Aftershock: One Man's Quest and the Quake on Everest

by Jules Mountain

  I really needed that. We were free walking at this point – none of us was attached to a rope – but there were some fixed ropes slightly higher. And then we’d have to start using the jumar to climb the top sections.

  We stopped, gathered in a group in silence, panting and gulping water from our bottles. I also crunched on a ginger biscuit. I tried to remain standing as straight as I could, ignoring the screams of my muscles. ‘This isn’t even Everest,’ I kept telling myself. ‘Pull yourself together!’

  After five minutes, we trudged on again – pant, pant, step, pant, pant, step – soon we came to the fixed ropes.

  Each in turn, we hooked on our jumars and continued.

  Pant, pant, step, push the jumar up, pant, pant, step.

  It started to get steeper; each step became harder than the last. I couldn’t stop; I wouldn’t allow myself to stop. If I did, I would never start again.

  To the right, out of nowhere, there was a sudden massive drop-off. I looked down. It seemed a around a kilometre of sheer drop. An unimaginable distance. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle.

  I was bloody glad I was fastened to the rope.

  I was dizzy, the thinning air and the lack of oxygen made my muscles feel heavy, dead. Without that rope, I wouldn’t trust myself to stay balanced; I would be halfway down that drop before I even realised what was going on.

  We stopped again, on a small plateau.

  “We’re about halfway,” somebody said.

  Bloody hellfire.

  There wasn’t much left in the tank, I was fighting against the will of my body and half of my brain. Then that news about being only half way...

  This was going to be a killer. I gulped some more water and ate some gummy bears.

  We pushed on again. I focused on putting one foot in front of the other, then the other again…repeating. Left foot, right foot…the only thoughts going through my brain.

  It felt as if I would never get up. It would take forever. I would be climbing this mountain forever. It wasn’t even Everest.

  We arrived at a slope, a very steep slope, around 50 degrees.

  It was exhausting. I pulled on the rope with my jumar like mad, fighting against gravity as it tried to drag me back down. Right foot, pant, pant, pant, left foot, pant, pant, pant, right foot, pant, pant, pant, left…right…left…right…left…

  I could hear Lincoln coming up behind me, and Taka just behind him. I could see Louise ahead.

  I was desperate not to let Lincoln pass.

  I wanted to keep my position. Crazy, really, when it doesn’t matter where you come, but you get obsessed around Everest.

  My mouth ached, the cold sore burned. I struggled on.

  Right, pant, pant…left, pant, pant…right, pant, pant…left, pant, pant, pant. I collapsed on my hands and knees.

  The deep breaths filled my lungs with nothing at all.

  Lincoln caught up with me.

  “Are you alright?”

  I was now on all fours. “Yeah, yeah, fine…fine,’ I lied. ‘Crack on, you’re doing great.”

  Lincoln carried on.

  I wasn’t fine. I felt like I was dying on the spot. I was absolutely exhausted.

  I looked up. How bloody far was this? When was it going to end?

  I couldn’t see far in the fog that swirled about me. It was impossible to judge how long it was still going to take.

  With every ounce of strength I had, I hoisted myself to my feet. I was desperate to keep my place on the rope, not to let anybody else pass me. I looked back. I could make out Taka in the distance behind me.

  The thin, thin air rattled uselessly through my lungs. It felt as if somebody had put a plastic bag over my head and then told me to run up and down the stairs a million times. There was no air; there was just no bloody oxygen.

  My rib cage felt as if it was about to explode from my long, drawn-out breaths.

  I kept going… Left, pant, pant, pant…right, pant, pant, pant…left… How long? Right…left… I can’t keep…

  “You’re nearly at the top!”

  The voice floated down serenely, heavenly.

  I took five more steps, collapsing again on my hands and knees, panting like a sick dog. I pulled myself up, managed five more, collapsed again. I stood up, clenched my frozen jaw… Left, pant, pant, pant…right, pant, pant, pant…left…

  I looked down at my feet. There was nothing else in the world right now apart from the frozen, solid ground in front of me.

