Pakistan · Baltoro · June–July 2025
Documenting, and attempting to ski, an 8,035-meter peak without oxygen, deep in the Karakoram.
Of all my expeditions, Gasherbrum II will probably remain one of the wildest.
55 days of adventure in the heart of the Pakistani Karakoram, one of the most isolated regions on the planet. No signal, no houses. Just hundreds of kilometers of glaciers, some of the highest mountains in the world and a constant feeling of being far from everything.
I was commissioned by The North Face to document their athlete Tom Lafaille’s goal: to climb and ski down Gasherbrum II (G2), an 8,035-meter peak, without supplemental oxygen and fully self-sufficient on the mountain.
Two roles that are sometimes hard to reconcile: filmmaker and rope partner.
01. The Baltoro, an adventure before the adventure
An expedition to an 8,000-meter peak in Pakistan starts long before you set foot on the mountain.
To reach Gasherbrum II base camp, you first cross part of the country, spend long hours on jeep tracks, then continue on foot for more than a hundred kilometers, much of it on the Baltoro, one of the longest glaciers in the world outside the polar regions.
The approach alone can take several weeks.
The landscape changes little by little. The last houses disappear, the valleys narrow and the mountains take on proportions that are hard to imagine. We walk at the foot of the Trango Towers, before entering a world dominated by giants such as Broad Peak and K2. Each day we cover 20 to 30 kilometers, followed by some fifteen porters and mules, and each evening we set up a temporary camp for the night before setting off again early the next morning.
For me, this is already an important part of the story.
I keep a Sony camera body and a small drone close at hand to document the trek. The rest of my filming gear travels with the food and expedition equipment, carried by porters or mules.
And this is where the first real challenge for a filmmaker begins: getting all your gear there in one piece.
By the way, my gear is available at Studio Sport, with 5% off using the code: NOABARRAU5
Lenses, camera bodies and the most fragile accessories are carefully wrapped between my down jackets and sleeping bags. The biggest drones travel in large hard cases.
You have to anticipate shocks, dust and humidity, but also the constant handling along the way. Out here, there is no ordering a spare part or getting a device repaired.
Everything I bring has to work for two months, with no outside help.
02. Filming at base camp: a production studio at 5,000 meters
When we finally reach base camp at 5,000 m, on a moraine that will be our home for the coming weeks, a second expedition almost begins: getting organized.
Before even thinking about the summit, we have to settle in.
Leveling the moraine to make platforms flat enough for the tents, setting up living spaces, building makeshift toilets and showers, organizing the food supplies and preparing everything we need to live here for several weeks.
On my side, I also have to turn this small camp lost among the glaciers into a real audiovisual production base.
In the end, my biggest problem is not storing the footage, but electricity.
Between the cameras, the drones, the many batteries and all the accessories, the power needs are significant.
So I set up my solar panels and organize a system that lets me work fully self-sufficient for the whole expedition.
Managing power becomes a routine I almost enjoy, being a bit of a geek. You have to make the most of sunny days, anticipate the needs of the coming days and above all protect the batteries from the cold so they don’t drain overnight.
I also have to think about my memory cards, backing up the footage, maintaining the gear and how to carry all of it up the mountain.
It’s a rather particular kind of logistics, because I am both the athlete who has to save every gram to succeed on the climb and the filmmaker who would always like one more camera in his pack.
And of course, the two don’t always agree...
03. The icefall and the Banana Ridge: finding a way through the ice
After a few days of setting up, we start our first acclimatization rotations.
Our first goal is to cross the icefall, a huge zone of broken ice more than 7 km long that leads to the foot of the mountain.
But conditions are poor this year because of a very low-snow winter. We had high hopes of crossing this zone on skis, but it will be crampons and ice axe instead...
The crevasses are many, sometimes huge, and the routes we had imagined are not always passable.
We will spend more than ten days looking for a way through this zone.
Every push takes a lot of energy. The packs are heavy, loaded with food, gas, bivouac gear and everything we need to carry up to the higher camps.
I film as much as I can, but I constantly have to choose between taking out the camera and keeping moving, since Tom and I are roped together on this section for safety.
When we finally get through the icefall, we continue toward camp 2, via the Banana Ridge.
We are the first to get there this year, so there are no fixed ropes.
I watch Tom and Victor Garcin (a French friend who was also in the area that summer) move along the ridge, digging out and recovering old ropes stuck in the ice. We have to open our route while carrying the gear we need for the coming days.
Nobody is really in great shape.
I try to document the progress as best I can. Movements are slow, the packs are heavy and the altitude is starting to be felt.
The first rotations above 6,000 m are often the hardest...
We eventually head down to spend the night at a makeshift intermediate camp between C1 and C2, sheltered from the seracs.
That too is what an 8,000-meter expedition is about: a lot of time and energy spent to gain a few hundred meters, before going back down and starting again.
04. At 7,000 meters, between two roles
Once back at base camp, the following days can be summed up in one word: patience.
Every time we plan a new rotation, the weather changes the plans. We wait, we watch the forecasts, we pack our bags, then unpack them. We get up at 11 p.m., Tom sticks his head out of the tent and I do the same: it’s snowing, it will be worse up high. We talk about it for an hour and go back to bed.
Finally, a good enough window opens up to try going up toward 7,000 meters.
This time, Tom and I set off alone.
We climb through the night above camp 2. There is a huge amount of snow and, in the dark, it sometimes becomes hard to understand what is really under our feet.
