There was a period of my life when I was obsessed with mountain climbing. I didn’t climb mountains myself, mind you — I had kids and a budget and a creaky back — but I watched other people climb them on TV.

For a while, I mainlined every documentary the TV gods cared to bestow upon me about high-altitude, high-risk alpinism. It was a very particular type of entertainment, designed to fill the viewer with equal parts admiration for the brave climbers and disdain for them because they were taking such risks with their own and others’ health for a fairly pointless endeavor. Now that I think about it, it’s not that different from a lot of reality TV, which invites the viewer to feel simultaneous jealousy and judgment of the people on the screen.

Anyway, I watched hour after hour of people freezing their butts off in base camp or having discussions about the ethics of using supplemental oxygen, or making life-altering decisions under excruciating circumstances. I eventually tired of the genre, partially because almost all of these shows and documentaries centered on Mt. Everest.

I get why Everest is the star — it’s the biggest mountain in the world! — but that also makes it into a strange subject for this sort of show. It’s not the hardest mountain to climb in the world. It requires less technical skill than other mountains of a similar height. And its popularity has, if you’ll excuse the pun, snowballed — the more attention Everest gets, the more people want to climb it.

Now, Everest is as well known for being a high-altitude garbage dump and for the long lines of climbers who wait for their turn at the summit on the few good climbing days of the year as it is for magnificent feats of daring. Its history is well-known, too. Even casually interested people know the stories of climbers like Mallory and Hillary.

But what about the other mountains — the ones that are just about as tall as Everest, and in many cases more challenging to climb? K2 is only about 800 feet shorter than Everest, and Kangchenjunga, the third-highest peak in the world, is less than 100 feet shorter than that. These mountains, too, have a history. So let’s dig into the history of the two other peaks higher than 28,000 feet, which have an allure and a danger all their own.

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For a while, Kangchenjunga was considered the tallest mountain in the world, sitting on the border between India and Nepal. It looms on the northern horizon about 50 miles north of Darjeeling, dominating the view on a clear day. During the colonial period, British officials who worked at the hill station there would gaze at the massive mountain in their idle moments; it shows up in various works of art by imperial artists. Here’s one from 1854:

And another from 1879:

Eventually, it showed up in photos, too:

As you can see in the images above, the mountain is not just tall, it’s wide; it’s an agglomeration of five peaks above 25,000 feet in an area with over a hundred glaciers and dozens of mountains taller than anything in North America. The local people saw it as a place of great holiness and mystery. Many believed that the mountain’s five peaks concealed five treasuries — of salt, gold, scriptures, weapons, and medicine — that would be opened to humanity in times of crisis. But some of the Europeans who looked out at the mountain saw only a peak to conquer.

Kangchenjunga was dethroned as the world’s highest peak by the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, an undertaking that lasted almost seventy years. The survey was, like so many efforts of this era, a combination of scientific discovery and colonial domination. Its surveyors fanned out across the subcontinent with heavy instruments — some weighed 100 pounds or more — to determine the precise distances between locations and the altitude of the peaks that dominated the northern parts of India.

These efforts resulted in detailed maps of the region, like this one from 1903:

These topographical efforts confirmed that Peak XV (later renamed Everest, after the head of the Survey) was the highest mountain on the planet; by 1856, Kangchenjunga was in third place, where it would remain. But the peak, so close to Darjeeling, still lured in plenty of people who wanted to climb it.

An expedition in 1899 included an Italian photographer, Vittorio Sella, who took a stunning collection of photos. Imagine being one of these climbers, trudging toward deadly altitudes with little knowledge of what lay ahead, wearing gear that was nowhere near as light and waterproof as some of the items I put on to shovel snow in the winter. They turned back 3,000 meters short of the summit.

They camped in these desolate wastes:

One of the most famous early expeditions took place in 1905, headed by this guy, seen here bathing on an earlier expedition near K2, which he also tried to climb:

This is Aleister Crowley, a young British aristocrat who would go on to be one of the most notorious figures of his generation. He was obsessed with alchemy, a member of occult societies, the founder of his own religion, and an all-around weirdo. Somewhere in there, he found the time to lead an assault on Kangchenjunga in 1905.

This was base camp; the photo gives you a sense of the equipment with which these men tried to climb higher than anyone ever had before. The Swiss doctor and photographer Jules Jacot-Guillarmod, who documented their exploits, is on the left:

To be honest, I decided to write this whole post because I couldn’t get this next photograph out of my head. This shows the climbers huddled in Camp IV, above 6,000 meters. Can you imagine being perched on a ridge like this, gasping at the thin air, chilled to the bone?

