PAKISTAN · HERO

25 MAR 2026

Ali Sadpara:
The National Hero of the North

A shepherd's son from Sadpara village who became the greatest mountaineer Pakistan ever produced — the man who made the first winter ascent of Nanga Parbat and gave his last climb to K2.

There are climbers who are famous, and there are climbers who are beloved. Muhammad Ali Sadpara — born in 1976 in the tiny village of Sadpara, a few dusty kilometres from Skardu — was the second kind. He began as a high-altitude porter, carrying other men's dreams up slopes where the air would kill him, and ended as the symbol of Pakistani mountaineering itself.

The Village That Raised a Giant

Sadpara grew up in the shadow of the Karakoram, the son of a livestock farmer. Like so many young men of Baltistan, he started working as a porter for foreign expeditions in the late 1990s, learning the mountains the only honest way — step by step, load by load, at the mercy of the weather. What the expeditions saw in him, quickly, was not just strength but a rare instinct for snow, ice and judgement.

The Impossible Winter of Nanga Parbat

For decades the Killer Mountain, Nanga Parbat, had refused every attempt to climb it in winter. Thirty-one expeditions had tried and failed. Then, on 26 February 2016, Sadpara climbed it in winter for the first time in history, alongside Simone Moro and Alex Txikon — one of the great firsts of modern alpinism. The Italian Moro put it simply: “Ali is to Nanga Parbat what Tenzing was to Everest.”

Eight Eight-Thousanders, One Life

Across his career Sadpara stood on eight of the world's fourteen 8,000-metre peaks — Gasherbrum I and II, Nanga Parbat, Broad Peak, K2, Lhotse, Makalu and Manaslu — four of them in a single year. He climbed K2 in summer 2018, and had twice made the first winter ascent of Nanga Parbat's summit a reality. He wanted K2 in winter too — but without oxygen, and with his son Sajid beside him.

The Last Winter on K2

In February 2021, at the end of the same winter in which Nimsdai's Nepali team had made the first-ever winter summit of K2, Sadpara set out again — this time with his son, along with John Snorri and Juan Pablo Mohr. The team climbed past the Bottleneck in the dark and never came back down. On 5 February 2021 they were declared missing; their bodies were found high on the mountain in July. Sajid, who had turned back to save his own life, carried his father home. The K2 winter story →

“He wanted to show that Pakistan could climb. He wanted it without oxygen, and he wanted his son there when it happened.” — the memory of a nation

Ali Sadpara is Pakistan’s North Star — the man who proved the Karakoram belonged to the people who were born in it. Remember the ten who fell on Broad Peak →