That night, two members of Claiborne's team ignore Harold's warnings of an impending avalanche and perish when snow careens down the mountain.

As the ascent continues, the team's Balti porters go on strike (mirroring the real-world experiences of several expeditions in the 1970s), and altitude sickness incapacitates Claiborne.

By luck, Taylor discovers Dallas' frozen body and scavenges his climbing rope, epinephrine (adrenaline), and an ice axe.

Taylor injects Harold with an epinephrine autoinjector and then begins to lower his friend toward base camp, a few dozen feet at a time.

[5] Writing in The New York Times, Frank Rich found the scenery “astounding” and “overpowering.” Of the dialogue, however, he wrote, “some of it sounds like padding and much of it is pretentious.” Indeed, Rich wrote, much of verbiage “sounds like warmed-over David Mamet"; he added that when they “are not force-feeding us their biographies or arguing like television debaters, the climbers can be saltily amusing.”[6] K2 received negative reviews from critics.

Once a cerebral two-character theater piece by Patrick Meyers, it has been adroitly turned inside out and transformed into an adventure film whose main asset is thrills and (quite literally) chills.

"[7] Vincent Canby's review in The New York Times was more mixed, writing that "the film's concerns and quality of imagination have very little to do with [Meyers'] play", that "the movie doesn't even make much of the cliches it introduces", that it "has some stunning if isolated sequences of physical daring", and that "both Mr. Biehn and Mr. Craven work hard but without success to bring life to their watered-down roles.