This was my sixth visit to Spantik. The team reached base camp in early July, aiming to avoid the warmer temperatures and soft snow often found in August. We were the only substantial team on the mountain and enjoyed having base camp largely to ourselves. We had a strong local team of 4 Pakistani climbers working with us, who had all climbed the mountain in previous seasons. Despite mixed weather in the first part of the expedition we established camp one and camp two on schedule, opened and marked the route, and placed 1000m of rope at camp two ready of a summit push. Sadly the weather remained unsettled with rain at BC and snow above 5000m everyday until the end of our allotted climbing period. We were therefore unable to proceed higher than camp two due to deep and unstable snow conditions.

David Hamilton. Skardu July 2024