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The end of June 1986 had not yet come, and already K2 had taken four lives. The pattern of catastrophe during this “dangerous summer” would be utterly different from the tragedies of 1939 and 1953, which struck within the ranks of the only team on the mountain at the time. It would be different, for that matter, from the 2008 disaster on K2 or the 1996 debacle on Everest, each of which burst forth in a single dramatic two-day event—the freakish storm of May 10–11 on Everest, the serac collapse and benightment of August 1–2 on K2.

Instead, in 1986, one bad situation after another would develop through the summer, scarring the mountain with a series of isolated tragedies. Around each death, a collective grief would briefly bring members from the different expeditions together, as in the funeral service for Smolich and Pennington or the base camp vigil for the lost French climbers. But then the teams would go back to their separate missions.

Benoît Chamoux had been deeply concerned about the fate of his compatriots, and he may have saved Parmentier’s life by talking him down to the top of the fixed ropes. But only a week after that hair-raising episode, Chamoux set off again up the Abruzzi in quest of his speed record. Climbing in loose association with the Italians, whose fixed ropes and blazed tracks he took advantage of, on July 4–5 Chamoux essentially soloed the mountain, climbing all the way from base camp to the summit in the astounding time of twenty-three hours. Instead of stopping to camp, he climbed straight through the night, taking short breaks to gulp down food and swallow drinks. He reached the top at 5:00 P.M. on July 5, spent half an hour there, then headed down into his second night. After a short sleep at 24,900 feet with the Italians, he bombed on down to base camp the next day.

Chamoux’s performance was dazzling; in itself, it almost mocked the notion of climbing an 8,000er by going from camp to camp on successive days or retreating to base to gear up for another attempt, as we had to do in 1992. (“‘Gobsmacked’ was the only word to describe our reactions,” Curran wrote.) That summer, Chamoux was in fantastic shape. Only two weeks earlier, he had soloed Broad Peak in a comparable dash, an exploit that had honed the acclimatization he would need for K2.

Chamoux’s twin killing was one of the first examples ever performed in the Himalaya or the Karakoram of what I would later call a “twofer” (as in “two for the price of one”). It turns out to be the most efficient way to go after 8,000ers, provided you can keep that edge of fitness and not get worn down by the sheer exertion of it all. In 1995, I would pull off my only “threefer,” climbing Makalu, Gasherbrum I, and Gasherbrum II in a span of two months, though I had a two-week break back home between Makalu and the Gasherbrums. (I would actually have accomplished a “fourfer” had we not stopped less than 350 feet short of Everest’s summit just before my Makalu expedition.) In 2003, J.-C. Lafaille notched his own threefer, climbing Dhaulagiri, Nanga Parbat, and Broad Peak in succession (the last two with me), although the pulmonary edema that felled him on the summit of Broad Peak might have been partly caused by the sheer intensity of his campaign.

One of the members of the Italian team who also reached the summit on July 5 was a Czech, Jozef Rakoncaj, who three years earlier had climbed K2 by the difficult north ridge. Rakoncaj thus became the first man to climb K2 twice. That’s a remarkable achievement, too. Twenty-three years later, only two other men have climbed K2 twice. Yet I doubt that many K2 aficionados are aware of Rakoncaj’s feat, or have even heard of the man.

Meanwhile, Jerzy Kukuczka was gearing up for his monumental alpinestyle attempt on the south face—not by the Magic Line, but along an equally serious and committed route to the right, or east, of it. Kukuczka and his Polish teammate, Tadeusz Piotrowski, had bought their way onto a massive international team led by the notorious