The Final Summit

This year’s race to be the first-ever climbers to make a risky winter summit of K2 was ripe with ego and intrigue and ended in both triumph and tragedy.

- By Jeff Moag

It’s New Year’s Eve, 2020, at K2 base camp, a tent village of about 100 souls on a patch of icy scree 16,300 feet above sea level and five days’ march from the nearest road. The world’s second-highest mountain looms even higher above, its 28,251-foot summit still untouched in winter.

Outside it’s –20 degrees, but thankfully, the wind has tapered off. The hissing kerosene heaters in the Seven Summits Treks mess tent hold the mercury somewhere above freezing as Mike Posner, the U.S. singer-songwriter-turned-trekker, claps out a beat and launches into his 2015 signature party anthem, “I Took a Pill in Ibiza.”

I’m a real big baller ’cause I made a million dollars

And I spent it on girls and shoes

Cellphone cameras pan climbers from around the world, their voices joining Posner in the chorus—all I know are sad songs—as he flashes a broad smile and raises his palms in encouragement, like some kind of puffy-coated orchestra conductor.