Ama Dablam Base Camp at night. (Photo: Tim Mosedale)
The nights’ conversations are always fun. A big part of the attraction of these expeditions, apart from achieving something impressive, is doing so with good people. I’m getting to know the crew a lot better and they’re a really fun group. Like most mountaineering trips though, much of the conversation is inevitably around mountaineering – the people we know, the climbs we’ve done. I chime in to entertain with some tales of a well-known and self-promoting climber who is alleged to have left Andrew Lock for (quite possibly) dead on an 8000m peak, even going as far as to commandeer his sleeping bag when he didn’t arrive at the high camp from the summit, rather than going and looking for him. Andrew’s book was called Summit 8000 (or Master of Thin Air, in the US), but the well-known mountaineering blogger and writer Mark Horrell suggested to Andrew, after hearing the tale on an Everest expedition, that it should be called “(Climber) and Other C**** I Have Known”.
I have really lucked out with a fascinating crew of people to climb with. Everyone’s reasonably mature – no-one under 30 – with some really interesting life experience.
November 13 - Base Camp
It’s a rest day again, which for once actually means a fair bit of rest. We mooch around the camp for the morning, getting to know our Sherpa crew. We got to know a couple of them on the way in, the (I think) secretly judgemental Jabu, and Gyalgen Dorje, the frighteningly fit and efficient head climbing Sherpa. Our Sherpa crew of about eight has close to 100 summits of Everest between them. Between them and Jon (two Everest summits) and Tim (who’s not here yet, but has five Everest summits) we’re in pretty good hands.
The number of Everest summits (or climbing experience for that matter) doesn’t necessarily translate into good expedition leadership. There are plenty of tales about commercial expeditions led by “celebrity” climbers that have turned into absolute horrorshows. The problem is that the single-mindedness needed to climb at an elite level is often diametrically opposed to the temperament you need to herd a group of similarly single-minded amateurs who’ve only just met. It’s also worth considering that many “celebrity” climbers receive their fame from being part of a usually tragic epic, so you’re probably climbing with someone who’s also been part of a bad decision-making process. In our case, we got lucky with Jon, who’s a top bloke, even though he doesn’t suffer fools.
We have a puja ceremony at Base Camp, with our Sherpa team spending the morning constructing an impressive altar, with flags streaming out to four corners. We place our climbing hardware – axes and crampons – on the altar to be blessed, among various beers and bottles of rum. Buddhism, it turns out, doesn’t seem that different to Catholicism, at least when it comes to the inability to understand what is being said and the involvement of alcohol.
Around mid-morning one of the local Lamas arrives on a yak, strolls to the altar and starts muttering for about 30 minutes. We belatedly realise the ceremony has started and try to look like we know what’s happening. At various points, prompted by our Sherpas, we throw rice in the air. We’re a bit like naughty Catholic schoolboys at a house mass, but we know that our Sherpas, at least, take this very seriously and we try to show as much respect as we can. On this mountain we may need all the luck and blessings we can get. I spend a good part of the ceremony quite irreligiously moving around to shoot video and snap pics, mainly because the smoke from the altar fire keeps finding its way to me, and my throat is raw enough at the moment. I really don’t need to make it worse.
Laurent throws rice in the puja ceremony.
After the ceremony we retire to various tents to wash, read and scoff olives and pate. Richard’s wife Leigh leaves us about lunchtime to trek to Everest Base Camp. She’s been a terrific and entertaining addition to our trip, although secretly I think we’ve all (including Richard) been looking forward to her departure so we can have a real boys’ trip and not have to watch our language anymore.
Towards the end of the afternoon, Steve strolls in. He’d been bored, so decided to wander up to Advance Base Camp. WTF? That’s an altitude gain of nearly 900m, a serious undertaking when we’re supposed to be resting. Steve’s a machine, but I can’t help wondering if he’s overdoing it and pushing himself too hard. Steve says he only planned to wander up the trail for a bit of a look, and felt good, so he kept going to the camp. It’s a solid five to six-hour round trip. I wonder if Steve’s adventurism has been sparked by the shots of rum and the beer he had at the puja.
