Ardito Desio, 104; Led First Conquest of Second-Highest Peak

Ardito Desio, the Italian geologist and geographer who led the first expedition to scale K2, the world’s second-highest mountain, has died. He was 104.

Desio died Wednesday in Rome, Italy’s ANSA news agency reported.

Born in Palmanova, near the northeastern Italian city of Udine, Desio studied geology at the University of Florence. He lectured on geology at the University of Milan and later became director of the school’s geology institute.

Over the years, he embarked on a series of expeditions. Starting in the late 1930s, he made about 15 trips to remote corners of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. His travels took him to Ethiopia, Jordan, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Burma and the Philippines. In 1938, he discovered deposits of oil and gas in Libya. In 1962, he became the first Italian to reach the South Pole.

Arguably his most daring accomplishment came in 1954, when he led an Italian expedition composed of five scientists, a doctor, a photographer and 12 others up the Himalayan peak K2. Over the years, five attempts by others to scale it had failed. But in 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mt. Everest, opening the realm of possibilities in mountain climbing.

Despite encountering severe weather conditions, losing one member of the expedition to pneumonia and being abandoned by its porters, the Desio team neared the top of K2 after exactly two months of climbing. Two members of the expedition--Bruno Lacedelli and Archille Compagnoni--made it to the summit of the 28,250-foot peak on July 31, while Desio and the rest of the team stopped several hundred yards below.

Desio returned to K2 in 1987, at 90, when he organized an expedition to measure the peak after a study by the University of Washington claimed that it was actually taller than Mt. Everest.

Using satellite surveying techniques and traditional land-based measuring procedures, Desio found that Everest actually was the world’s highest peak.