Here we see the climbers after an avalanche at 6,500 meters — still almost 2,000 meters from the top:

Sometime after this, the expedition fell apart. Crowley’s eccentricities had become a problem — he was cruel to the porters (who, we should not forget, did a lot of the hardest work on these expeditions and are never commemorated in the photos) and reckless. Crowley stayed behind while many of his fellow climbers made their way back down; the descending group triggered an avalanche that killed four of them. Crowley, who heard their cries, refused to help them and, when he descended, wouldn’t even speak to those who had survived. In the end, Crowley stole the expedition’s remaining funds and dubiously claimed to have climbed past 7,000 meters, higher than any other human up to that point.

It wouldn’t be until 1955 — two years after the successful conquest of Everest — that people finally reached the summit, using the Crowley expedition’s route. The climbers, led by George Band and Joe Brown, stopped five feet short of the summit out of respect for the residents of Sikkim, who had asked them not to interfere with the gods that lived on the peak. Mountaineers considered this feat more impressive in some ways than the first summit of Everest, as the expedition had to explore a much larger section of never-climbed mountain and had to do more technical climbing at a higher altitude.

While Kangchenjunga is a massive wall of glaciers, K2 is, as the American climber George Bell called it, “a savage mountain that tries to kill you.” Where Kangchenjunga is broad and imposing, K2, on the boundary between China and Pakistan, is sharp and steep. Look at this thing:

The photo above was taken in 1909 by Prince Luigi Amadeo, Duke of the Abruzzi, who, in addition to his royal duties, tried to reach the North Pole, climbed 16 mountains in Uganda, and took on K2 and other Himalayan Peaks, actually reaching the altitudes that Crowley had claimed to visit on Kangchenjunga on his climb of Chogolisa.

But one of the first depictions of the mountain makes it look small. This sketch by Thomas Montgomerie from 1856 names it K2 (K1 was later renamed Masherbrum). The British usually tried to give mountains names in the local language, but K2 is so remote — it’s not visible from the closest villages, and it’s unclear how many people would have even laid eyes on it before the British survey — that there was no local name to adopt.

The stark, simple name is fitting somehow. As this 1909 photo by Vittorio Sella shows, it’s a monster:

The 1902 expedition, which included Aleister Crowley, took two weeks simply to reach the foot of the mountain. Here’s the caravan working its way along the Karakoram Highway:

Here, the Swiss photographer Jacot-Guillarmod rides a horse on the way to the climb:

Here are some members of the expedition, including Crowley (the one with the messy hair) and Jacot-Guillarmod (sitting in front), who took photos on Kangchenjunga, too:

This is the expedtion at base camp:

They spent over two months on the mountain and made it above 20,000 feet before turning back.

As with Kangchenjunga, climbers attempted K2 again and again over the first half of the 20th century. Many of them died — K2 has earned a reputation as the deadliest of the world’s big peaks, killing a quarter of those who tried it before 2021.

An Italian group finally reached the summit in 1954. Here we see Lino Lacedelli at the summit, looking a bit like a Tusken Raider from Star Wars:

The first summit of K2 is the kind of mountain-climbing story that seems typical of this kind of achievement. Lacedelli and Achille Compagnoni, the team that eventually reached the summit, depended on oxygen tanks brought up to the final camp, Camp IX. But they set their camp higher than previously agreed with the men who ferried the oxygen, Walter Bonatti and Amir Mehdi.

This meant that Bonatti and Medhi, who hadn’t planned to go that high, ended up stranded at 26,000 feet, in a blizzard, without tents or sleeping bags. Lacedelli and Compagnoni seem to have thought that their companions headed back down in the dark, but Bonatti and Medhi couldn’t get back down. They were stuck on the edge of the “death zone,” where the air is too thin to sustain human life. Mehdi lost his mind for a while, and had to be consoled by Bonatti. Then the two men tried to hack a hole in the snow to stay alive for the night.

Bonatti and Mehdi were understandably furious; Mehdi had to have all of his toes amputated due to frostbite; his son later said that he had been “left out in the cold to die.” He struggled to find work for the rest of his life.

The Italian climbers sniped at each other for years afterward. Compagnoni (and journalists sympathetic to him) accused Bonatti of stealing oxygen so that he could make his own run at the summit, leaving the two men who eventually summitted dangerously short of supplies. He also accused Bonatti of abandoning Mehdi.

For his part, Bonatti sued Compagnoni for slander, noting that his story was inconsistent. The controversy reigned until Lacedelli, who had stayed quiet for decades, published a book in 2004 that supported Bonatti’s version of events. He asserted that Compagnoni had moved the camp to keep Bonatti, a younger, stronger climber, from joining the summit team and potentially stealing his moment of glory.

Whether such risk-taking and pettiness at high altitude fascinates, thrills, or disgusts you depends on your outlook. For me, as so often with mountain-climbing stories, it’s a mixture of all three.

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