By Joshua Calhoun

July 19, 2002 For now, Christine Boskoff is thinking about the top of K2. This month the 34-year-old alpinist is focused on making a 28,250-foot summit of the world's most deadly peak—after that she'll worry about the little things, like getting back down the mountain alive.

Boskoff, the United States' premier female mountaineer (see "Star Power," Outside magazine, December 2001) and owner of Seattle-based expedition outfitter Mountain Madness, believes she has what it takes to become the first U.S. woman to top K2: "It is a difficult climb," she says, "I'm aware of that, but it's not beyond my capabilities."

The odds aren't exactly stacked in her favor. Only five women have ever summited K2, of those five only two made it back down the "savage mountain," and both survivors died in future climbing attempts. There is no woman alive today who has summited K2.

Boskoff intends to see those statistics improve by the end of this month. In the mean time, she's acclimatizing to the high altitude with an attempt on neighboring Broad Peak, an 8,000-meter mountain she first climbed in 1995. But weather hasn't been cooperative, according to the latest dispatch on the Mountain Madness Web site (www.mountainmadness.com). Boskoff and fellow climber Charlie Fowler are waiting at base camp for the chance to make a third attempt on Broad Peak, after which they'll turn their full attention to K2's summit.

Fowler, Boskoff's accomplished climbing partner and a professional film producer, will also be documenting the climb. "We hooked up when we did the south face of Shishapangma," explains Boskoff, "and we just really climbed well together and did our share of the work so it seemed like it was a good fit going into K2."

To add to the difficulty of summiting K2, and the purity of the climb, the tandem will climb by "fair means"—without supplemental oxygen or sherpas to carry their equipment. Their route, the Polish Line, up the south face of the mountain, will consist of technical, rocky climbing up to 6,000 meters, then steep, exposed snow and ice climbing from there to the summit. According to K2climb.net (a Web site tracking eight 2002 K2 expeditions), "If you are not afraid of avalanches, this is the route."

Boskoff is realistic and unassuming. "I'm real confident I'll be able to do it, but it relies on many different factors…the big thing is weather because it can come out of nowhere and get you trapped up high."

"On K2, there is no pattern," says Heidi Howkins, alpinist and author of K2: One Woman's Quest for the Summit, explaining that the two, multi-day weather windows one can expect on Everest simply don't exist on K2. "No one's figured out a formula for K2. There's some of the best climbers in the world there this year and they're repeating it because they didn't summit the first—or the second time."

Chogori or "King of the Mountains" is the local name for the monstrous Karakoram range peak situated on the Pakistan-China border. The apex of K2 is just 785 feet shy of Everest's summit, but the bragging rights are much more elusive. In 1986, nearly half the climbers attempting K2 died, and since its first ascent in 1954, just one year after Sir Edmund Hillary topped Everest, the peak has only been reached 198 times. That's compared with 182 ascents on Everest in 2001 alone.

But Boskoff is no stranger to high altitude trials. A K2 ascent would be her seventh 8,000 meter peak, putting her halfway to becoming the first woman ever to climb all fourteen peaks over 8,000 meters. All these since 1995, shortly before she quit her job in Atlanta engineering flight simulators for Lockheed Martin and moved to Seattle to take over Mountain Madness from Scott Fisher after his tragic death in the Everest disaster of 1996.

She swears she's not counting, though. "It's not a checklist. It's the pure pleasure of climbing and what climbing gives to me and that's why I'm out there doing it…that, for me, is what climbing is all about."