K2 The Impossible Descent

‘K2: The Impossible Descent’ tells the story of Bargiel’s historic ski descent. A new feature-length documentary on Red Bull TV (released on July 22) reveals what happened behind the scenes of Polish ski mountaineer Andrzej Bargiel’s world-first mission. Bargiel was an athlete keeping a low profile when he summited K2 without oxygen and skied from peak to base without removing his skis in 2018. This seemingly impossible challenge had never been completed before or since.

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The ascent of K2 alone is an extraordinary achievement with one in four people who attempt it never returned. Following a 60+ hour ascent up K2 without supplemental oxygen, Bargiel’s historic route down K2 involved skiing from the summit to the shoulder at 8,000m as quickly as possible to escape the notorious ‘death zone,’ where the body is dying by the minute. Bargiel had to dodge ice falling at the speed of bullets to reach the treacherous Messner Traverse, a barely-climbed narrow route with deep caverns on either side and on to the crevasse-filled Kukuczka Piotrowski route back to base camp. At the time, only Bargiel’s team, including his brother Bartek, knew how perilously close the mission came to failure when his climbing partner Janusz Golab became sick. A drone flown by Andrzej’s brother Bartek was used to carry up emergency medical supplies that stabilized Golab and le