If they’d been just 15 minutes further down the mountain, they’d have been knocked about but they would have been safe. As it happened, these winds struck them with the force of three jet engines and blew them into oblivion,” Mr Ballard said.The climbers fell 6,000ft (1,820m) before hitting ice and rock “Spaniards said the bodies landed in a large scoop. It’s a mountain of savage beauty.”Just how the accident which killed Ms Hargreaves along with three Spaniards, an American, a New Zealander and a Canadian occurred may never be known for sure. But after talking with survivors from the expedition, Mr Ballard disputes the accepted version that his wife and the others were possessed by “summit fever” and made a fatal error of judgement in attempting a final lunge to the top before the storms closed in.”It will always be conjecture. But it seems the weather appeared fine when they started out. Then these jet streams kicked up off the Tibetan plateau, winds up to 260mph, and it struck the spot where they were on K2 with pinpoint accuracy.

“The day was so perfect it was unreal,” Mr Ballard said.Asked about the reaction of his energetic children to seeing the peak where their mother was killed, Mr Ballard replied: “Anyone who has a four- year-old knows that these things don’t really register – not that we can tell anyway But Tom said he wanted to sit and think of his mum So we all did We saw the bit of the mountain where Alison last stood You couldn’t fail to be moved by K2. K2 peak, still 10 miles away, loomed in its grandeur before them. They spent days climbing across boulders that were “like an enormous building site” They forded rapids on precarious rope bridges. And at night, they buried themselves in thick down sleeping bags to survive temperatures of -15C.At first sight, K2 was swirled in cloud, and Mr Ballard had to check his compass bearings to make sure they were not confusing the peak with others in the vast Karakoram range They camped, and next day dawned clear. The boy is a lot like his mother, given to quiet thought,” Mr Ballard said.The Ballard party skirted along the foot of the Karakoram glaciers, which are the world’s longest outside the Arctic region. The BBC provided him with logistical help but did not pay him a fee.”Kate, being the four-year-old superstar that she is, rode on a porter’s shoulders But Tom insisted on walking most of the way on his own.

Mr Ballard felt it unwise to take the children above 11,500ft (3,488m). I made sure we never put a foot over that line,” Mr Ballard claimed, “Why, the most dangerous bit was probably driving through London.” Accompanying the family were two doctors who carried oxygen in case the children suffered from high altitude sickness, an expert mountaineer provided by the Pakistani government, porters and a BBC film crew covering the Ballards “inner and outer journey” to K2. It is now thought that Ms Hargreaves, 33, and six other climbers on the 13 August summit ascent were probably swept into oblivion by a maelstrom of a 260-mile-per-hour wind which struck them on Abruzzi Ridge just below the 28,251ft (8,570m) peak.”There’s a thin line between adventure and danger. In the wrong season, Mr Ballard was cautioned, the approach can be nearly as hazardous as the mighty mountain itself. When they set off on this odyssey, Mr Ballard was attacked in the media as being addled by grief or, worse, driven to risk his children’s lives for publicity, to cash in on lucrative book and television deals.The usual trek to K2 crosses glaciers with traps of unseen crevices, fields of boulders as immense as a city and treacherous rapids.

We did it,” he told the Independent on return to Skardu, the final outpost in the Pakistan Himalayas for mountaineering expeditions.
Experts in Britain had warned Mr Ballard, 49, not to drag his children along to K2, which after Everest is the second highest peak in the world. “I had to fulfil a promise to Tom that I’d show him and his sister, Kate, their mummy’s last mountain. For 10 days, Jim Ballard accompanied by his two young children, Tom, seven, and Kate four, had trekked up into the Karakoram range in the Himalayas for a glimpse of the K2 peak where the children’s mother, Britain’s most famous female climber, Alison Hargreaves, fell to her death. But then Luciano Pavarotti isn’t really a musical ambassador at all; the only thing that Luciano Pavarotti has ever promoted is Luciano Pavarotti.ANDREW GUMBEL. A man in your position could so easily be the classical equivalent of the late Art Blakey, who was forever renewing the line-up of his Jazz Messengers as old recruits took off on their own and new ones came in. It’s demeaning to a man of your talents.You call yourself a man of the people, but if the people had wanted to see you do the whole of Un Ballo in Maschera at Covent Garden this year, they would have had to fork out pounds 267 for a ticket.You clearly aren’t interested in cultivating other people’s talents; even your occasional co-performer Placido Domingo you eye with jealous rivalry. Trotting out aria after aria is like serving up spaghetti sauce without the spaghetti – feeding your audiences dollop after dollop of intense emotion without the context to make it digestible.