Summit 8000

by Andrew Lock

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  After four days the weather indicated another good spell, this time a bit longer. As Abele and Christian had already climbed Gasherbrum 1, and Waldemar had said that he didn’t want to, Pepe and I set off on our own. We made good time up to Camp 3 and from there we headed for the summit at 2 a.m.

  The climb from our tent at 7000 metres to the summit at 8068 metres was a huge distance, one of the biggest altitude gains from a high camp to a summit of any 8000-metre peak. Again Pepe was slower than me, so I broke trail almost all the way to the top. The route doglegged through some rocks after a few hundred metres, then opened out onto a major face. When the snow conditions are firm, some teams go straight up the face or onto a snowy ridge to the left, but on this day the snow was deep. I needed to conserve energy, so I headed for a rock ridge to the right. It was a longer route, but the rock was easier to climb.

  The day ticked by slowly, but we gradually gained altitude. About 100 metres from the summit I was stopped by a rock face. It was steep and unconsolidated, and in my exhaustion I didn’t think that I could overcome it. Luckily, Pepe caught up to me. Still having some strength, he threw his energy at the rock and found a way over the buttress. I followed him up.

  Above the barrier, Pepe stopped on a ledge to take off his boots and warm his feet, at which point I caught and overtook him. I climbed another 20 or 30 metres, then realised that I was just 10 metres from the summit. I stopped and called to Pepe to come up. It was about half an hour before he caught me, and we walked the last few metres to the top together, reaching the summit at 4 p.m. It was very important to me that I didn’t step on the top before Pepe. It seemed fair that we share that moment; indeed, it was a far richer experience for me that we did. It was just eight days since we’d stood on the summit of Gasherbrum 2.

  Strangely, I found a chocolate bar on the top, but I guessed that Abele and Christian must have placed it there. Their motivation for doing so wasn’t completely clear, but I had no desire to leave rubbish on the summit of this beautiful peak, so I put it in my pocket. We made it back to Camp 3 around 11.30 p.m. and over the next couple of days descended to Base Camp. We’d seen no sign of the Japanese climbers we’d been asked to look out for. I suspected they’d missed the dogleg turn on the way down from the summit. Pepe and I had had enough difficulty locating it in the dark of night, even with our tracks in the deep snow. If the Japanese climbers had continued straight down the face and missed the dogleg through the rocks, they’d probably have climbed down into such steep ground that they’d either fallen or been unable to make their way back up again.

  Once Pepe and I reached the glacier above Base Camp, we saw that it had changed completely in the few days we’d been up high. Crevasses had opened up everywhere. At one point we sat on the snow to rest, with about 8 metres of rope tied tightly between us. All of a sudden Pepe disappeared with a yelp, as the snow he was sitting on collapsed and he dropped into a massive crevasse. As he plummeted, the rope jerked me towards the hole. I managed to roll onto my stomach and use my ice pick to stop the slide, but Pepe was already 6 metres down the crevasse. Normally, a climber is able to climb back up the rope using prussik loops—short lengths of cord that can slide one way up the rope—but Pepe wasn’t carrying any. So I made a pulley system with the remainder of the climbing rope to hoist him out.

  Even with my knowledge and experience, it was all I could do to pull him up and out of the crevasse, such was the exhaustion I felt after climbing two 8000ers in a just over a week. His enthusiastic encouragement—‘Pull harder, Andre! Harder!’—didn’t actually assist me very much, but finally I hauled him out. I collapsed face-first onto the snow. His rescue was testament to the value of those mountaineering courses I’d done in New Zealand fourteen years earlier.

  Back at Base Camp, Christian, who wasn’t the friendliest guy in the world, doubted our claim to have summitted. He thought it was too tough for us and said he’d left something in the snow on the summit and demanded we describe it, to prove to him that we’d made it. I pulled out the chocolate bar that I’d found on the top and handed it to him. There were no further questions.