“It would have been rude,” he says, “to turn it down.”
Steve lives by the mantra of “go for the decision that makes a good story”. Admirable, so long as the story doesn’t end up being what we describe in the climbing world as “an epic”.
Closer to the mountain now, we can see the route we will take in more detail, even though much of it is only just hidden on the other side of the South-West Ridge. Because of the altitude, we need to shuttle up and down the mountain to ever-higher points three times before even attempting the summit. It allows our bodies to adjust to the thin air, as well as allowing us to stock our high camps with food and gear. The trick is to do it just enough that you’re acclimatised, but not so much that the constant up and down drains your energy. Most of us also have some form of respiratory niggle as well by now, a product of the thinner air, dust and residual smog from Kathmandu. So we’re racing against that as well.
The South-West Ridge route of Ama Dablam, seen from about an hour below Base Camp.
The technical challenges are reasonably obvious. The emotional challenges are much, much more. This is a terrifying beast of a mountain. Up close, seeing the enormity of the peak, the steepness of the slope and the looming menace of the dablam hanging like the sword of Damocles over the summit slopes. It’s really daunting. On the mountain itself, I know it will all be compressed into solving the problem in front of you – the next 10 to 20 metres. But down here, where it’s the only mountain for kilometres, it’s all one big problem. My gut clenches a little every time I look up. Fear, anticipation, fear of failure. Mainly fear actually.
That night we settle into our routine for the rest of the expedition. We take our empty bottles with us to the mess tent at night and the kitchen crew fill them with boiling water. We stick them in the bottom of our sleeping bags when we go to bed, which means our feet are toasty, and in the morning we have water that hasn’t frozen solid. I’ve got a couple of big Camelbak thermoses, which I do leave out of the bag so I can have a drink during the night. It is freezing in our tents. Laurent has a thermometer attached to his pack inside the tent and it registers a low of -16C on the first night. It’s at least five or 10 degrees colder outside. My Camelbak bladder is now useless in the cold and spends the rest of the trip with residual ice inside it.
We all purchased cheap knock-off Nalgene water bottles in KTM to pee into during the night, but they’re a hassle to use while kneeling in the dark of your tent and at Base Camp most of us brave the cold for a quick dash out in the, ahem, wee hours, as required.
November 14 - Base Camp
Morning at Ama Dablam is becoming a routine. We stay rugged up in our sleeping bags until about 7.30am – I usually wake about 6.30am and read my Kindle for a bit, trying to keep my arms inside the warm bag. It helps that I’m shortsighted, so I can leave my glasses off and read like an old woman with the Kindle about 10cm from my face.
At 7.30am the sun comes over the bowl and there’s a mad scramble to get out of the down bags and coats as the tent becomes an oven in about 5 minutes. It’s quite nice at first, but can quickly get uncomfortable.
There was a bit of a commotion last night when one of the yaks which hang around our camp got spooked and raced through the tent lines. A bit scary, given the size of these things, topped with wickedly lethal horns. Yaks are central to the economy in the Khumbu and they’re worth about $600. Owning one is the equivalent of owning a B-double truck in Australia. There’s simply no other way of transpo
rting bulk goods around. Human porters can only lift so much. Finding out this information from our kitchen staff brings the realisation that we haven’t been eating yak steak the whole way up here. It’s probably some sort of buffalo or something, because on the scale of the local economy, yak is more valuable than Wagyu beef.
It’s another rest day today – Steve really does rest – but once again there’s a bit of work on. Around 11am we make ourselves sandwiches and wander down to the Ama Dablam Lodge, which is at the bottom of a small rock bowl about a 10-minute walk downhill. We’ve got our climbing harnesses and helmets with us this time, to practise moving on fixed ropes.