  Then, as suddenly as I wasn’t, I was there. I had reached the top.

  I didn’t want to look as if I was in a bad way in front of the guides who were already there. I didn’t want to show them that I was knackered. I stood at the top of Lobuche Mountain, every fibre of my body screaming for me to lie down, but I didn’t.

  I walked the ten metres over to the others, dropped my rucksack to the floor and sat down with them.

  “You OK?” asked one of the guides.

  “Yeah, fine,” I lied.

  I had finished well, and I now slumped onto my rucksack… I was so tired.

  But I had made it.

  Lincoln, who had overtaken me in the last section, grinned his huge wide happy grin at me.

  “Well done, buddy,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Well done to you too bud – you beat me up here; great job.”

  Louise and Paul were also there, getting their breath back, trying to recover.

  I had come fourth, out of the group of ten. Considering I had left later than everybody else, I was quite pleased with myself. It wasn’t a race; I knew that. I was just eager to prove myself worthy of being a part of the expedition team. I didn’t want to seem as if I didn’t know what I was doing, and I didn’t want to be the slow one at the back, holding everybody else up.

  In all likelihood, we were going to be split into two teams to tackle Everest, with the strongest team going first. I wanted to be in that team if I could. To be left back at Base Camp, and for the first group to return having successfully summited, would be really hard. What if the weather changed, and the second group didn’t get their shot?

  We had been given five hours as a rough estimate to summit Lobuche. I looked at my watch, rubbing off the frost that had accumulated on the face. It was 10.30. It had taken the four of us only three hours – not bad.

  Taka arrived and sat down with us, panting. I patted him on the back and he smiled.

  “Well done, mate.”

  Now I could breathe again, and the lactic acid was starting to drain from my muscles, I looked around the immediate area where we would be camping. We were about 100m from the actual summit of Lobuche, on a natural plateau of about seven square metres.

  Five tents had been pitched for us to stay the two nights. I decided to go and investigate, to try to find one that didn’t slope too severely, one that wasn’t too close to the cliff edge.

  I found a good tent with a view towards Everest and shoved my bag into it, claiming it for John and me.

  I decided to dig a small trench in the snow inside the front section of our tent, so that we didn’t have to sit with our knees around our ears while we cooked. It meant we could actually sit in the main part of the tent, with our feet in a hole in the front part of the tent and with the lining unzipped. We would at least be a little more comfortable.

  John arrived half an hour later, panting and wheezing. He was the last of the 10 of us, but he was strong, too, and we’d all made it up in three and a half hours. It was very impressive; some people don’t even make it in five hours, others don’t make it up at all. We were a pretty unusual group, according to the guides; we were all pretty strong, and most of the expeditions have one or two stragglers, but not ours.

  “What’s the hole for?” John asked, between gasps of air.

/>   “It’s for our feet, so we can sit in here properly.”

  He smiled the smile of an exhausted man.

  “We can leave a little ridge in the middle. We can put the stove on it and we can sit either side,” I said.

  That night, all of us spent the evening huddled in our own tents, zipped up, sitting around tiny camp stoves making dinner.

  “A cup of tea before dinner, John?”

  “Yes, that’d be lovely, thank you very much.”

  “Do you want some powdered milk with that?”

  “Oh super, yes, please.”

  “Sugar?”

  “Just a little, as we’re here, for a treat.”

  It was a surreal experience – sitting in a tent very high up in the world, with someone I had met just over a month ago, drinking tea. We made our very own little patch of England at the summit of Lobuche. The tent was all that was between us and death, as the temperature outside plummeted to -15°C once more.

  “What shall we have next? Shall we have the soup or the main course?”

  “Oh, let’s have a soup course.”

