Heinrich Harrer runs from trouble at home in WWII Austria to climb Mt. Nanga Parbat. After meeting unforseen obstacles, he comes into contact with the forbidden city of Lhasa.

1943. With the battle of Stalingrad turning the war against them, the Germans are attempting to bully neutral Turkey into joining the Axis; to this end they have trapped 2,000 British soldiers on Kiros, an island in the Aegean, with only one sea route for evacuation, a sea route commanded by two gigantic German antiship batteries deployed in a massive cliffside bunker on the island of Navarone. Immune to air attack and too much for Allied battleships to suppress, the British muster Keith Mallory, a commando officer who has been working on occupied Crete for nearly two years and who is an expert mountaineer, to ferry a team of British commandos to the only area of Navarone that is not monitored by the Germans, a 400-foot cliff. Greek resistance is to meet the team inland and guide them around German patrols to the area of the German guns. However, the commanding officer of the British team suffers grave injury in the climb and Mallory must take control of the mission, despite clashes with explosives expert John Anthony Miller, who upon the arrival of the night of the raid finds his equipment has been sabotaged, thus exposing a traitor in the team’s ranks.

A high-adrenaline tale of young climber Peter Garrett (Chris O’Donnell), who must launch a treacherous and extraordinary rescue effort up K2, the world’s second highest peak. Confronting both his own limitations and the awesome power of nature’s uncontrollable elements, Peter risks his life to save his sister, Annie (Robin Tunney), and her summit team (Bill Paxton and Nicholas Lea) in a race against time. The team is trapped in an icy grave at 26,000 feet - a death zone above the vertical limit of endurance where the human body cannot survive for long. Every second counts as Peter enlists the help of a crew of fellow climbers, including eccentric, reclusive mountain man Montgomery Wick (Scott Glenn), to ascend the chilling might of the world’s most feared peak to save her.