The killing began on June 21. An American expedition had set its sights on the Southwest Pillar, a technically demanding route that had never been climbed. Mountaineers called it the Magic Line -- a name that suggested elegance rather than the brutality it would deliver. Team leader John Smolich and Alan Pennington were caught in an avalanche while working the route. Climbers who witnessed the disaster managed to recover Pennington's body, but Smolich's was never found. The rest of the American team abandoned the mountain. It was still early summer. The worst was months away.

Two days later, on June 23, the season's most celebrated moment arrived entangled with its cruelest. French climbers Liliane and Maurice Barrard reached K2's summit at 8,611 meters, just thirty minutes behind their teammate Wanda Rutkiewicz, who had become the first woman ever to stand on top of the world's second-highest mountain. Both Liliane Barrard and Rutkiewicz climbed without supplemental oxygen -- a feat of extraordinary physical will at an altitude where every breath delivers roughly a third of the oxygen available at sea level. As darkness fell, the summit party and two Spanish climbers, Mari Abrego and Josema Casimiro, dug in for an emergency bivouac near the top. All six survived the night. But during the descent, Liliane and Maurice Barrard vanished. Their bodies were never recovered.

The deadliest period began in August, when a massive storm engulfed the upper mountain for days. British expedition leader Alan Rouse had originally obtained a permit for the difficult northwest ridge rather than the conventional Abruzzi Spur. After his team disbanded, Rouse pressed on alone, joining forces with climbers from other expeditions for a summit attempt. He reached the top but was already severely weakened. Trapped at Camp IV by the storm, Rouse deteriorated rapidly while other climbers fought their way down through hurricane-force winds. He never left the mountain. Between August 6 and 10, five climbers died as the storm raged -- Rouse among them.

For those who survived the August storm, escape was its own ordeal. Austrian climbers Willi Bauer and Kurt Diemberger, the last to descend, found that Camp III had been ripped apart by the winds. They managed to reach Camp II on the evening of August 10, but both were badly frostbitten and Diemberger could barely walk. Jim Curran, the expedition's cameraman who had already retreated to Base Camp, climbed back up with a pair of Polish mountaineers to help bring Diemberger down. On August 16, both Bauer and Diemberger were helicoptered to safety. Each lost multiple fingers and toes to frostbite -- the price the mountain extracted for letting them leave alive. Diemberger later wrote about the experience in his book, The Endless Knot, a title that captures the way K2 binds ambition and catastrophe together.

The 1986 season forced the mountaineering world to confront uncomfortable questions about crowding, competition, and judgment at extreme altitude. Multiple expeditions had converged on K2 that summer, many of them vying for first ascents of unclimbed routes. The race to summit created pressure that may have pushed climbers beyond prudent limits and into weather windows that were not truly open. K2 would see similarly devastating seasons in 1995 and again in 2008, as if to remind each new generation that the lessons of 1986 remained unlearned. At 8,611 meters, the Savage Mountain -- the name climbers have given K2 -- does not distinguish between the skilled and the lucky. It simply waits.