  We had noodle soup next. We had to work together as a team. With our downing suits on, we looked like two very big Michelin Men, and our thick gloves made it very difficult to open packets and handle cutlery.

  After dinner, we had spotted dick and custard for dessert. Nobody but the English wanted to touch these puddings with a barge pole, so there were loads of the packets for John and me. It was great actually; everybody else was missing out. I’m not sure the Americans knew what it was, but anything with a name like ‘Spotted Dick’ was to be avoided at all costs!

  So there we sat, with our feet shoved in the holes I’d dug in the ice, eating dinner, drinking cups of tea and chatting away quite happily for the evening.

  I had a small music speaker with me, so I used my iPhone to play some songs. The Beatles came on, so we sang along loudly. Unfortunately, one of the guides didn’t appreciate our musical prowess.

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  Heathens.

  We sang louder, of course – it was very rude of them, actually; there we were doing a few Beatles numbers, serenading our little group on the summit of Lobuche, and somebody was telling me to shut the fuck up. Outrageous!

  By about nine o’clock, the makeshift campsite had gone quiet. I’d turned the music off and the chatter from the other tents slowly diminished. There was very little to do, so I settled down to another night wedged into my slightly too small sleeping bag, praying that I wouldn’t need to pee.

  * * * * *

  I woke in the morning to a shower of icicles cascading down from the canvas lining of the tent as John got up. “Bollocks,” I thought. I couldn’t be bothered to move. What was the point? We were staying there for another day and night acclimatising – so there was no point in rushing to do anything. There was nothing to do.

  “Cup of tea?” John asked.

  Without waiting for my answer, he sat up and fired up the stove to make a couple of cups of Her Maj’s finest. That was something worth moving for.

  I felt tired and cold, but I picked my head up off my inflatable pillow and sat up.

  I ate crushed Weetabix, with powdered milk, lots of sugar and hot water for breakfast.

  Soon, there was movement around the camp, so John and I pulled on our boots and crawled out of the tent.

  Paul and Lincoln stood looking up at the summit.

  “It’s a shame really,” Paul said.

  “What’s that?”

  “To come all this way and not go to the very top.”

  I looked up at the summit of Lobuche, about 100 metres away from where we were camped, along a very, very narrow ridge.

  “We could just walk up that ridge,” said Lincoln.

  That ridge looked horrible. It was a skinny, narrow thing with a massive drop on either side. There was no rope.

  “Wouldn’t it be fun to actually walk up the ridge to the summit?”

  “No, that would not be fun at all,” I said. “That would be stupid.”

  Ten minutes later, the guides walked over.

  “We’re doing the summit, if anyone wants to come.”

  Oh shit, I thought. From what I know of my expedition buddies, most of them will want to do it. It’s my day off at 6,200m, and I will now be forced, through peer pressure, to climb this bloody ridge. And if I fall off, it’s certain death!

  We didn’t have enough rope to tie ourselves together, so we did the ridge in sections, with our ice axes as anchor points for the rope. Not only were we climbing the ridge, but we had no ice axes in our hands, as they were all stuck in the snow securing the short safety rope which held us on the tiny mountain ridge.

  It was sheer stupidity; the whole expedition could have been wiped out in an instant by one wrong step. There was every chance that the ice might crack and the snow would collapse, taking us all down in an almighty avalanche.

  We got halfway along the ridge and ran out of rope. So we had to stop to haul the rope in and lay it out again on the final section to Lobuche summit. It was a very tense few minutes.

  I took my iPhone out, hitting play on iTunes.

  I sang along with Paul McCartney’s Fool on the hill as we stood there. It brought a smile to everybody’s faces.

  We were ready for the next section, so I put the phone away and inched up the treacherous ridge to the summit of the mountain.

  Soon, we were huddled on the ridiculously small summit – about two square metres, with a kilometre drop on three sides.

  I looked out across the landscape. The fog from the previous day had lifted, so we could see for miles. There was only one point that would have commanded a better view… We could see Everest; she seemed to mock Lobuche, towering over her, belittling the effort it had taken us to get here.

