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The 1939 American Karakoram expedition to K2 was the unsuccessful second attempt by American mountaineers to climb the then-unclimbed second-highest mountain in the world, K2, following the 1938 reconnaissance expedition. Fritz Wiessner, the leader of the expedition, and Pasang Dawa Lama got to within 800 feet (240 m) of the summit via the Abruzzi Ridge – a difficult and arduous route – with Wiessner doing practically all the lead climbing. Through a series of mishaps, one of the team members, Dudley Wolfe, was left stranded near the top of the mountain after his companions had descended to base camp. Three attempts were made to rescue Wolfe. On the second attempt three Sherpas reached him after he had been alone for a week at over 24,000 feet (7,300 m) but he refused to try to descend. Two days later the Sherpas again tried to rescue him, but they were never seen again. A final rescue effort was abandoned when all hope for the four climbers had been lost.
The deaths and the apparently badly organized nature of the expedition led to considerable acrimony between team members and commentators back in America. At first, most people blamed Wiessner, but after he published an article in 1956, criticism turned to one of the team, Jack Durrance. When Durrance at last made his manuscript expedition diary available in 1989, it seemed instead that the primary failings had been with the deputy leader, Tony Cromwell, as well as with Wiessner himself.
In 1961, Fosco Maraini described the expedition as "one of the worst tragedies in the climbing history of the Himalaya".
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