On July 22 2018, a Polish ski mountaineer clicked into his bindings at an altitude of 8,611m to make history. Follow And | dG1fM3N1UGptalhnTGM
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Short filmTranscript
00:00All of a sudden, your whole body switches.
00:11You're starting over from scratch because you're not climbing anymore.
00:15You're using different muscles, you're using different brain waves, different fear pathways.
00:22When you're in big mountains, in the Himalayas, in the Karakoram, there's a lot of snow.
00:52There's potential for massive avalanches, class 4 or 5 avalanches that would take out of town.
00:58You just don't know what's going to happen. It's a very unstable environment.
01:07No go right side yet.
01:10I had to cut the route with the climbers.
01:13There were a few people I could potentially blame.
01:22It's a very delicate balance, which means that your capacity to assess your terrain
01:30and your level of situational awareness has to be at a very, very elite level.
01:40You know, of course, we're at very high altitudes.
01:43Lack of oxygen makes decision-making quite difficult.
01:46Your brain feels foggy or like when you are drunk.
01:49And so this adds a lot of risk to everything you do.
02:00The thing about K2 is if the snow is firm, pretty much every single place on K2,
02:06if you fall, you will go to the bottom. There is nowhere to stop.
02:13This means that any small mistake will be fatal.
02:37I have already spent several hours above 8,000 meters.
02:44I have to move on.
02:46Soon I will face the most dangerous part of the route.
02:49The grass from Messner.