Historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela explores life, love and death on Earth's second-tallest peak in the new season of Extreme.

Straddling the border of Pakistan and China in the Karakoram mountain range, K2 is often referred to as the "savage mountain". Towering 8,611m and reaching into the heavens like a snowcapped pyramid, K2 is the world's second-tallest mountain (topped only by Everest) and arguably the hardest to climb. In Peak Danger, the second season of BBC's Extreme podcast, host and historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela chronicles the harrowing tale of newlyweds Cecilie Skog and Rolf Bae, who scaled K2 in 2008 – and found themselves in a disaster that would see 11 climbers lose their lives in two days.

For Skog, the allure of the mountains came early. She was born surrounded by formidable peaks and explains that even as a child, she often found herself drawn to the alpine heights all around her. Like many climbers, she called the rush of scaling mountains "addictive".

"I grew up in Ålesund, a little town on the west coast of Norway, and surrounding this little town is mountains everywhere. It is really beautiful there," Skog says on the podcast. "These mountains, they should have given it with, like a warning sign: 'this is really addictive.'"

While climbing mountains all over the world, Skog also found love and married climber Rolf Bae. After years of honing their skills, the couple decided their honeymoon would be the perfect opportunity to venture to Asia and attempt to scale K2. Their journey started in Pakistan at the Baltoro Glacier, a near-mythical landscape home to six peaks over 7,900m. The beautiful, nearly untouched scenery is one draw, but it is accompanied by the thrill of high altitude, steep cliffs and breathtaking ascents – and the always-present spectre of cheating death.

"If you are going to take on K2, you got to be at the top of your game. That is why it is known, in climbing circles, as 'the mountaineer's mountain,'" Petrzela says. That reputation was something Skog and Bae were well aware of, as well as the inevitable possibility of facing a life-or-death emergency.

"The most important thing cannot be to summit; the most important thing has to be to come back home alive," Skog says in the podcast.

Upon their arrival to the Karakoram Range, Skog and Bae joined some 30 hopeful, optimistic climbers from far-flung countries such as Serbia, Ireland, France, the Netherlands and........

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