Amir Mehdi

Amir Mehdi was born in 1930 in the Hunza region of what was then the northern frontier of British India, a mountainous territory that became part of Pakistan after 1947 ^[1]. His home village of Hassanabad sits near Aliabad on the road through central Hunza, beneath the ice slopes of Shispare and the glaciers that feed the Hunza River. Boys raised there grew up walking steep ground at altitude as a matter of daily routine, herding animals on high pastures and crossing glacier margins long before any foreign expedition arrived with ropes and payrolls.

Almost nothing was written down about his childhood, a silence typical for Hunza men of his generation, whose lives entered the record only when European climbers hired them ^[2]. What is known is that by his early twenties Mehdi had earned a reputation as one of the strongest load carriers in the region. Hunza porters occupied a role in Pakistan's Karakoram similar to that of the Sherpas in Nepal: expeditions depended on them to move tents, food, and oxygen up the mountain, yet expedition books usually recorded their names briefly, if at all ^[2].

Collecting reliable Amir Mehdi facts therefore means working backwards from the expedition accounts of the 1950s, where he appears first as a porter of exceptional stamina and later, briefly and painfully, as a central figure in one of mountaineering's longest controversies ^[3].

Mehdi's first appearance in climbing literature came in the summer of 1953, when the German and Austrian expedition led by Karl Herrligkoffer attempted Nanga Parbat, at 8,126 metres the ninth highest mountain on Earth and one that had already killed dozens of climbers ^[4]. Mehdi was among the Hunza porters hired to support the effort. On 3 July 1953 the Austrian climber Hermann Buhl reached the summit alone, without supplemental oxygen, after a forty-one hour push that included a standing bivouac near the top ^[4].

Buhl came down the mountain frostbitten, hallucinating, and barely able to walk. Porters including Mehdi helped bring the shattered climber down through the lower camps, and Buhl's own expedition narrative acknowledged the Hunza men who supported the retreat ^[4]. For Mehdi the episode was an apprenticeship in what the highest mountains do to human bodies, and it fixed his name on the short list of porters trusted to work at extreme altitude.

That reputation mattered a year later. When the Italian government backed a large national expedition to K2 in 1954, its leader, the geologist Ardito Desio, recruited a team of ten Hunza high-altitude porters to work alongside the Italian climbers ^[5]. Mehdi was selected among them, a mark of standing in a valley where portering for foreign expeditions had become both a livelihood and a source of pride ^[2].

K2, at 8,611 metres the second highest mountain in the world, had defeated every previous attempt, including the American expeditions of 1938, 1939, and 1953 ^[6]. Desio's 1954 effort was organized on a military scale, with tons of equipment, a scientific program, and intense pressure to deliver Italy a first ascent ^[5]. Through June and July the team pushed a chain of camps up the Abruzzi Spur while storms killed one climber, Mario Puchoz, and wore down the rest.

By the end of July only a handful of men remained capable of working high on the mountain. The plan called for Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli to make the summit attempt from a ninth camp, using bottled oxygen that first had to be carried up to them. The job of hauling the oxygen sets fell to the young Italian climber Walter Bonatti and to Amir Mehdi, the only porter still strong enough for the task ^[3]. Each load weighed roughly nineteen kilograms, to be carried above 7,900 metres without supplemental oxygen for the carriers themselves.

Accounts written afterwards, including Bonatti's own, state that Mehdi agreed to the carry partly in the hope of going high on the mountain, perhaps even to the top, an ambition the Italians did little to discourage while they needed his legs ^[3][7]. He made the climb in boots that fitted him poorly, a detail that would have brutal consequences within hours ^[7].

On 30 July 1954 Bonatti and Mehdi climbed with the oxygen bottles toward the agreed site of Camp IX. When they arrived in fading light, the tent was not there. Compagnoni and Lacedelli had pitched the camp higher and farther across the slope than planned, out of reach in the darkness ^[3][6]. Shouts were exchanged across the ice, but no one came down and the two carriers could not climb safely to the tent at night.

What followed became one of the most notorious nights in mountaineering history. Bonatti and Mehdi cut a small ledge into the snow at roughly 8,100 metres and stood through the night in the open, without tent, sleeping bags, or stove, in temperatures far below freezing ^[3]. No one had ever survived an unprotected bivouac at that altitude. Mehdi, less insulated and in inadequate boots, suffered terribly, and Bonatti later described him crying out and stumbling through the hours before dawn ^[3].

At first light the two men left the oxygen sets on the ledge and descended. Compagnoni and Lacedelli retrieved the bottles later that morning and reached the summit of K2 on 31 July 1954, completing the first ascent and igniting national celebration in Italy ^[5][6]. Mehdi reached the lower camps with his feet frozen solid. He was evacuated down the Baltoro Glacier and eventually treated in hospital in Pakistan, where surgeons amputated all of his toes and parts of both feet ^[1][7].

The amputations ended Mehdi's career at twenty-four. A man who had been among the strongest walkers in the Karakoram returned to Hassanabad unable to work as a porter again, and he spent the rest of his life in the village, walking with difficulty on what remained of his feet ^[1]. The Italian expedition's official account, written under Desio's direction, passed briefly over the bivouac, and for decades the public story of K2 had little room for the Hunza man who had carried the summit oxygen to within reach of the top ^[6].

The silence was not total. Bonatti, who felt he and Mehdi had been sacrificed to protect the summit pair's version of events, spent much of his life fighting to correct the record, publishing his account and pursuing the matter through the Italian press and courts ^[3][8]. In his writing Mehdi appears not as an anonymous porter but as a companion in an ordeal, a man whose suffering that night exceeded his own.

Mehdi rarely spoke publicly about K2, though his family later recalled his lasting bitterness at how the expedition had treated him, and his belief that he had been used and then forgotten ^[1]. He died in Hassanabad in 1999, forty-five years after the climb, without any formal acknowledgement from the expedition establishment that his carry had made the first ascent possible ^[1].

Vindication came after his death. In 2004, on the fiftieth anniversary of the climb, and definitively in 2007, the Club Alpino Italiano accepted a revised account of the first ascent that upheld Bonatti's version: the oxygen carried by Bonatti and Mehdi had lasted to the summit, the camp had been moved, and the two carriers had been left to a night that nearly killed them ^[3][8]. The correction restored Mehdi's place in the story of K2 as an essential participant rather than a footnote.

International attention followed. Journalists travelled to Hunza to interview his son Sultan Ali, and a widely read BBC report in 2014, timed to the sixtieth anniversary of the ascent, introduced Mehdi to a global audience as the forgotten man of K2 ^[1]. Historians of the Karakoram now cite his case when examining how mid-century expeditions depended on local high-altitude porters while denying them credit, pay commensurate with risk, and adequate equipment ^[2][7].

Any honest Amir Mehdi biography ends on that double note. Among Amir Mehdi achievements stand two of the defining moments of 1950s Himalayan climbing: the retreat from Nanga Parbat with Hermann Buhl in 1953 and the oxygen carry that enabled the first ascent of K2 in 1954. He gained from them neither wealth nor fame in his lifetime, only injury. In Hunza, and increasingly in the wider climbing world, he is remembered as a man of extraordinary endurance whose treatment forced mountaineering to look honestly at the people who carried its triumphs uphill ^[1][2].