Pete Schoening -- Famed for 1953 "The Belay" Rescue on K2

Pete Schoening's name will forever be etched in the annals of mountaineering for his conquests of many of the highest and most treacherous peaks on Earth.

For being one of the first two Westerners to summit the remote Pakistani peak Gasherbrum I, a 26,470-foot monster also called "Hidden Peak," Mr. Schoening is listed among such luminaries as Sir Edmund Hillary, the first to scale Everest, as one of the world's renowned climbers.

But whether the famously humble man wanted it this way or not, climbers will forever associate the name Pete Schoening with a single heroic day in August 1953, when he alone held a rope that kept six climbers from plunging to their deaths from the icy crags of K2.

It's a moment climbers simply refer to, with reverence, as "The Belay."

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