Under a cobalt-blue sky that seemed just beyond reach, Chris Warner placed his boots yesterday on the snow-encrusted summit of K2, the world's second-highest mountain, where few others have gone and that he had only pictured in his dreams.
Just three days shy of his 43rd birthday, Warner, an Annapolis resident and owner of three Baltimore-area climbing gyms, became the first Marylander to stand atop both 28,253-foot K2 and Mount Everest, 782 feet higher.
It took more than 15 hours for Warner and more than a dozen other climbers to cover the 1,850 vertical feet from Camp 4 to the summit, plowing through chest-deep snow, picking their way across ancient ice slabs and hauling themselves up slopes that reached an 80-degree pitch.
Watching with binoculars from base camp thousands of feet below in Pakistan, support staff erupted in cheers, laughter and applause as each climber stepped to the top, said Joel Shalowitz, the Baltimore resident who is Warner's camp manager.
After reaching the summit at 7:36 a.m. EDT, Warner called his wife, Melinda, to assure her all was well.
She was trying to explain to their 20-month-old daughter, Wendy, where her father was. The phone rang as the little girl practiced saying, "Daddy, top. Daddy, top," Melinda Warner said.
"He made a joke, typical Chris, and I told him I was proud of him," she said. Their talk was brief, she explained, because he was talking over a hand-held radio to Shalowitz, who was holding his radio to a satellite phone.
"He didn't sound exhausted. He sounded psyched. I have to say, 'Amen,'" Melinda Warner said.
The climbers descended to Camp 4 last night for rest and rehydration before continuing to base camp today.
Until yesterday morning, just 112 people - eight of them Americans - had reached the top of both Everest and K2, according to The Himalayan Database. Whereas 3,050 people reached the top of Everest from 1953 through the end of last year's climbing season, 253 have stood atop K2 from 1954 to 2006.
The mountain has not been kind to climbers in the new century, with just a handful of successful ascents recorded. Warner, owner of Earth Treks Climbing Centers and considered "one of America's top high altitude climbers" by the Web site k2climb.net, was thwarted in 2002 and 2005 by bad weather.
This year's summit push was an international effort, with teams from Korea, Russia, Portugal, Iran and Italy taking turns leading the climb and fixing ropes on the upper reaches of the "Savage Mountain," as K2 is known.
"We are all just one team," Warner radioed base camp before the start of the summit push.
Like a multidimensional chess match carved in ice, the teams have spent weeks inching their way up K2, finally abandoning individual dreams to forge an alliance that brought the strongest skills of each group together to defeat the elements.
Several times on this expedition, violent winds and smothering blankets of snow forced climbers from all groups to retreat to base camp. But forecasters predicted a small window of good weather with winds of 10 mph or less Thursday and yesterday. Conditions are expected to deteriorate today, with blizzard conditions returning tomorrow.
Teams staggered their starts to the summit. The U.S. team of Warner, Don Bowie and Bruce Normand left high camp without bottle oxygen Friday at 1:20 a.m., Pakistan time (Thursday, 3:20 p.m. EDT).
Three hours into their climb, the expedition reached the famed Bottleneck, a narrow passage with a pitch of 80 degrees and the site of many fatal accidents. It took them about 3 1/2 hours to clear it to begin navigating their way across the 55-degree Traverse pitches before they tackled the final ridge to the summit.
There are 14 mountains that poke more than 8,000 meters, or almost five miles, into the sky, all of them in the Himalaya or Karakoram ranges in Asia. With his ascent of K2, Warner has reached the top of five of them - two of them solo - and was turned back 300 feet from the top of a sixth.
Before heading home, the expedition had hoped to climb nearby Broad Peak, at 26,401 feet the 12th-highest mountain.
Melinda Warner said she had not heard whether the plan had changed, but "they're so close, it wouldn't surprise me if they tried it."
candy.thomson@baltsun.com
Five miles high
Chris Warner has now climbed five of the world's 14 8,000-meter peaks.
No. Mountain Meters Year
1 Mount Everest 8,848 2001
2 K2 8,611 2007
4 Lhotse* 8,516 2004
6 Cho Oyo 8,201 1999
14 Shishapangma* 8,027 2001
*-solo