Rafal Fronia suffered a broken arm and had to be airlifted to a hospital in Skardu. A fist-sized rock hit Adam Bielecki in the face, gashing his forehead and breaking his nose.
As they fixed ropes and established intermediate camps along the route, stones of various sizes pelted the climbers. One thing the team learned was that the Cesen Spur route, though steeper and shorter than the standard Abruzzi Ridge route, exposed the climbers to persistent rock fall. Two team members were able to make it Advanced Base Camp at 5,200 meters (17,000 feet), only to find the tent crushed and the ropes leading up to Camp 1 buried. The team recorded 80 inches of snowfall in the preceding eight days.
“But if it doesn’t stop snowing, it will become impossible.” “Avalanches have swept away Camp 3 in the past, and we must be extremely careful.” He explained that there had been more snow than on previous winter expeditions, which made the risks much higher. I had been able to reach Wielicki by satellite phone as he was weighing his decision whether to continue the expedition. In the end, it wasn’t the threat of ferocious winds blowing the climbers off the mountain that spelled the end of their expedition but rather the threat of being buried under tons of snow. His team began dismantling their base camp in a remote corner of northeast Pakistan, and the following Sunday they began their arduous 60-mile trek through the snowy Karakoram Range back to the closest road. The week of March 5, 2018, expedition leader Krzysztof Wielicki officially declared the expedition to be over. After two months of subfreezing temperatures, gale-force winds, and dramatic twists, a team of elite Polish mountaineers is abandoning its historic attempt to summit K2 in winter.
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