Trio make difficult choice to abort climb to K2 summit

Three Irish men yesterday aborted their climb to the summit of K2, the second highest mountain in the world, but they are considering another attempt.

Gerard McDonnell from Limerick, Mick Murphy from Cork and Banjo Bannon from Newry were travelling with different summit teams but they all arrived back at base camp yesterday afternoon.

They had been trying to get to Camp 4 from where they would make their attempt to reach the peak of the 8,611m mountain in the Himalayan range.

However, altitude sickness forced many of the climbers back and the remaining ones could not go alone, according to adventurer Pat Falvey who was in contact with the climbers yesterday.

He said it was a hard decision to make but it was probably the right one, given their energy levels and lack of oxygen.

"Everyone is exhausted. Tiring bodies need to re-energise themselves to make a summit attempt and the climbers are now weakened from the push of the last few days of getting food and shelter to these high camps," he said.

"The longer that they spend up high on the mountain, the weaker they will become."

The three men left their homes nearly two months ago to climb the mountain, which is on the border of China and Pakistan.

Mr Falvey said they were very experienced and had all climbed Mount Everest already. K2 was even harder to scale than Mount Everest because it had more technical sections and attracted severe weather.

He said that the permit held by Mr Murphy and Mr McDonnell was about to expire in the coming days but they were hoping to use Mr Bannon's permit because it would last for a few more weeks.

Everything now hinged on the weather forecast, Mr Falvey said. The weather was good at K2 yesterday but looked set to worsen later this week.

That would put "severe stress" on the team, he said. The coming days would be difficult and frustrating because they would have to readjust to the reality of having to spend more time on the mountain than they had expected.

This is not the first attempt on K2 by Irish climbers. It was tried in 1998 by a group led by Calvin Torrans and last year by Banjo Bannon. Bad weather forced back both groups.

For updates on the men's progress, see www.patfalvey.com