Qatari mountaineer who lost fingers to frostbite conquers Mt K2
Tribune News Network
Doha
Qatari mountaineer who lost more than four fingers to severe frostbite during an expedition has conquered the world's second-highest mountain.
Fahad Badar, a Qatari banker, mountaineer and outdoor enthusiast, raised the Qatari flag atop Mount K2, which straddles the borders of Pakistan and China. Dubbed "Savage Mountain", it is considered more dangerous than Mount Everest due to its death to ascents ratio of one to six.
"Ten months ago, everyone said this is impossible. After my surgery, they said I will never climb again... I challenged them and I said I will climb K2. And, here I am, on top of K2," Badar said after scaling the summit.
Born in 1979, Fahad has always had an inclination towards sports, boldly faced challenges, and an incessant urge to constantly break limits, according to his website fahadbadar.com. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Banking & Finance from Bangor University (UK) and an MBA from Durham (UK). Currently, he is working as the Executive General Manager of International Banking – Commercial Bank of Qatar, where he has been working for the past 20 years.
His first summit was Mount Kilimanjaro (5,895m) in February 2018, which is the highest peak in Africa. Six months later on August 28, 2018, he reached the summit of the highest mountain in Europe Mt. Elbrus (5,642m). Determined to finish the year with another summit, he attempted to climb Mt. Aconcagua (6,921m) the highest mountain in South America and the highest in the world outside Asia in December 2018. Due to unavoidable circumstances, he had to stop at camp 2 (5,500m) and this temporal setback only further fueled his ambition to summit Earth’s highest mountain above sea level, Mt. Everest.
His dream became a reality in May 2019 when he not only summited Mt. Everest (8,848.86m) but he also did Lhotse (8,156m) in one expedition. This was an extraordinary personal achievement as he was the first Arab to do this double summit in a single expedition. Fahad has also summited Mont Blanc and Matterhorn in Switzerland in August 2019. Later that year on December 28 2019, Fahad wound up the year with the incredible achievement of skiing one of the ultimate adventures on the planet, a 110km cross from the Antarctic plateau to the South Pole – The Last Degree Expedition. This expedition marred with harsh weather conditions & temperatures as low as -20c to -50c at the summit took him 7 days.
To start off the year, Fahad went on to scale one of the coldest mountains on earth, Mt. Vinson Massif (4,892m). Mt. Vinson Massif is the highest peak in Antarctica and was his 4th of the 7 summits he aspires to complete. The year 2020 went by without any summits due to the Covid-19 pandemic but this did not deter him from attempting one despite all the regulations and travel restrictions. In December 2020, Fahad left for Ama Dablam (6,812m) a true alpinist’s dream, which he also felt was a suitable option for training and preparation for the twelfth highest mountain in the world Broad Peak.
In June 2021 Fahad left for Pakistan to embark on Mt. Broad Peak and several accidents happened to leave him hypothermic with his hands severely frostbitten. He lost four fingers on his left hand and part of the ring finger in his right hand. Since there are no major cases of frostbite in the Middle East, he looked for specialists in the UK where he did his amputation and other surgeries on his hand.
Besides the mountaineering passion, Fahad has been a martial arts enthusiast since 1998 and an aikido practitioner since 2000. He undertook several years of heavy consultation with sports professionals and mountaineers to ensure the optimization of his training routines and diets required for this lifelong self-chosen sport.
Mountaineering has tested his ultimate limits and he has been able to grasp essential lessons that he would never get from ordinary corporate life. In mountains, Fahad has overcome numerous fears, finessed the art of the preparation, learnt the value of hard work and teamwork, embraced the beauty in suffering, embraced the value of being in solitude, as well as endured pain and exhaustion.
Mountains have also taught him that patience indeed is a virtue and accidents do happen. Mountaineering has equally given him a platform to promote topics close to his heart from mental health, community engagement, and cancer awareness, and creating further public and international recognition of the important venues and entities that Qatar offers.
