A spokesman for the families of Kyle Dempster and Scott Adamson, two accomplished and well respected climbers from Utah, has announced that they are calling off the search for the two missing men.
Dempster and Adamson set out with five days of supplies on August 21st to attempt the highly technical first ascent of the North Face of Ogre II in Northern Pakistan. This is their second attempt at the wildly steep and highly coveted climb summiting at just over 23,000 feet. Their first attempt last year was forcefully abandoned when Amanson fell 100 feet, resulting in a broken leg. They fell an additional 400 feet lower on the mountain, during an remarkable self-rescue on par with Doug Scott and Chris Bonnington’s 1977 descent of Ogre I when Scott broke his leg on the summit.
They were last seen by their basecamp cook about halfway up the granite face on Aug 22nd, and after failing to return to basecamp on Aug 26th, he notified authorities. Family, friends and sponsors quickly set up a GoFundMe campaign to help mitigate the expenses of a costly military search and rescue. Persistent bad weather had kept all search attempts grounded until Sep 1st when the military was able to perform an exhaustive helicopter search of the route and the descent finding no signs of the two men. Based on the fact that there was no gear spotted on the route, it is very possible that the duo had reached the summit successfully and disappeared on the descent in some sort of traumatic event, such as a massive avalanche, that took them, and all their gear out of sight.
Our thoughts are with the families and friends of the two men, with one friend posting on social media that he is “gutted.”