Two 8,000-Meter Peaks. One Week. No Fixed Lines.

Billy Haas did not grow up in the mountains. He grew up an hour north of New York City, skiing small hills in New York and Western Massachusetts with his childhood friend Adam Fabricant. Neither had any real plan. They just loved skiing and figured out you could do it for a living.

That lack of a formal plan has a way of working out. This past summer, Billy and Adam, alongside their friend Brendan O'Neill, skied both Gasherbrum 2 (G2) and Gasherbrum 1 (G1) in Pakistan's Karakoram range in the span of a single week. Both peaks exceed 8,000 meters. Both had seen fewer than a handful of ski descents prior. No Americans had skied either of them before. And no team had combined both in a single season except once, years prior.

Billy is now an AMGA/IFMGA certified mountain guide based between Salt Lake City and Jackson, Wyoming. He spends his seasons guiding in the Wasatch, the Tetons, and Alaska, and teaches professional guides trainings as an instructor team member for the American Mountain Guide Association. He and Adam have been running expeditions together for over two decades, from the Andes to Denali to Alaska. Pakistan was their first time above 7,000 meters.

Getting There

The Gasherbrums appealed to Billy and Adam for straightforward reasons. "They just look like really good ski peaks - peaks that you could realistically ski, click in on the summit, and in good conditions ride all the way back down," Billy says. The relative remoteness helped too. These are not K2 base camps. The scenes are smaller, the altitude slightly more approachable on the 8,000-meter spectrum, and crucially, G1 and G2 sit right next to each other, two objectives on a single approach.

The route to base camp follows the Baltoro Glacier, a roughly 70-mile hike shared with expeditions heading to K2, Broad Peak, and dozens of trekkers. For a team used to true wilderness, the traffic was its own adjustment. "We're used to like no one," Billy says. "You say goodbye to civilization and the next person you see is at the end of your trip." The Baltoro is the opposite, porters, mules, climbers, and trekkers all moving through the same corridor for days.

From base camp, the classic acclimatization rotations began: establish camp one through the icefall, push to progressively higher camps, descend to rest, repeat. G2 was the primary objective first, slightly more accessible and with more traffic on the route. The team established high camp at around 6,400 meters, skied back down, rested, and assessed the weather.

The G2 summit came on July 20th. They broke trail most of the way, skied a line distinctly off the fixed ropes, and were back in camp one by nightfall. The snow on G2 was punchy and inconsistent, but they got it done.

Less than a week later, they were moving up toward G1.

The Better Ski

G1 is the wilder of the two. The upper face above the Japanese Couloir holds sustained 45 to 50 degree pitches, steep enough that it demands commitment from the first turn. The conditions were firmer and more predictable than G2, and by the time they reached the summit, Adam was already sitting there with his gloves off waiting for the others.

From the top, the scale of what they'd done started to land. "You could see China to the north, Pakistan beneath you, K2, Broad Peak, all these peaks I've read about for years, all just from one summit," Billy says. "We just sat up there taking photos on our iPhones. It wasn't all that different from any other summit. We clicked into our skis and skied back down a really big hill."

The skiing on G1 was exceptional, firm windboard on the upper face, then honest powder snow through the Japanese Couloir below. Two rappels through the technical section, then a 15-minute glide back toward camp.

Fueling Above the Boiling Point

At altitude, cooking becomes a liability. Water boils at a significantly lower temperature above 6,000 meters, and rehydrated meals that work fine at base camp stop rehydrating properly higher up. The team learned this on rotation and adjusted accordingly.

"The rehydrated meals were on the edge even at camp one," Billy says. "Once we went higher, we dropped them. Ramen, miso, and RecPak was what we could actually get down."

At their highest camps on both peaks, above 7,000 meters, appetites shrink and the stomach revolts against almost everything. RecPak, mixed in cold or barely melted snow melt, became the reliable option when little else was.

"I remember sitting there at 7,000 meters with a miso soup and a RecPak," Billy says. "That was kind of hitting the spot right now."

Beyond palatability, the no-cook requirement carried a real weight advantage. Getting snow to liquid form requires a fraction of the fuel needed to bring it to a boil, a meaningful consideration when every gram on the rack matters.

Billy and Adam are already thinking about what comes next. Whatever it is, the nutrition system is getting simpler.