by Andrew Lock
On 23 April we carried our first load to Camp 1. João, Tose and I left Base Camp together, but we soon found that Tose was unable to maintain the same climbing pace as João and me, and he fell behind until he was out of sight. João and I continued to Camp 1, deposited our loads and descended, expecting to find Tose still climbing up. Instead we found him lying on the ridge below us, pretty much where we’d last seen him. When we reached him, he said he was experiencing great pain in his abdomen and had felt something rupture inside.
We took his backpack and escorted him down to Base Camp, where Gerlinde, who had nursing training, examined him. All of us had completed various wilderness and first-aid medical courses over the years, but it was a great advantage to have someone professionally skilled. Gerlinde suspected Tose had a burst appendix, which, given our location, was a serious state of affairs. Tose had to be evacuated, but at such altitude and in such rough terrain, no helicopter could land. After we dosed him up on antibiotics, João and one of our base-camp cooks walked him through the night to a grassy paddock about a thousand metres lower. Back in Kathmandu, Gerlinde’s diagnosis was confirmed and Tose was operated upon immediately.
This left me in a difficult situation, since both my climbing partners had now departed. Ralf and the rest of his team invited me to climb with them, which I gratefully accepted. I still had to carry my own gear and operate slightly independently, but I could rope up with them on dangerous ground. It was fun to share the climb with a strong, like-minded team. Ralf and Gerlinde used one tent, and Veikka and Hiro another. To save me the effort of carrying the three-person tent that I would have shared with João and Tose, Ralf lent me a lightweight ‘summit’ tent; a squeeze for two people, but ideal for one.
The lightweight tent allowed me to carry a little extra clothing, which was a good thing, because this was a particularly cold season, with strong winds most days, considerable snowfall and really bitter nights. I was trialling a new sleeping bag on the trip but found it wasn’t appropriate. After shivering my way through a couple of nights at Camp 1, longing for the faint warmth of the morning, I brought up my down suit to wear inside the sleeping bag. Toasty.
We established the usual camps up the mountain. On our first climb to Camp 2, though, we ran out of daylight and were obliged to camp on the steep mountain face in the middle of a highly unstable field of ice cliffs. Sometime in the night there was the sound of massive blocks of ice crashing. Although our ledge shook, it stayed firm, so we stayed where we were, albeit rather hyper-alert in case the whole thing suddenly collapsed underneath us—not that we could have helped ourselves if it did. The next morning we found that the inside of the ice cliff on which we were camped had collapsed in on itself, so we were sitting on a hollow tower of ice. We packed up and climbed out of there pronto.
At a safer camp a few hundred metres higher, we were pinned by bad weather for two nights. As I was on my own in my tent, I was quite bored, so Veikka tore out a couple of chapters of a book he was reading and gave them to me. I quickly devoured them and asked for more, but he was still reading. So I re-read the first two chapters, then re-read them again. And, again. I also occupied myself by drawing out my meals for as long as possible.
Over the years, I’d refined my high-altitude food to provide maximum energy for minimum effort. I particularly favoured food that didn’t require cooking and the use of my scarce supply of gas. Most days started with a couple of cups of lukewarm tea—the low pressure at high altitude means that water boils at much less than 100 degrees Celsius—and a muesli bar. Not much, but that’s about all I can stomach anyway, because the altitude seriously affects my appetite. Lunch would be another snack bar, if I had the appetite. Dinner was the cordon bleu meal and usually comprised a cup of powdered soup mixed with powdered potato and some slices of salami. I sometimes supplemented this with a bit of cheese, tinned fish or pate on a biscuit. Chocolate was a rarity because, unlike at sea level, I really can’t stand it at altitude. Not surprisingly, I lose a fair bit of weight while climbing, but I tend to make up for that by eating huge amounts while I’m at Base Camp.
