Peter Hillary says bodies will remain on K2

A New Zealand climber who escaped a terrifying ordeal on the world's second-highest peak, K2, said on Wednesday it was "totally impractical" to recover the bodies of six dead companions.

Peter Hillary, son of Sir Edmund Hillary, who was one of the first to climb Mount Everest, said he turned back from his summit attempt on K2 when he realized a blizzard was closing in.

Fellow New Zealander Bruce Grant decided to press on and join mountaineers from Spain, the United States, and Scotland who successfully scaled K2 but were killed on the descent.

"I must say I was very unhappy about the conditions, but they just seemed to think they'd go on, which they did, and they actually reached the top late in the evening just before the storm slammed into them," Hillary said in a radio interview from Skardu in Pakistan.

"It was an absolutely vicious storm. I had a pretty terrible time getting lower down the mountain, so I shudder to think what it was like up there at the top."

The climbers who died on the descent were Grant, Alison Hargreaves of Scotland, Robert Slater of the United States and Spaniards Javier Escartin, Lorenzo Ortiz Monson, and Javier Olivar.

A seventh climber, Canadian Jeff Lakes, fell sick with pulmonary edema brought on by the altitude and made his way down from Camp 4 to Camp 2, where he died on August 14.

"We know that Alison Hargreaves fell a very great distance down the south face and we don't really know what happened to the other guys, but they never came home," Hillary said.

Earlier this year, Hargreaves, the mother of two, became the first woman to climb Everest, the world's highest mountain, alone and without oxygen.

Hillary said the bodies could not be recovered from K2 because of the risks involved and the fact that helicopters could not fly at such high altitudes.

"Recovering bodies from these very high mountains is not dissimilar to trying to recover bodies from the moon," he said.

"We don't even know where they are. We just know that they're right up near the top somewhere, so that's where they're going to have to stay."

Hillary said there would be "a fair amount of water under the bridge" before he decided whether to attempt K2 again.

"When you lose a couple of friends just when everything was looking very promising, it really comes as a terrible blow. We certainly tried to do whatever we could for the other guys, but when the storm came in, it's really in the lap of the gods."

This story prepared by Reuters