Ali Sadpara, the porter who climbed Nanga Parbat in winter and never came back from K2

Ali Sadpara

Photo: Rao Ahmad / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 2, 1976 Skardu
Died	February 5, 2021 (45)
Occupation	Rock Climber

Ali Sadpara began his working life carrying other men’s ambitions up the Baltoro Glacier, in flip-flops and cast-off gear, and ended it as the climber an entire country was watching on K2. Between those two points sits one of the steepest rises in Himalayan mountaineering: a porter from a village whose name had become shorthand for load-carrying, who stood on top of Nanga Parbat in winter after every previous winter expedition had failed. What his life leaves open is the price of becoming a national symbol at the very moment the high mountains turned into a stage.

The village is Sadpara, a short drive from Skardu in Gilgit-Baltistan, and for generations its men have hauled loads for the foreign expeditions heading to K2 and the Gasherbrums. He was the youngest of eleven children, most of whom did not survive childhood. Football came first: he played in midfield for the Government College in Skardu, and climbing, a childhood friend later said, was only ever his second choice. He married Fatima at nineteen and soon had a son, Sajid, the first of three children.

He was born in that village on 2 February 1976, and the mountains reached him through the only door open to a young man there. He started as a low-altitude porter in the early 1990s and, in the middle of that decade, ran supplies to Pakistani army posts on the way to the Siachen Glacier, the frozen front line with India, climbing ice walls at night under shellfire. “After the Siachen, I wasn’t afraid anymore,” he told Alpinist magazine. By 2005 he was working as a high-altitude porter, and in 2006 he reached his first 8,000-metre summit, Gasherbrum II, in second-hand equipment he had bought and repaired in Skardu. “I didn’t have the right boots, didn’t have a down jacket,” he remembered.

Nanga Parbat became his mountain. He climbed it in 2008 and again in 2009, added Gasherbrum I in 2010, and then joined the Basque alpinist Alex Txikon in the hardest project the peak still offered: a winter ascent. Their first attempt, in 2015, lost the route at around 7,200 metres. On 26 February 2016, Sadpara, Txikon and the Italian Simone Moro reached the summit by the Kinshofer route on the Diamir face, closing a chapter of winter attempts that went back decades. He became the first Pakistani to stand on an 8,000-metre peak in winter, and both of his European partners said publicly that the summit would not have happened without him. Txikon later told the story in his own film, La montaña desnuda.

The years that followed were his most productive. Broad Peak and another Nanga Parbat came in 2017. In the winter of 2018 he joined Txikon on an attempt to climb Everest without supplemental oxygen; they turned back, but made a winter ascent of Pumori along the way. That summer he reached the summit of K2, and in 2019 he added Lhotse, Makalu and Manaslu in Nepal. Eight of the fourteen 8,000-metre peaks, five of them at home: no Pakistani climber had more. He signed on to the French speed climber Marc Batard’s five-year programme, Beyond Mount Everest, and in early 2019 he was on Nanga Parbat again, searching for the missing climbers Daniele Nardi and Tom Ballard.

He never dressed the work up. He told Alpinist that he wanted a sewing machine for his wife and a winter ascent of K2 for himself, and in 2016 he said plainly that he would not want his children to follow him into the profession. Poverty, he argued, was what sent the young men of Sadpara onto the glaciers; given better options, most of them would stop. Recognition from the state arrived late. On 25 January 2021, the government announced it would sponsor his attempt on the remaining 8,000-metre peaks. He was already at K2 base camp.

That winter he had teamed up with the Icelandic climber John Snorri Sigurjónsson, with Sajid alongside. Pakistan had reopened its borders during the pandemic and the mountain filled up: a large Nepali team that included Nirmal Purja and Mingma G, a commercial expedition run by Seven Summit Treks, independent climbers with their own camera operators. On 16 January 2021, ten Nepali climbers made the first winter ascent of K2, the last great first left in the sport. The Spanish climber Sergi Mingote died in a fall that same day. Sadpara and Snorri stayed.

On the evening of 4 February they left the high camp with Sajid and the Chilean Juan Pablo Mohr. At about 8,200 metres, at the foot of the Bottleneck, Sajid’s oxygen regulator failed. His father had told him to use oxygen to climb the gully; those were the last words Sajid heard from him. The son turned back. Contact with the other three was lost on 5 February, and whether they reached the summit has never been established. On 18 February, Pakistani authorities and the family declared them dead.

The heroic version took hold in Pakistan almost immediately: the national son lost on the national mountain. Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary The Last First: Winter K2, which premiered at Sundance in January 2026 and reached Apple TV on 2 October, tells a less comfortable story. In its account, the small Snorri-Sadpara team woke one morning to find the Nepalis had set off for the summit without them, despite an agreement to climb together. After Mingote’s death, when many expected the remaining teams to leave, Pakistani officials visited base camp and made clear the country was counting on its two climbers, while the filmmaker Elia Saikaly, backed by the government, arrived to document a victorious Sadpara ascent. The film credits Sadpara as a mountain guide on the Icelander’s expedition, and the A.V. Club singled out “Ali’s complex relationship with the Pakistani government” as one of its threads. The documentary does not claim anyone ordered him up the mountain. It shows how many people had a stake in his going.

On 26 July 2021, a Sherpa rope-fixing team working for Madison Mountaineering found three bodies on the route above Camp 4. Sadpara’s lay about 300 metres below the Bottleneck, with Snorri’s a short way beyond and Mohr’s lower down. Sajid had come back to K2 that summer with Saikaly and Pasang Kaji Sherpa to search for them, and he was waiting at Camp 4 to be led to his father. That same month he reached the summit of K2 for the second time. In 2023 he became the first Pakistani to climb Everest without supplemental oxygen, the son of a man who had hoped his children would never climb at all.

Pakistan has since put his name on the map. A roundabout in Gilgit is now Sadpara Chowk, a park in Karachi’s Korangi district carries his name, a climbing wall at Peshawar’s Qayyum Stadium was dedicated to him, and the Gilgit-Baltistan government approved a mountaineering school in his honour. The monuments settle the hero. His record argues something harder: that the climbers of Baltistan were never only the porters in someone else’s photograph, and that by the time the state and the cameras noticed, the mountain had become a race he had not chosen to run.

Tags: sports, athletes, The Last First: Winter K2, Ali Sadpara, K2, John Snorri, mountaineering