After two days, by which time I could recite those two chapters verbatim, the storm eased a little, so we packed up the camp, buried our equipment to prevent it from being blown away and, having acclimatised sufficiently for a summit attempt, descended to Base Camp to await a spell of good weather. By this time João had returned from Kathmandu, but we were stuck at Base Camp in a prolonged period of bad weather. Finally, on 10 May, after eight interminable days, we received a promising forecast with indications for a good summit day on Sunday 14 May. João’s acclimatisation was dubious since he’d spent so little time on the mountain, but he decided to try to summit with us if he could.
At Camp 1 the next night I ate something that didn’t agree with me and suffered terrible stomach cramps, which left me weak and nauseated. Continuing on to camps 2 and 3 became an exhausting battle as I tried to ignore the cramps and my lack of energy to push myself up the hill.
We placed our Camp 3 on the mountain face at 7700 metres. Although that was 500 metres higher than our high camp in 2003, it still left us with about 800 vertical metres of climbing on summit day. We could have placed it a couple of hundred metres higher still, but that would have meant lugging our heavy loads for several more hours and then resting at such a high altitude that it would have been less beneficial. We shared the camp with the Swiss expedition, which was also going for the summit the next morning, so there was quite a group of us.
My friends in 2003 had been caught out when bad weather hit the upper slopes of this peak, burying their tracks and shrouding the mountain in complete whiteout. To avoid a repeat of that epic, I had brought up a bunch of bamboo wands to mark our route to the summit, so we could find our way back in the event of any such storm. However, in my fatigue, not having slept or eaten for the previous several days, I couldn’t face carrying them. I could justify leaving them behind, though, because I’d also brought my GPS, which João agreed to carry.
Our plan was to set out for the top at midnight, but a snowstorm kept us pinned in the tents until dawn, around 4 a.m. Within the first few steps, I knew I was in for a very hard day. My stomach cramps were severe, and I was half-starved and absolutely listless. The only thing that kept me going was that I wanted this summit badly. It wasn’t the weather or the dangerous conditions preventing my success, it was my own physical weakness. I couldn’t and wouldn’t accept that as an excuse to fail, so I forced myself onwards.
The route from our camp to the summit was a complex one. It angled up and to the right, to reach a rock band, then it zigzagged through that and emerged left, leading us up a long and very exposed snow and ice ramp that seemed to stretch to the heavens. I knew that leaving the bamboo wands behind would make it harder for us to find our way down if there was a storm, but I had faith that the GPS would keep us safe. After about an hour’s climbing, though, I looked down to see that João had turned around and was heading back to camp. Clearly, he wasn’t sufficiently acclimatised to make the climb that day. With him went the GPS and our navigational safety net.
The rest of us pushed up the mountain, praying that the forecast was correct and that we wouldn’t need the GPS to find our way back to camp. Hour after hour we ground up the steep ramp. The day seemed interminable. I didn’t have my usual climbing stamina and kept falling behind the group. Each time they reached a rest point, I would keep climbing until I caught up with them. By the time I arrived they’d have finished their rest and would be ready to resume, leaving me gasping for breath in their wake. It was soul-destroying. Worse, the predicted good weather had morphed into cloud, snow and ever-increasing wind. Our forecast, which had been so accurate throughout the expedition, was wrong on the day when we needed it the most.
As the sun crossed the sky, our height gain seemed imperceptible on that never-ending ramp. The only breaks were a series of short, steep sections that would have made great ski jumps in the right loc
ation. Finally, we turned off the ramp to thread our way up steep rock and ice across the exposed upper slopes of the mighty South Face. Miserable in my exhaustion and desperately hoping that we were nearly at the top, I searched through the patchy cloud for the summit. Through the fog of my high-altitude awareness, forgetting the image I’d studied at Base Camp, I saw what I thought was the top, not too far away. Hope gave me a burst of energy, and I forced myself to continue, panting for oxygen, hands clutching at the rock. The climbing became technical as we clambered delicately over and around small granite outcrops that overhung the face up which we’d just ascended. This was not the place to fall.
At 1.30 p.m. I reached that hoped-for highest point, but cruel humour was the gods’ pleasure that day. A hidden section of the mountain face was then revealed, stretching at least another 100 metres above and well into the distance. A hundred metres might not sound much, but it meant at least another two hours’ climbing into yet more extreme altitude, in ever-deteriorating weather. Worse, I did not have a single calorie of energy to draw upon.
