Russian-American climber found dead on Karakoram mountain

ISLAMABAD: A missing Russian-American climber died on a mountain while preparing to scale the world’s 12th-highest peak, having refused to turn back in dangerous winter conditions, a spokesman for the expedition said Tuesday.

Alex Goldfarb pushed on alone when his teammate failed to persuade him to give up during an acclimatising mission, ahead of a bid to scale the nearby 8,051-metre Broad Peak in the Karakoram range on the Chinese border.

"We are deeply saddened to have lost our climbing partner and friend," said Laszlo Pinter, spokesman for the Broad Peak Winter Expedition 2021. "The helicopter search mission has found his body on Pastore Peak where he is presumed to have fallen off the mountain," he said in a statement.

It has been a bittersweet week for the climbing community, which saw 10 Nepali climbers scale K2 for the first time in winter -- but also the death of Spanish climber Sergi Mingote on the same mountain.

Goldfarb was attempting a winter ascent of Broad Peak with Hungarian Zoltan Szlanko as part of a two-man non-sponsored expedition. The pair had first been acclimatising on the 6,209 metre Pastore Peak.

Their team described the attempt as “the cleanest style without any high altitude porters and supplemental oxygen”. Szlanko, an experienced climbing instructor and mountaineer rescuer, deemed conditions too dangerous and insisted both should return, Pinter said, but Goldfarb pressed ahead.