Which mountain range contains K2?

The Karakoram, on the border between Pakistan and China - a separate range from the Himalaya proper, and home to the greatest concentration of high peaks anywhere. Four of the world's fourteen eight-thousanders are in it, along with some of the longest glaciers outside the poles.

K2 is the second highest mountain and by some distance the more dangerous. Around one climber has died for every four who reach the summit, against a far lower ratio on Everest, and it is steeper, more technical, more exposed to avalanche and weather, and cannot be walked up by anyone with money and oxygen. It had never been climbed in winter until a Nepali team did it in January 2021 - the last eight-thousander to fall, and notably done by Sherpas climbing for themselves rather than guiding.

The name is a survey code that stuck. The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India labelled Karakoram peaks K1, K2 and so on; the others turned out to have local names in use and reverted to them, and K2 - deep in uninhabited glacier country with no village in sight of it - did not. So the second-highest mountain on Earth is known by a nineteenth-century filing reference.