           II: The Climber's Obsession  In profile, K2 looks
like a child's drawing of an idealized mountain: a jagged, snow-
clad pyramid of black stone, nightmarishly steep on all faces
and plunging 10,000 feet to the surrounding glaciers. Spotted
and named by members of a British trigonometric survey in 1856,
K2 stands astride the Pakistan-China border in the Karakoram
Range, at the center of the greatest agglomeration of high peaks
on Earth. An Italian team first reached the summit in 1954, a
year after Sir Edmund Hillary knocked off Everest.  Everest may
be 800 feet higher, but K2's notorious weather, its mind-
boggling exposures, and its immense technical challenges make it
far more dangerous than its taller sibling. In all, more than
3,679 climbers have summited Everest, while 210 have died. For
all the righteous critiques of Everest and its commercial cattle
drive, that mountain is actually getting safer. Only two
climbers were lost in the 2008 season. The odds on K2 are much
worse: Just 299 people have