Ama is steep. Vertical in parts, so many of the upper slopes are protected with fixed ropes every year. Without these ropes the mountain is not impossible to climb, just dicey. At the lodge, Jon has us clipping in and moving along gently sloping terrain to get used to the system. A jumar – a handheld mechanical ascender that slides up the rope and grips it when pulled down – goes on first, with safety carabiners always clipped in. On Ama many of the ropes from previous years are left in place, despite the efforts of Sherpas to clear the route. You’ve got to be sure you’re clipping onto this year’s rope. Several of the most recent fatalities on the mountain are because people clipped into the wrong rope. After years in the sun and freeze-thaw-freeze the ropes turn into paper just when you lean back to rappel.
Jon explains that in his view Ama’s harder than Everest, which is really just an ultra high-altitude hill walk. On Ama, once you leave your tent at Camp 2 it’s pretty much vertical, and a lot of things can go wrong. We saw that yesterday morning, with a helicopter long-lining two Ukrainian climbers off between Camp 2 and 3. Somehow they’d got off route and lost and spent a night out in the sub-zero temperatures. Camp 3, it turns out, isn’t a camp any more. It’s a gently sloping area – about the only one on the upper slopes, at about 6400m. On the surface, it is a great place for a camp, just past the super-technical face of the grey couloir, so it used to be the spot to climb to in about three or four hours, camp and then have a shorter summit push. That was until 2006 when the dablam, the ice cliff, calved off and wiped the slope clean, killing six climbers. All that was left was a plastic spoon. So no-one (at least no-one in their right mind) uses Camp 3 any more. There’s now a secondary camp just below that slope that people call Camp 2.9. I’m particularly interested in this because it’s an option to climb to and reduce the length of my summit day. I know I operate well at high altitude, but I’m also in no doubt that I’ll be slow and it’s nice to think I might not have to smash myself.
Back at Ama Dablam Lodge, Jon has us try a short 3m cliff to get used to how we will have to ascend a couple of tricky sections. We’re puffing hard by the time we get to the top of this pimple, at merely 4300m. We’ll be doing the real thing almost 2km higher, so this is a real wake-up call. We also practise rappelling, which is probably more important, because it’s what gets us off the hill. You use a “figure 8” descender, which is a device which looks, well, like an 8, which the rope loops around, the friction slowing your descent. We’re all pretty experienced at this, but it’s important that we learn the system Tim and Jon use, with a “cowstail” of rope simply rigged with jumars, carabiners (‘biners) and descenders. It’s an easy system and bombproof, so long as the anchors hold. You’re always connected to the rope – always. There’s usually the odd hero on Ama Dablam who announces his (it’s usually a guy) intention to “free” the route – to climb it without reliance on the fixed ropes. While admirable, Ama isn’t the mountain to try that. This is a mountain (more than most) where speed is safety, and which can clog up pretty quickly with multiple teams going for the summit. Having some hero getting in your way and slowing you down is a good way to kill people. I’m definitely using the ropes.
November 15 - Advanced Base Camp
This is our first real day on the hill. Unless you’re Steve, of course. We spend the morning packing, unpacking and repacking for a load carry to Advanced Base Camp – ABC. It’s a drop and go walk – we’ll take up some gear for a night out – our spare sleeping bag, cookers, a bit of food – and leave it for the following night. It means we’re very slowly trickling our gear up to Camp Two in preparation for a summit push. Our recently blessed climbing hardware has already been taken by porters to be locked in a trekking bag at the base of the rock slabs below Camp 1. It’s a bit of a cheat, but a welcome one. We stuff our packs with snacks and a packed lunch of sandwiches and head off.
It’s a slog. I really struggle the first kilometre, trying to find a rhythm. If all goes well I’ll be doing this walk to ABC four times. But right now I’m blowing like a spent racehorse, coughing up bloody, dusty phlegm until my throat and nose clears and I find my pace. It’s a disgusting way to start, but it seems to work. I’ve got my ear buds in, listening to the last part of Dan Carlin’s Spanish-American War podcast, and it takes the boredom out of the trip up my own San Juan Hill. For all the spectacular scenery around us, the walk itself is on fairly ordinary land. It’s a goat track between small boulders. I break the walk down into easily manageable sectors. Up the first hill – 30 minutes. Down a small gully, then up the other side to the start of the ridge – 30 minutes. An hour or so to where we join the trail from the main Base Camp. Looking down that trail, you can see why Tim prefers his Base Camp – it’s a much easier walk from ours. Another 30 minutes to the top of the ridge then another 30 to ABC. It’s a long, slow walk that at sea level would be maybe an hour.