  Waldemar, Abele and Pepe moved on to K2 but weren’t successful in climbing it. Christian walked out to civilisation, and I followed a day or two later, taking an interesting route over a pass called Ghondogoro La, which went out via a different valley system than the Baltoro Glacier. As far as I know, ours was the only team to summit Gasherbrum 1 that year. For Pepe and me, it was a really great expedition. We’d become good friends, worked well together and achieved two tough summits—my fifth and sixth ascents of 8000-metre peaks. In addition, my climb of Gasherbrum 1 was the first Australian ascent of that mountain, my third such honour. As well as being the second time that I had summitted two 8000ers in a single year, summiting these two 8000ers just eight days apart was a personal record.

  More than the statistical achievements, the climbing style and my performance on the climbs were of most significance to me. I’d made the summit of Gasherbrum 2 in extremely fast time and in barely enough clothes to keep warm at base camp. On Gasherbrum 1, I’d led virtually the whole way on the summit day, breaking trail in steep, thigh-deep snow for more than twelve hours nonstop. Not because I had to but because I could and I wanted to. On both climbs I’d felt absolutely in my element. I’d relished the hardship and felt almost at one with the peaks. I realised that the mountains were becoming a part of me, or me a part of them. They were no longer just an object for challenge and adventure; they were my life. I feared them and I respected them, but I also loved them.

  Postscript

  Park Young-Seok, the highly accomplished Korean climber I met during the Nanga Parbat expedition, was killed in an avalanche on the South Face of Annapurna in Nepal in 2011, the same face on which Anatoli Bukreev was killed several years earlier.

  My friend Pepe Garcés fell to his death while attempting to climb Dhaulagiri in Nepal in 2001.

  7

  A DREAM REALISED

  It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.

  Edmund Hillary

  BACK HOME, I found that the media were starting to take an interest in me. Outdoor magazines reported my successes and requests for interviews became more frequent. While that was an interesting new element to my mountaineering life, it also signalled a change: my climbs were no longer my own. People wanted to know the stories behind the climbs; they wanted a piece of me. The personal purity of the experience was just a little eroded by this. Inevitably, questions were asked of when I would tackle Everest and whether I was actually chasing the fourteen big ones. While I hadn’t given much thought to the fourteen, Everest was clearly in my sights.

  I won another contract with the Australian Antarctic Division as a field training officer over the southern summer of 1999–2000, this time to work on the Antarctic continent. Interspersed between my own expeditions and the Antarctic work, I led groups of people on treks and easy climbs in the Himalaya and Karakorum, and the Tien Shan and Pamir mountain ranges in Central Asia. My life had become one great adventure. Girlfriends came and went, but the mountains remained constant.

  While in Antarctica, I received an invitation from a British company, Jagged Globe, to lead a commercial expedition on the south side of Mount Everest in the pre-monsoon season of 2000. I was pleased to discover that David Hamilton, the British climber with whom I’d summitted Gasherbrum 2 the year before, had recommended me to the company. While the invitation was welcome, leading a commercial expedition was not how I’d planned to return to Everest. In the seven years since my last attempt on the mountain, I’d gained a wealth of experience, and success, on more technical and more remote high-altitude mountains. I was confident that I had the skills needed to take on Chomolungma with a fair likelihood of success. In the interim, however, the cost of an expedition to Everest had skyrocketed.

  When I first went to Everest, in the post-monsoon season of 1991, the peak fee was US$3000. In 1993, by which time t
he first commercial expeditions were coming to Everest, the fee had gone up to US$10,000. Now, in 2000, it was US$70,000 for up to seven foreigners, including guides—Sherpas, as Nepali citizens, didn’t need a permit. This was now well out of my price range, so the opportunity to get paid to go back to Everest was a tempting alternative. The quandary was that, in order to lead a commercial expedition, my personal goals would have to be subservient to the goal of getting the paying clients to the top and back down safely. I would be climbing as a business entity, not for the pure love of mountaineering. But at the end of the day, I wanted to climb Mount Everest and I was prepared to do whatever it took to achieve that goal. I accepted the job.

