A file picture of Nadre Sherpa atop Everest

Gangtok, July 16: He has conquered the world’s best-known Death Zone twice. Now he prepares to face the challenge of the “killer”.

Mt Godwin Austin or K2, known to be the one of most ruthless peaks of the world, is what Sikkim’s Nadre Sherpa is eyeing at present.

The wiry instructor at the Sonam Gyatso Mountaineering Institute is keeping his fingers crossed as the proposal for an Indian expedition to K2 gets processed in Pakistan. A part of the Karakoram range, expeditions to K2 have to be launched from Pakistan.

So far, there have been no summiteers to K2 from India.

Talking to The Telegraph, Sherpa said the process of securing permission from Pakistan was underway. “There is always chance. Did the bus not start rolling out again from Lahore to our country,” he smiles, referring to the resumption of the Delhi-Lahore bus service last week as part of the peace process started between the two nuclear neighbours.

The Indian team, he said, might get into a joint expedition with another country to the second-highest peak in the world.

According to Sherpa, the accent to K2 would be the “ultimate climb” and posed the biggest challenge for him.

The fact that no Indian has scaled the peak so only adds to his excitement. “Once the permission comes through, I definitely want to be the first Indian to scale K2. I want to do it for Sikkim, for India and for my family,” he says, adding that a successful climb would also be a major achievement for him.

“I love the mountains, they never scare me,” says Sherpa with regard to the “killer” sobriquet of the peak.

“This does not mean I am overconfident. More often than not, mountaineers die because of carelessness on the high peaks,” says the Everester.

He will undergo a special training before starting on his journey up the mountain. “The proposed expedition is likely to start in March, 2004. Before that , we have to undergo a rigorous training for at least two months. This will make us tough not only physically, but also mentally. Just the planning will take more than a month. We will have to study the mountain in detail and accordingly prepare ourselves for journeys on all possible approach routes,” he says.

The course would prepare the climbers to deal with emergencies like storms and heavy rains and train them to communicate with torchlights during night-climbing, he explains.

“We will have to increase our endurance to a level where we can run 15 km everyday with a load of about 15 kg on our backs along with other more specialised exercises,” says Sherpa.

Before the mission to K2, is another peak — K6, a peak in Himachal Pradesh.

The Indian Mountaineering Foundation has announced its plans to summit the peak with Nadre Sherpa as the Leader.

He is, however, unsure about whether he will be able to join the team.

Explaining the reasons, he says the expedition to K6 would start on the Independence Day, the same day that Sherpa will be felicitated by Sikkim chief minister Pawan Chamling.

“Much as I want to leave for the expedition, I cannot reject the honour that is being bestowed on me. It is too great an occasion to miss.”