As many of you will have heard the summit of K2 was reached several days ago after a 3 year wait, the last successful attempt being way back in 2008 - that's a long time for one of the tallest and most infamous mountains in the world! This long wait has been in part due to the extreme difficulty K2 presents climbers with its variable weather and technical difficulty, the death rate is much higher than that of Everest.
My thought is that perhaps it's a good thing if 8,000m peaks aren't being climbed by a truck load of tourists every year; Everest, among others (such as Cho Oyu), are climbed by hundreds of people a year now, wouldn't it be great if permits were just not made available for one year out of every five or out of every ten? Give the mountain a break and make it more exclusive to the more competent and dedicated climber, rather than some rich person with more money than sense attempting the, often under estimated, climb of Everest. It's a shame to see the greatest mountains on earth exploited and over used, 3 years without a climb gave K2 even more allure (and that's only 3 years!) and it would be great if the same could be said for the rest of the 14 8,000m peaks. What do you think?
