Fredrik Sträng announces he will try to summit K2 again in 2019. This expedition will be his fourth attempt to summit K2. He continues his partnership with Sigma technology for the expedition.

On 02 March, Fredrik Sträng announced he would be making his fourth attempt on K2 in the summer of 2019. He shared his announcement via Facebook alongside a video of his physical preparations for the expedition.

4 months left. My 4th attempt. Second highest mountain in the world – K2. It’s all about being well prepared. There are no rooms of errors. I shall control what I can control, the rest like weather is just life happening and that I need to accept. I don’t keep trying because I can’t see myself being defeated. I keep pushing because that is what I owe myself. I don’t seek for easy even though the long hours building up my base fitness seems like paradise in this short video. I do it because it’s hard. And doing hard things like it looks easy is fine art and sounds like poetry.

Previous Attempts on K2

We initially covered Sträng’s return to K2 in 2017 through Dispatches of the entire expedition, from start to its eventual end. During this expedition, harsh conditions and bad timing cost him the summit.

But it became the first season in which a summit on K2 was successful since 2014.

At the time, his return marked an end to almost a decade of absence from K2 after the 2008 K2 disaster, which killed 11 climbers. Strang survived that expedition because he knew when to turn around.

In 2018, Sträng made another attempt on K2 which did not yield him a summit. When asked about the prospects of this 2019 bid, the editor of BCM, which was Sträng’s point of contact during our 2017 Dispatches said:

I am excited to see if this expedition succeeds. I’ve always said that Sträng is immune to summit fever. He rarely makes a decision to continue on a route if the conditions aren’t optimal or they are reckless. I am sure that on this, his fourth attempt on K2, he won’t do anything stupid. He’s a strong climber, he’s smart. I wish him all the best. C.J. Leger

We wish him and all the climbers of the 2019 K2 season the best of luck.