The North Face Presents: K2 Chasing Shadows

For decades, the prevailing belief in mountaineering was that humans couldn’t survive above 8,000m without supplemental oxygen; a notion disproven in 1970, when Reinhold Messner became the first person to climb Mt. Everest with no bottled oxygen. This feat prompted further paradigm shifts, prompting alpinists to pursue progressively more stripped-down approaches. In 2022, The North Face Athlete Benjamin Védrines set out to break K2’s FKT, failing his attempt and barely escaping to tell the tale. He returned in 2024 to fulfill the challenge that had come to define him—and face the psychological scars of his earlier mission.