Lebanese-Saudi fitness expert Nelly Attar has reached Pakistan to summit the world’s second-highest peak K2 this year. She along with a dozen other mountaineers will summit ‘Savage Mountain’ this year.
Attar aims to become the first Saudi woman to summit K2. She is a Lebanese mountaineer who is raised in Saudi Arabia. At the end of June, she set off on a 50-day journey to scale K2. Nelly Attar says she wants to use her skills to inspire women in the Middle East and Pakistan.
She left her career in mental health in 2017 to focus on sports and expeditions. She is the founder of Move Studion, Saudi Arabia’s first dance studio. In 2020, Muslim Women Network named her “One of the Top Influential Women in Sports,” while Sports 360 called her “Female Fitness Influencer of the Year Across the GCC” in 2019.
She scaled Mount Everest in 2019. Attar has scaled 15 other peaks before she started her journey to K2. Interestingly, less than 20 women across the globe have summited K2.
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“I am embarking on the most challenging journey to climb K-2 on June 20 [today],” Attar told Arab News in an interview in Islamabad last week. “I feel like there’s so much unknown, there’s so much to this journey that we will be embarking on, so I’m very excited,” said Attar in her interview with Arab News.
She said she had been aiming to scale K2 for the past three years but her father passing away last year strengthened her resolve to summit K2 on his first death anniversary.
“It was a very difficult time for me and I was just thinking how can I find the purpose of this year that would give a bit of drive and excitement, so, I started work on the idea of K2,” she said.
She says her love for climbing and hiking is a gift from her father.