On the way up, there’s another helicopter rescuing someone from Camp One. Not being at the main base camp we don’t have much opportunity to find out what the problem is. But three people rescued in three days. And that’s just the heli rescues. God knows how many others have been helped down. It’s not quite first day at the Somme, but it is a bit of a reality check as to how hard this mountain is. No-one comes here (or at least they shouldn’t) unless they’ve had months of preparation and years of experience. So the people being rescued are presumably good climbers. The math says they’re probably better climbers than me.
I’m one of the last to arrive at ABC, after three hours, where I sit in the sun with Dave and eat my sandwiches. ABC has nothing to recommend it. Our tent – Dave and I were the slowest, so we get the least attractive site – is wedged on what purports to be a flat surface (it’s not) between larger boulders. Much of the rest of the team has already dumped their gear and gone back, except for Steve, who due to his walk up the other day is pushing ahead of the normal acclimatisation schedule and staying the night. This isn’t unusual – Jon and Tim insist that you follow your own pace depending on how you feel, rather than adhering to a set schedule. Some people get ahead of their recommended acclimatisation schedule, some slightly behind. It’s a common-sense system that many commercial “guided-not-led” expeditions don’t follow, insisting that clients move as a pack. From an objective safety point of view that may seem to work better, but the flip side is that you’re raising the risk of altitude sickness. One client goes down and your whole expedition may have to wait as well.
Dave and I shoulder our much-lighter packs and retreat back. The trip takes exactly three hours, despite being downhill. My dodgy, reconstructed knees mean I take it carefully, picking out support with my trekking poles.
Advanced Base Camp.
Jon is cruising easily past us all, even the massively fit guys like Steve and Adam. He really does demonstrate the difference between the amateur mountaineer – those of us who might get into the steep hills maybe two or three times a year at best – with the professional. Andrew Lock, the first Australian to climb all 14 8000ers, says climbers need to decide fairly early on whether they’re going to be a client or a climber. If you’re going to be a climber, spend 10 months of the year in the mountains, learning your trade, sleeping on floors and in vans and realising you’re not going to have much of a home life or stable career. But massively building your experience. If you’re going to be a c
lient, the trade-off to having that home life and stable career is to accept that you’re nowhere near as experienced, that you’ll have to stick to “normal” routes rather than perilous north faces. Both, Andrew argues, are honourable pursuits, and both provide the enjoyment that mountains bring. Just don’t be a client and think you can solo something extreme. It’s all about knowing your limitations – which is probably the key aspect to becoming a good climber anyway.
In Jon’s case, he has actually found a stable career guiding and leading expeditions for almost a decade. Ama, Kilimanjaro, Elbrus in Russia. He’s one peak shy of becoming a “Snow Leopard”, someone who’s summited all five of the 7000m peaks in the former Soviet Union. He almost finished it off a couple of years back before being knocked unconscious by a rock fall above 6000m and needing to be helicoptered to safety. That experience and fitness shows. He’s not only acclimatising much faster (or at least complaining less), his general mountain fitness is outpacing our gym fitness. All that and he’s also looking after all our logistics and staff.
I ask Jon that night if he’s ever considered becoming the next Bear Grylls – a TV adventurer.
“Been there, done that,” he replies.
Jon didn’t much like TV, for all that I reckon he’d be a natural. He found shooting a TV adventure involved a lot of sitting around, a few tightly scripted comments and not much adventuring.
Boys being boys in the mess tent, the lads are comparing times. Adam, our superfit firefighter, did it in not much over two hours. Average time seems to be about two-and-a-half hours. I’m worried, I tell Jon, voicing my fears for the first time, that I’m out of my depth amongst this lot of racing snakes.
The Mother's Necklace Page 4
