagram showing two close-up figures on a small snow patch surrounded by jagged rocks. He said the bodies are going to be hard to reach but to try and recover them would be done everything possible.
A climber is someone climbing new routes
It was the most extraordinary human and alpine experience I’ve ever had because it spared my life, it let me taste its violence and its honey, the Queen of Mountains, the Killer Mountain. “Daniele Nardi, 2014.
It is an ancient truism that death gives a mountaineer greater visibility than life. News anchors have chuntered over the past two weeks, keyboards battered, and printers rattled as media and public around the globe fixed on the search for Daniele Nardi and Tom Ballard on Nanga Parbat.
With the discovery of the lifeless bodies of the pair, joined by a rope, haplessly stretched across a slope on the Mummery Spur, through a long-distance photo, attention now turns to the reasons for their demise and to remember how they lived.
Karim Shah Nizari, a Gilgit mountain climber from Pakistan, near Nanga Parbat, said: “Nardi was very strong mentally. He was highly motivated and differed from other climbers. He was always saying, ‘A climber is someone climbing new routes.'”
Nardi could handle the Spur and wouldn’t take unnecessary risks
“He tried the route three times and nothing happened, so that wasn’t so dangerous to him. He had a better understanding of Nanga Parbat and the Mummery Spur than any other climber in the world.
The talented and tenacious mountaineer was hoping to build a mountaineering school to train rescue personnel in Pakistan. He is leaving a wife and a baby son behind. Shah Nizari remembers saying, “I’m going to be more careful now because I’m a dad.
