The most formidable of the 8000-metre peaks, K2 has always represented the direst challenge to climbers. Weissner, Bonatti, Scott, Bonington and Dienberger are a few of those whose lives have been changed forever on K2. Jim Curran, himself a member of the British expedition in the ill-fated year of disasters, 1986, recounts the international attempts to climb it, many of which ended in death, controversy or heroic retreat.