K2's unclimbed North Ridge Expedition report -- Tuesday, September 3 Reflections on K2 summit bid Our correspondent R.D. Caughron filed the following update from London following his departure from K2 base camp. The international team succeeded in putting five of ten team members on the summit of K2, though they did so via the standard route, rather than the unclimbed north ridge as they had intended. This is R.D. Caughron calling with some reflections on our K2 trip. We're all back except for Krzysztof Wielicki who just summited Nanga Parbat on the Diamir Face. This was the only ascent of Nanga Parbat this year. Two other expeditions were on it but failed. It took Krzysztof about five days after returning from the summit of K2. That's pretty impressive. In any event, overall we got to the top five out of ten members, but we had a lot of tensions on this trip. This was a very difficult expedition for us all. If I had to summarize some feelings about K2--well, it was a fantastic adventure and much harder than I thought: steeper, worse weather, more uncertain weather. A lot of hard work to fix and replace the fixed ropes. And very limited tent sites on the route we were on. It's also more isolated than I'd imagined. And psychologically it's a big problem because there's no medical support if anything happens. Also, socially you're just there with your partners. And it's not like other expeditions where you're surrounded by large numbers of other people. Our climb was very complex to manage. We had some disruptive elements in our team and there was some personal behavior that created some organizational tensions, which kind of frayed us. We lacked a strong leader and we had some communication problems. So that part of it was fairly difficult. Also, the climb was pretty resource limited. We ran out of food. Everything was stretched. Our equipment was stretched. The time we spent there was stretched. The route was dangerous. We had one climber, the Russian climber, die of fatigue and I think Carlos was pretty close to the edge. It took him ten hours coming back from the high camp. Also, we had one climber, one of our Italian climbers, Marco Bianchi, who suffered from shock and frostbite and he was very close to it. And people who were lucky. Krzysztof fell into a crevasse and managed to survive it. At any rate, it's a big individual accomplishment to climb K2 but it's also a shared accomplishment with the other people on the team, the porters, the cooks, and especially the Russians. The Russians showed up mid-point and considerably added to our sense of strength of being on that route. It was a big disappointment for some on our team. I think maybe the thing for me, the thing I think about is there was a lack of camaraderie and some people who wanted to summit but didn't--including me.