  “Next stop, Everest.”

  We made our way back down to the plateau and settled in for another night – tea, soup, and our boil-in-the-bags, followed by more spotted dick and custard.

  The following morning, we packed up our stuff and headed back down the mountain. Once again, my leisurely start earned me admonishment from the guides. Boy, this downhill thing was great! I was moving at a steady pace, arm-wrapping the rope as I descended. Arm-wrapping is a common climbing technique, used where the slope is steep but not vertical. You wrap the rope around one arm and grip with the same hand. This then creates friction, slowing your rate of descent. I was motored now.

  I could see someone ahead of me – I think it was Hachiro. When we reached the rope fixing point, I nipped past him. I continued doing this, catching up and passing members of the team until I was near the front.

  I could see Louise, Paul and Aayusha ahead. I had my work cut out to catch up with them; they were fast.

  As we neared Rock Camp, I was right behind Louise and Paul, but Aayusha was still a way ahead. Bloody hell, was she fast!

  As we came in to Rock Camp, she was squatting to pee in the snow: when you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go.

  We stopped at Rock Camp for a quick break; I gulped down some water and a Mars Bar.

  “You coming Jules?” said Louise.

  Jeepers, I’d hardly caught my breath!

  Ever up for a challenge, and wishing to be one of the first down – just to prove a point to the grouchy guide that morning, I pulled myself up and slung my rucksack over my shoulders.

  We had overtaken Aayusha at Rock Camp – she’d stayed for slightly longer.

  We moved on, clipped into the rope, and carefully manoeuvred along the narrow ledge, and then down some man-made steps. At the bottom, we had to remove our crampons – it was now a case of clambering over massive piles of rock for about half a mile, all the way back to Lobuche BC.

  “You get going,” said Louise. “I’ll be right behind
you.”

  So off I went, clambering over boulder after boulder. I could get my breath now – the air was thicker – but I knew I’d slightly overcooked the top section and I was absolutely knackered.

  Louise would be right on my heels, and Aayusha couldn’t be far behind us – she was fast. I was on the last half kilometre. I could see Lobuche BC. I looked behind me and there was no sign of Louise, but I could see Aayusha approaching fast, with one of the guides following closely.

  There was no way they were going to beat me back.

  I stretched out my legs and picked up the pace, thinking of the hot, steaming mug of tea waiting for me in the mess tent at Lobuche BC. I was almost exploding with the effort, but I was determined to get down first.

  I was closing in…50 metres…20 metres…ten metres… five…

  And I was there! I kept going, straight into the mess tent and slumped down in a chair.

  Five seconds later, Aayusha came in. I was pleased to see that she, too, was exhausted. The guide arrived not long after.

  “Good work, guys,” he said, red-faced, before disappearing off to his tent.

  I sat there, unable to move, with white froth and dried skin stuck to my lips, trying my best to look as if it was all in a day’s work. How the hell I was going to manage the three-hour trek back up to Everest BC later in the day, I had no idea…

  We would be remaining at Everest BC until our summit day, which would be around five weeks from now. I felt ready; I felt confident, and I felt terribly excited. We just had to hope that everything went according to plan in the next few weeks...

  Avalanche aftershock

  But it didn’t, of course. The avalanche saw to that. A week or so later that wall of snow and ice had fallen out of the sky and buried me alive in my yellow plastic coffin..

  I was burrowing my head deep into my Therm-a-Rest, as if trying to dig my way into the earth – desperate to protect my head and hold onto my six square feet of ground.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the lake a few metres behind me, the same one that I had absentmindedly stared across on countless occasions over the past couple of weeks. I couldn’t stop thinking it would soon become my watery grave. I was almost certain the avalanche would pick me up, wrapped in my tent like a sweet in its wrapper, and throw me unceremoniously into the freezing water.