I was in hell. I knelt on the snow, my head in my hands, desperate for oxygen and feeling completely crushed. Over the past few hours my stomach cramps had worsened and I was now vomiting frequently. I was nearly at the end of my tether. The sensible option was to go down. But what is ‘sensible’, anyway? Resting when you are tired or feeling sick? Turning back because of pain or a lack of motivation? Is that sensible? Comfortable, maybe. But I wanted this summit. If I didn’t get to Kanchenjunga’s summit this time, I’d just have to come back and overcome all the dangers and hardship again. In that context, what was ‘sensible’?
Don’t give up. I pulled myself to my feet and, somewhat unsteadily, climbed on. To save weight, I shoved my backpack, water bottle, headtorch and one of my two ice axes into the snow. At least the angle had eased and the climbing was straightforward, so I didn’t have to concentrate as hard. You lose track of time in those situations and enter a kind of trance, placing one weary step after another, attentive enough simply to hold on to the mountain. Lost in that blankness of mind, I maintained a good climbing rhythm, actually overtaking two of the Swiss climbers to catch the rest of my team.
As we neared the top, the face steepened. We traversed beneath the summit pinnacle to avoid a rock chimney that looked too exhausting. Tricky and exposed rock scrambling on the far side required every speck of what limited focus we could muster at almost 8600 metres without oxygen. After a final short, steep pitch, we emerged onto the summit at 5 p.m., four hours after climbing over that false peak just a short way below. Out of respect for the local religious beliefs, we stopped just a few metres short of the very top. Not all climbers follow this request to leave the mountain’s gods undisturbed, but I did and would later be glad of it.
Too tired to join in the celebratory backslapping, I sat and filmed the others, then enjoyed the vista for a few brief minutes. Cloud was all around us, like the view from a jet airliner. Except we were outside the plane. The wind had picked up to near gale force and darkness was fast approaching. It was time to get down to safety. The trickiest part of the route on the way up had been the steep rock and ice just above where we’d turned off the long ramp, so it was vital that we get below that section and onto the ramp in the last of the day’s fast-fading light.
My reserves of energy were gone. Knowing that I’d be slowest, I started down first, but the others soon caught up and overtook me. Norbert, the leader of the Swiss team, paused as he caught me.
‘Andy, do you want me to climb down with you?’ he asked.
I couldn’t accept. I had climbed myself into this situation, made my choices and accepted the risk.
‘No, you go ahead, Norbert,’ I replied.
He quickly descended ahead of me into the encroaching gloom, and with him went a tangible link to my own survival. Even amid that gale, the desire to lie in the snow and sleep was overwhelming and I shouted at myself to keep going, the words whipped away as I voiced them. I had to find the ramp before dark or I’d be stuck high on the mountain in an increasingly fierce blizzard. That could only be fatal.
With raw lungs rasping in the freezing wind so that I tasted blood and my heart thumping so hard that I thought I’d simply faint and fall off the mountain, I pushed down past the hump that had deceived me as a summit on the way up, through the steep rock and onto the snow slopes below:
We’d left the summit about 5.30 pm and then began a race against the oncoming dark. It was relief to reach the cache at the overhanging rock where I’d left my headtorch, as I thought I’d be okay to go down by myself. However, as the darkness came on, so the wind increased; by the time I reached the ramp in almost total darkness, the wind was a genuine gale and I had to hide my face from its furious lashing.
It was 7 p.m. and right on dark when I reached the top of the ramp. In the whipping snow and utter blackness I could see nothing. I turned on my headlamp, but the cloud was so thick that it reflected back to me, like car headlights in a fog. It was better to be in darkness than have that blinding light in my eyes.
The situation was more than a little serious. I crouched on the snow, buffeted by the storm, and considered my options. I’d bivouacked twice before on descents from 8000er summits, but those had been at least 500 metres lower than I was now, and in quite calm conditions. Although I’d survived, it had been marginal on both occasions. In my already weakened state, in this raging storm and at this higher altitude, I would not last the night.
