Naperville native and mountain climbing record-setter Lucy Westlake announced via Instagram that she made the decision to end her climb to the summit of K2, the world’s highest mountain after Everest.
Dangerous conditions along K2 climb
According to her Instagram post, Westlake decided at 26,300 feet to turn around and forego the remainder of the climb due to a large avalanche.
“If it had been any bigger, I would have died,” she said, then describing how a fellow climber had fallen into a crevasse and couldn’t be rescued. Upon attempting to do so, a second avalanche was triggered.
“We all knew that if everyone had continue to push for the summit, more people would’ve died,” Westlake said. “I knew if I chose to go up while others chose to go down for the safety of their community members, I would never be proud of that summit, but if I chose my community over myself, I would always have peace.”
The young mountaineer started her climb more than a month ago and faced a number of threating weather events along the way, according to her mother, Amy Westlake. She shared with NCTV17 that one major storm drew heavy winds that caused the tents of fellow climbers to blow away on July 13.
“Lucy and Mingma discovered that their tent, which had all their summit gear inside, was the only tent that did not get blown away, and therefore, their essential gear survived and they are ready to continue up as planned,” she reported at that time.
Mingma is Lucy’s sherpa, or mountaineering partner.
Attempting another record
Had she reached the top, Lucy would have been the youngest woman to complete the journey to the K2 summit at 19 years old.
“To date, less than 500 people have ever reached the top and less than 50 of them have been women,” Amy wrote NCTV17 in an email.
British mountaineer Adriana Brownlee is currently the record holder for youngest woman to summit K2, doing so on July 28, 2022, at the age of 21 years old.
The youngest person ever to do so is male Pakistani mountaineer, Shehroze Kashif, who summited K2 on July 27, 2021, at 19 years old.
“Am I disappointed? Of course I am!” Lucy writes of her K2 attempt’s end. “But I know I made the right decision.”
Westlake climbs for a cause
During her climbs, Westlake hopes to help raise awareness of the need for people to have access to safe, clean water around the world, in partnership with her work with nonprofit WaterStep.
And on her K2 climb, she had a special mission of collecting ice and snow samples on the mountain, to be used by climate scientist Dr. Ulyana Horodyskj Pena in her research on black carbon and ice mass loss from the Arctic and Himalayan region.
She also hopes to inspire other young girls and women to keep climbing forward, not letting stereotypes stand in their way.
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