As the first light split the horizon in two, mountaineer Gregory Attard removed his oxygen mask and phoned his girlfriend Sharon Zahra from the towering 8,080 metre peak of Gasherbrum I in the Pakistani Himalayas.
Despite it being 3am in Malta, an anxious Ms Zahra answered the satellite phone call immediately. When the 36-year-old doctor broke the news that he was on the summit, having successfully accomplished his dream of climbing two eight-thousanders consecutively, she shouted in joy.
“Despite the thousands of miles separating us, we felt so close,” an elated Ms Zahra, 34, told Times of Malta.
“I am so very proud of him. I didn’t let him speak for too long though because I knew he had removed his oxygen mask to speak to me.”
Dr Attard’s incredible feat of successively climbing two 8,000-metre mountains, Gasherbrum I and Gasherbrum II, within one week puts him and Malta among the mountaineering elite.
Ms Zahra noted that it might be hard for the Maltese to fully grasp the scale of his achievement, seeing that many had barely seen a mountain on television, let alone been on one.
“What a man,” she said with glowing admiration.
“He is so strong, God bless him. There were times when he was frustrated and others when he felt tired and saddened but his determination never once wavered.”
The Maltese doctor has, in the space of three years, successfully climbed Cho Oyu (the sixth highest mountain), Everest (the highest), Ama Dablam (a very technical mountain in the Nepalese Himalayas) and McKinley (the highest mountain in North America last May).
Just as he arrived in the village of Skardu, on June 23, gunmen stormed the base camp of Nanga Parbat, the world’s ninth highest mountain also located in Pakistan, and shot dead nine foreign trekkers and a Pakis-tani guide.
Dr Attard had passed through Nanga Parbat in transit the day before the massacre. After being given the green light by the Pakistani Government, which was toying with the idea of withdrawing all climbing permits as a precaution, Dr Attard led a five-person expedition up Gasherbrum II, being the first to summit.
A mere three days later, he took on the more challenging and technical Gasherbrum I to summit yesterday morning, following an aborted attempt 24 hours before due to high winds.
While ascending the summit, Dr Attard spotted the body of one of the three Spanish climbers whom Dr Attard had met a week earlier and who had gone missing a few days before.
Prior to the summit attempt, Dr Attard messaged Times of Malta: “In three hours off to summit. One chance, one try. I can almost smell it. It all boils down to this. Scary but extremely exciting.”
He spent the night at Camp 1 (situated at around 6,000 metres altitude), from where he will today continue his descent to base camp.
Dr Attard was unassisted, meaning he had no Sherpa (guide) to help him carry 35 kilogrammes’ worth of camping material, supplies and oxygen.
Unlike Mount Everest, the two Gasherbrum mountains had no ropes to which Dr Attard could clip himself on to, meaning that one misplaced step could have seen him falling thousands of metres to his death.
“I can only describe his feat as unbelievable,” Dr Attard’s friend and fellow climber Marco Cremona told Times of Malta.
“The Gasherbrum mountains are extremely demanding, dangerous and technical – imagine climbing two consecutively and unsupported. He was also the medic of the expedition.
“I could never have done what he achieved,” he said.