My team was well below and would never find me, even if they had the energy to look. I was too tired to stand up and climb down the ramp. The only option was to glissade. This meant sitting in the snow and sliding forward, like on a slippery dip, using my ice axe as a brake by my side. It was fraught with danger because I could easily lose control, gain too much speed and rocket off the side of the ramp, out into the void. I recalled that David Hume, my teammate on the 1993 Everest expedition, had been killed on Makalu in 1995 doing exactly what I was proposing, glissading. And he’d tried it in daylight, in good conditions.
The ramp was not straightforward. From my position, it angled steeply down and to the left, but it also tilted sideways towards the massive abyss a few metres to the right. If I slid too far to the right, I’d shoot off the ramp and drop a thousand metres down the face. Not a good option. As well, there were those ski-jump steps that I would have to locate and down-climb, as they were way too steep to glissade. I’d be launched into eternity if I tried. Most importantly, all this had to be done in total darkness. There was no moon and my headlamp was worse than nothing. All in all, glissading was the worst possible way to descend the mountain.
I sat in the snow, put my ice axe by my side and started sliding down the slope. I could only guess at my speed. I could see nothing at all but was vaguely aware, more by sense than anything tangible, of the massive face of the mountain to my left, so I kept my direction parallel with it. I had no perception of the right-hand edge of the ramp or the abyss below it, but that was probably just as well. My biggest worry was the steep steps that I’d climbed earlier in the day. I recollected that they existed but had no idea of where I was in relation to them. I had to stop sliding before I reached them or I would be killed.
As I bounced and skidded my way down the slope, trying desperately to conjure up a picture of the ramp in my mind, I was suddenly overcome by the strongest awareness that I should stop right at that point. This was the same type of feeling that had saved me from a storm at 8000 metres on Everest in 2004. I stopped immediately and rolled onto my front. I tentatively felt my way down the slope and, sure enough, found the first steep step beneath my feet. After carefully climbing down it for a few metres to the ramp below, I sat down and continued glissading. Somehow I was able to do this at each step—never able to see them, but always sensing them just in time.
I cannot explain how this worked but can only think that my inner voice was working overtime, or that the gods were giving me a help
ing hand for having respected their summit earlier that day. It was almost an out-of-body experience with my guide hovering over me—not another person so much as my own self guiding me down. It was an incredible but very real experience.
*
The risk I’d taken paid off. Within an hour I caught up with the others near the bottom of the ramp. They’d stopped because they were unable to find the exit point from the ramp that was the start of the zigzag through the rock buttress and the traverse back to our tents. It was imperative that we turn off at the right point—if we crossed the slope too high, we’d never see the tents below the ice cliffs, and if we descended too low, we’d fall off the bottom of the ramp. Had we planted the bamboo wands, or had any of us been carrying the GPS, we’d have found the way easily. As I wrote:
We were in pretty bad shape. No moon, the wind howling and freezing, lost, and exhausted. I was sick and had only drunk 200 millilitres of water since twelve midnight, twenty-one hours before.
As it was, we were 700 metres down from the summit but were still stuck in a wild gale at around 7900 metres. We had at least descended out of the cloud and so could use our headlamps to see our immediate surrounds, but without moonlight we couldn’t identify our position on the mountain face.
Suddenly, in the distance, down and to our right, was the flash of a headlamp. It was João. The light lasted only for a few seconds, but it was enough to save our lives. We frantically set the bearing on our compasses and staggered desperately towards that point.
In my haste and absolute exhaustion, however, my concentration lapsed and I fell over a small ice cliff, about three metres high. The feeling of falling through space in the darkness, albeit only for an instant, was not particularly comforting. In the blackness I didn’t know if I’d started a long plunge to my death or if I would hit the ground immediately below. Luckily for me, it was the latter, and with my reflexes back on high alert I instantly rolled onto my front and plunged my ice axe into the snow to stop from falling any further.