At times we sink so deep that we no longer know whether we are just wading through fresh snow or moving over a crevasse.
Above 6,500 meters, the snow thankfully becomes firmer.
Tom takes the lead and breaks trail, while I use my ice axe to dig out the old ropes buried under the snow and ice. The idea is to use them to make our descent to camp 2 safer and faster.
Then day starts to break.
It’s one of those moments when my two roles clash again.
I’m tired, we are in the middle of a huge face and I know every extra effort will cost me. Yet the whole mountain range behind us is revealed, and I can’t miss the chance to film Tom in this setting.
So I move back in front to try to find a good angle and capture a few images of our progress.
A few moments later, we find ourselves blocked by a huge crevasse, invisible from below.
There is no way to carry straight on.
We then decide to put on our skis and go back down to camp 1, ending this new acclimatization rotation. Still, we are happy to treat ourselves to our first ski descent of the G2 face from that altitude.
We have reached 7,000 meters and our acclimatization is going well.
The next weather window will be the summit one. At least, that’s what we are convinced of.
05. Summit attempt on Gasherbrum II: one last chance
Back at base camp, we wait a few days before a new weather window appears.
This time, the goal is clear: go up to sleep at camp 2, then try for the summit during the night.
Other teams are on the mountain, including Sherpas and their clients. We plan to take turns breaking trail to improve our chances of getting through the deep snow.
But when we set off, at 10 p.m., conditions are already not what we had hoped for.
It snowed the day before and the snowpack has become heavily loaded.
We still make it to around 7,000 meters, before having to make a decision.
The snow is unstable. We hear cracking under our feet and, above us, a large accumulation zone makes the rest of the route particularly exposed. I remember trying to get ahead of Tom to take a few night shots at that moment.
After talking it over with Tom and some of the Nepalis, including Nimsdai Purja, who was leading the Sherpa team, we collectively decide to turn around.
Carrying on would mean taking a risk that nothing justifies.
We go back down to camp 2, hoping the slopes will settle and slough off during the day, so we might try again the following night.
But the weather gets even worse.
The wind picks up and we stay stuck for two more days, unable to go back up.
The forecasts for what comes next are hardly encouraging. The monsoon is approaching and no real weather window seems to be shaping up.
In the end, we have to face the facts: our summit attempt ends here, and we have to leave the mountain.
This season, nobody will reach the summit of Gasherbrum II.
It is obviously frustrating after so much preparation, time spent on site and energy invested.
But at high altitude, commitment is not only about knowing how to go higher. You also have to be able to accept the moment when carrying on no longer makes sense.
06. Thirty-five kilos on my back, and still everything to bring down
What expedition stories sometimes forget is that once the decision to turn back is made, the adventure is far from over.
You still have to get home.
And above all, you have to bring down everything you carried up the mountain over the last forty days.
The tents, sleeping bags, stoves, gas canisters, leftover food, clothes, skis and of course all my filming gear.
Everything now has to make its way back to base camp.
The packs become ridiculously heavy.
I particularly remember our last descent. After collecting the gear from the last camp, I find myself with almost 35 kilos on my back.
I can no longer manage fifteen steps without stopping to sit down for a moment.
At one point, I look at Tom and say:
“Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll make it back to base camp with this pack.”
And that is not a figure of speech.
With the accumulated fatigue, the altitude and the terrain, every meter becomes hard.
We have to cross the icefall again, with its huge crevasses and its unstable sections of ice.
Several times, the gaps are too wide to cross with our loads. Impossible to jump from one side to the other with 35 kilos on your back.
So we have to rig rope and pulley systems to pass the packs across the crevasses separately, before we can cross ourselves.
Everything takes forever.
After about six hours, we finally see the end of the glacier.
Charles Dubouloz, Symon Welfringer and Ali, our cook, come to meet us and help carry the skis and packs for the last five hundred meters.
I still remember Ali, walking on this particularly bad ice in simple sneakers with almost smooth soles.
At that moment, I simply cannot understand how he manages to stay on his feet.
And me, with all my technical gear, I only want one thing: to put this pack down.
07. Leaving the Karakoram
The expedition is finally coming to an end.
We did not reach the summit, and we will not ski down the slopes of Gasherbrum II as we had imagined.
But we still have several days ahead of us to get back to civilization.
After taking down base camp and packing all the gear for the return, we set off walking across the glaciers again.
Our route takes us toward the Gondogoro La, a pass that leads down into the Hushe valley.
On the other side, the landscape slowly turns greener, then come the first signs of human life.
After all these weeks among the ice and mountains, reaching the village of Hushe, where a jeep is waiting for us, truly marks the end of the adventure.
All that will be left is to get back to Islamabad.
I leave Pakistan without a summit, but with dozens of hours of footage, many memories and above all one more experience in this rather particular way I have chosen to live my job.
Filming an expedition like this one is not about showing up in the mountains with a camera to watch athletes. It’s about being part of the rope team, carrying your share of the gear, sharing the effort and the decisions, while trying to keep enough clarity and energy to tell what is happening.
Some days, the mountain takes up all the space and the camera stays in the pack. Other times, a few seconds of light, a look or a movement are enough to capture what I came for.
That closeness is what interests me.
Being committed enough to the adventure to live it fully, and attentive enough to bring back images from it.
And in the end, even without a summit, there is a great deal to tell.
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