By the time Mingma G reached the next camp on K2, his team had not heard from the Broad Peak climbers. They didn’t panic because climbers often turn off the radio to save battery life.
But something was bothering him.
One of the Broad Peak climbers, Wang Zhong, was a close friend and a client. He would normally message Mingma G through his Garmin satellite tracker to let him know he’d arrived safely at the next camp. But there was no message from him.
Thousands of metres below, Pakistani mountain guide Waqar Ali says he was also trying to contact the group, but to no avail. He thought they may have been sleeping, in preparation for a final push towards the summit that night.
But by 15:00, no-one at base camp had had any contact with the group on Broad Peak.
Mingma G was 7,300m up on K2, where communication was difficult. His team started calling officials, families, contacts in Kathmandu and anyone who might have been in touch with the climbers.
He says it was probably 20:00 when they first heard that the altitude readings from the Broad Peak climbers’ trackers had dramatically fallen: one of them had dropped by around 1,600m.
It was too late to climb and too dark to send up a drone, so he decided to wait for sunrise. “I had hope,” Mingma G says. Especially for Kilu and Nims, who were “experienced and physically… strong”.
Early next morning, a drone was sent up and soon after, the operator radioed them. The drone had spotted bodies down the mountain. It looked like there were no survivors.
“I was totally blank,” Mingma G recalls in a low voice.
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