Mountaineering | The Guardian

Savage Mountain review – inside the record-smashing mountain climb that ruined lives

Rachel Aroesti — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:00:10 GMT

Former cross-country skiing champion, Kristin Harila had clocked an incredible mountaineering record – but then, halfway up K2, she and her team encountered an injured porter from another expedition …

Why climb a mountain? Really, there’s only one answer: to prove that you can – to yourself, to other people, to the world at large. Is that a good enough reason? Not always, as demonstrated by this thought-provoking but ultimately not particularly revealing documentary about Norwegian mountaineer Kristin Harila.

From the off, we know this won’t be a straightforwardly inspiring tale of an ordinary person performing incredible feats against all the odds. That, despite Harila being relatively ordinary – a competitive cross-country skier in her youth, she was working for a furniture company when she took up mountain climbing – and her indisputably incredible achievements. In 2023, she obliterated the speed record for reaching the world’s 14 highest peaks; the previous fastest time was just over six months; Harila did it in 92 days. The glory, however, was short-lived. In retrospect, the experience was “hell and a nightmare”, she says. Not so much because of the climbs themselves – although the mountainside footage suggests hellish and nightmarish to be broadly accurate descriptors – but because of something that happened during the final ascent, which cast a particularly bleak shadow over all of Harila’s efforts.

Mountaineering | The Guardian

Savage Mountain review – inside the record-smashing mountain climb that ruined lives

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