Climber who lost mom on K2 goes missing while scaling ‘Killer Mountain’
A climber who lost his mother on K2 has gone missing while scaling Pakistan’s Nanga Parbat.
A British climber — whose mother was killed while descending the peak K2 in 1995 — was found dead with his climbing partner Saturday nearly two weeks after they vanished while Pakistan’s Nanga Parbat, the world’s ninth-tallest peak dubbed “Killer Mountain.”
The bodies of Briton Tom Ballard, 30, and Italian Daniele Nardi, 42, were located about 19,356 feet up Nanga Parbat, Stefano Pontecorvo, the ambassador of Italy in Pakistan, confirmed Saturday in a tweet. Ballard and Nardi were reported missing after they last made contact with friends and family on Feb. 24 at the altitude of about 20,669 feet.
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The climbers vanished when bad weather struck region and recent tensions between Pakistan and India over the disputed Kashmir region.
Briton Tom Ballard, right, and Italian Daniele Nardi were found dead on Pakistani mountain Nanga Parbat. (AP)
Ballard’s tragic death seemed to mirror the fate of his mother Alison Hargreaves, who died at age 33 while descending the summit of K2m the second-highest peak in the world. Hargreaves made history in 1995 when she became the first woman to climb Mount Everest unaided. She only got to celebrate her achievement for three months before she and five others died on K2 hours after reaching the summit due to a storm.
The search for the two mountain climbers was initially called off on Wednesday until a team reported seeing silhouettes in the snow where Ballard and Nardi vanished. The Italian ambassador shared telescopic pictures taken by Txikon, who concluded the silhouettes were the bodies of the men.
"We are stricken by grief in reporting that the search effort for Daniele and Tom is over," Nardi's staff said in a note of condolence on Nardi's Facebook page." ''The pain is great; confronted with objective facts, and after having done everything possible to find them, we have to accept what happened."
Ambassador Stefano Pontecorvo tweeted Saturday with grief that search for Italian Daniele Nardi and Briton Tom Ballard is over as search and rescue team headed by Alex Txikon has confirmed the silhouettes spotted at about 5900 meters are those of the two climbers who went missing at Nanga Parbat nick named “Killer Mountain."
Nardi, who is from near Rome, had attempted to scale Nanga Parbat in winter several times.
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Authorities said the men’s bodies are in a difficult area to retrieve. Nanga Parbat is notoriously hard to climb and known for the high number of deaths on its peak.
Ballard became an avid hiker despite his mother’s death in 1995. Chris Terrill, a friend of the Ballard family, told the BBC that they were a “mountain family.” He recalled Ballard’s father taking his children to K2 after Hargreaves death.
"It was an extraordinary expedition and it ignited something in Tom," Terrill said. “And no-one was going to stop him from following in his mother's footsteps. As tragic as his death is, he died doing what he loved.”
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The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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