  The ship bringing me back from Antarctica was delayed by sea ice and we had to make several resupply stops at other Antarctic bases en route to Australia. I emailed my deputy leader on the Everest team, Tim Bird, and requested that he meet the clients in Kathmandu and take a slow and leisurely walk to Base Camp, so they would achieve maximum acclimatisation. I would have to hurry as quickly as possible to meet them there.

  I did what I could to improve my fitness, spending a couple of hours a day on the ship’s rowing machine. Each evening I climbed the outside ladders, five or so levels to the top deck and down again, with a heavy backpack, 100 times. The Southern Ocean is a maelstrom at the best of times and when it was really blowing, the ship lurched and bucked about. With great sheets of freezing water blowing over me, it actually felt quite like I was in the mountains!

  Eventually we docked in Tasmania and I flew straight up to Sydney, raced home to pack my expedition equipment and flew out to Nepal the following day. On 2 April 2000 I started a fast trek towards base camp, popping lots of Diamox to aid my acclimatisation. Six days later I arrived, having stopped for a couple of hours at the Thyanboche monastery to attend a puja ceremony, in case I’d missed our expedition puja. I am not a Buddhist but I have always felt spiritual in the Himalaya, and with each expedition, this feeling has increased. There is an energy, a sense, to which I’ve become very accustomed in those mountains. Perhaps I’ve become a little superstitious, too, having survived avalanches, plummeted unroped into crevasses and had multiple bivouacs at extreme altitude without equipment or oxygen—situations in which so many others have perished. Puja ceremonies are a part of life in the Himalaya, and I feel much more at ease if I abide by the spiritual customs of the locals.

  Our expedition team was made up of me, my assistant leader Tim, seven paying clients, four climbing Sherpas and a couple of Base Camp kitchen staff. Somehow, as I raced up the Khumbu Glacier on the final day of my trek, I took a different trail and passed the clients without seeing them, so I actually beat them to the camp by about half an hour. Our Sherpas and staff were already there, and the kitchen was functioning when I arrived. By the time the rest of the team traipsed into camp, I was sitting outside the kitchen tent with a cup of tea, so I took full advantage of the opportunity to rib them for taking so long to get there!

  Having spent the last two summers teaching inexperienced people to survive in Antarctica, I wasn’t about to allow any accidents on this expedition. We spent several days practising basic climbing skills in the Khumbu Icefall, which allowed me to evaluate their abilities and to lay down some ground rules about the way we’d climb and use our equipment. This was important because I wouldn’t be able to watch every one of the clients all the time, and I needed them to be able to look out for each other and spot any potential problems themselves. Our climbing Sherpas were very strong at altitude but didn’t possess the same technical skills as most western guides, so I wanted to make everyone in the team responsible for each other.

  It quickly became clear that most of the group had ‘enhanced’ their claimed experience when they’d applied to join the expedition. I was stunned to see that one of them didn’t even know how to use his crampons. But the company had accepted them all, so the onus was on me, as leader, to help them reach the summit. This is the dilemma of guided climbing on these mountains, and it’s something I’ve thought about a lot over the years I’ve been climbing in the Himalaya.

  Is it appropriate for inexperienced climbers simply to pay big dollars to be virtually hauled up Everest and other big peaks? Guiding has been around since climbing began in the European Alps, when Swiss guides led tweed-jacketed punters up hills they wouldn’t have been able to climb on their own. But where do you draw the line? Should guided clients be limited to certain altitudes—5000 metres, 6000 metres, 7000 metres? When I decided all those years ago that I wanted to climb Mount Everest, I spent a year learning to rock climb, then went to New Zealand for alpine training. After that I spent several more years climbing in New Zealand and on progressively higher peaks around the world, until I felt I was ready to take on the 8000ers. And even then I still had a lot to learn.

