Climber denies walking past dying sherpa to set world record at K2

Kristin Harila is facing backlash after drone footage was released appearing to show her team climbing over a dying sherpa to reach the summit of K2.

A Norwegian mountaineer is defending her actions in the face of backlash surrounding drone footage that appears to show her team climbing over a dying sherpa to reach the summit of K2 in Pakistan.

Kristin Harila, 37, set a world record when she completed the K2 climb on July 27, becoming the fastest person to scale all 14 of the world’s tallest mountains with an elevation over 8,000 metres.

She completed the feat, alongside her Nepali sherpa Tenjen (Lama) Sherpa, in just three months and one day, breaking the previous record held by Nepali-British mountaineer Nirmal Purja, who took six months and six days.

But Harila’s critics are saying she will be remembered not for her record-breaking accomplishment, but for her inhumanity, after her team failed to save 27-year-old Mohammed Hassan from dying on K2. Meanwhile, the Norwegian climber says the dangerous conditions that day forced her team to split up.

The footage that sparked the scandal was released by Austrian climbing duo Wilhelm Steindl and Philip Flämig, who were also on K2 that day. They were recording drone footage when they captured video of multiple climbers walking over Hassan’s body to continue their summit.

Flämig described what they captured to Austria’s Standard newspaper: “He is being treated by one person while everyone else is pushing towards the summit. The fact is that there was no organized rescue operation, although there were sherpas and mountain guides on site who could have taken action.”

Flämig and Steindl were far below “the bottleneck” of K2, where Hassan died, when they filmed the drone footage.

“If he had been a Westerner, he would have been rescued immediately,” Steindl said. “No one felt responsible for him. What happened there is a disgrace. A living human was left lying so that records could be set.”