Naperville’s Lucy Westlake, who this week hoped to become the youngest woman to summit the second highest mountain in the world, had to stop her trek when an avalanche occurred.
A year after the college student became the youngest American woman to reach the world’s highest peak, 29,032-foot Mount Everest, she has spent the last month trying to reach the top of K2, also known as Godwin Austen, at 28,251 feet.
On her way up, an avalanche occurred and had it had been any bigger, she would have died, Lucy wrote on her Instagram page. A fellow climber fell into a crevasse and efforts to rescue him triggered another avalanche, she said.
“The conditions were extremely dangerous and we all knew that if everyone had continued to push for the summit, more people would have died,” she said. “We all have to make the decision to go up or down. Many chose up, many chose down.”
For the past month, she has been slowly making it up the mountain from Islamabad during one of the most difficult weather seasons ever recorded.
“After unbelievable attempts, they were finally able to break through after the snow was up to the sherpas’ waists for thousands of feet,” Amy Westlake, Lucy’s mother, said.
Unfortunately, once they began, the avalanches occurred. Lucy wrote that she is disappointed, but believes she made the right decision.
“I knew if I chose to go up while others chose to go down for the safety of their community members, I would never be proud of that summit,” she wrote. “But if I chose my community over myself, I would always have peace.”
Lucy arrived at the K2 base camp the last week of June after trekking 56 miles over seven days in extreme heat.
“It’s been an incredible emotional roller coaster ride because she’s been there for a long time,” Amy Westlake said. “No one knew if this would be possible because of the weather.”
Since tackling Everest, Lucy completed her freshman year at the University of Southern California, where the student-athlete studies water policy and runs cross-country and track.
Once school ended in May, she trained with long-distance runners in Kenya, Africa, and joined two female guides leading a trip up Mount Baker in Washington to teach mountaineering skills to a group of women ages 14 to 19.
Money raised through her GoFundMe.com page, “Lucy Westlake – K2 World Record Climb,” goes toward the cost of hiring Nepalese sherpas and Pakistani porters.
On July 3, Xtremeclimer’s expedition members and their sherpa team participated in a puja ceremony at the K2 base camp at 16,896 feet to ask the mountain for blessings and safe passage, according to online accounts.
Over the coming days the team would set up camp and get acclimated at 22,000 feet, 24,000 feet and 25,000 feet before making the final push to the top.
Less than 700 people have summited K2 because the country closed visas to mountaineers until the start of 2019 and then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Amy Westlake said.
As part of her journeys, Lucy has gathered never-before-attainted data in the fight against climate change, she said.
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She also used her previous mountain treks as a platform to raise awareness of WaterStep, a group that has helped people in more than 60 countries gain access to safe drinking water.
This time she is helping to research solutions for hy arid regions that are getting drier, like those served by WaterStep, by collecting K2 ice and snow samples for Colorado climate scientist, mountaineer and educator Ulyana Horodyskyj Pena.
In her GoFundMe post, Lucy said the samples are the first to be collected on a 26,000-foot peak in the Karakoram mountains of Pakistan to further climate change research.
Pakistan is among the countries suffering from climate change and desperately seeking help to resolve their problems, she said.
Pena is measuring the amount of black carbon soot and ice mass loss from the Arctic and the Himalayan regions.
Lucy’s mountain-climbing quest began when she was 7 years old. She has been able to reach the highest point in all 50 U.S. states and five of seven continents.
Oceana’s Carstensz Pyramid in Indonesia and Mount Vinson in Antarctica are the only continental peaks she has yet to attempt.
Last year she was recognized as a history maker at the Women’s Sports Foundation Annual Salute to Women in Sports and received a Billie Jean King Youth Leadership Award at the ESPYS for using the power of sport to improve communities by advancing gender equality.