  The number of climbers on the 8000ers in those days was very small because everyone went through a similar lengthy process to develop their skills, and only the most highly skilled attempted the biggest and toughest peaks. Since about the mid 1990s, guided climbing has enabled anyone with enough dollars to access these peaks, and this has massively increased the numbers of people climbing them, which has forced up the costs and effectively shut out the amateur enthusiast who might have real skills. Those enthusiasts either have to go further into the wilderness or climb harder routes on the big peaks, or else turn professional in order to fund their own 8000-metre aspirations.

  For my team of seven clients and two guides, officially we needed two permits at $70,000 each—an awful lot of money for a piece of paper. On top of the permit was the cost of all the infrastructure, transport, food and staff. Each of the clients on this expedition had paid US$50,000 to join. When the Nepali government put the price up from US$10,000 to US$70,000, the intention was that only one expedition would be allowed on each route per season. Only commercial groups could afford the massive fee, and since their clients were almost always inexperienced, the commercial operators only wanted permits for the easiest route. The one-expedition-per-route mandate was then never implemented. This is why there are regularly thirty or more expeditions on the ‘tourist route’ during the pre-monsoon season these days, with hundreds of climbers, hundreds of support Sherpas and hundreds more base-camp staff. The Nepali government has simply failed to regulate the numbers, and poor old Everest has been greatly diminished by the circus that commercial guiding has brought to her flanks.

  But while the government hoards the revenue from the permit system, which rightly upsets the population, the guiding business still injects huge income into the local economy. Sherpas can earn a year’s salary during a single expedition, villagers sell accommodation and meals to climbers and trekkers heading to base camp, locals are hired as porters and others lease out their yaks. The Khumbu (Everest) region of Nepal is by far the most affluent in the nation, precisely because of all these expeditions and commercial trekking groups.

  What is the solution? In 2000, as the leader of my own expedition, I hadn’t worked through this whole conundrum. I hoped that guiding the Jagged Globe team would provide me with an informed perspective on the issue. More importantly, however, leading the expedition gave me another chance to climb the mountain that I’d wanted to summit ever since I’d been inspired by a slide show years earlier and which I could no longer afford to climb on my own.

  Our team was international, with members from the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. Almost from the start there were some significant problems to deal with. The equipment supplied by the company’s agent in Nepal was in very poor condition. Our base-camp gas lantern didn’t work, and nor did the generator that could have provided electric lighting. I was surprised to find that while Tim was a highly experienced mountain guide, having led climbing expeditions around the world for a number of years, he had not been to high altitude. It was unclear therefore whether he would be able to cope with Everest’s altitude and be in a position to assist me on the summit push.
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  The leader of our four climbing Sherpas advised that, as sirdar, he would not climb, leaving me with only three climbing Sherpas to support nine foreigners. The clients wanted everything carried for them, including their sleeping bags, which weighed virtually nothing. I wasn’t sure what the clients had been promised, as the company hadn’t sent me any of the ‘joining information’ that they’d been given. We had been provided with a satellite phone, but that too failed to work, so I couldn’t easily contact our head office for information.

  Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when expeditions were organised by national climbing bodies, often with the support of their governments, a single team member reaching the summit was counted as a success for the entire expedition. The expeditions took a ‘pyramid’ approach to logistics and support up the mountain, and higher camps were smaller and had less equipment, because they only had to support the climbers who would try for the summit. On modern commercial expeditions, however, every client pays a large amount of money to be there, so everyone expects to get to the summit. Commercial expeditions need pretty much the same amount of equipment all the way up the hill, to give every team member an equal chance of reaching the top. There is some attrition along the way, of course, but you get the picture.

  Despite my own preference for climbing without oxygen, it was my rule that everybody, including me, use it on this expedition. It would give us the best chance of summitting, keep our minds sharper and, most importantly, help to ward off frostbite and altitude sickness. For seven clients, three Sherpas and two guides, that amounted to around fifty bottles to be carried up the mountain. The only way we would succeed was if we had the infrastructure in place all the way up the mountain. My intention therefore was to have the Sherpas carry tents, stoves, fuel, food, oxygen and rope. The clients would have to carry their own personal gear.