Above the Clouds

by Kilian, Jornet

It took me an hour to climb 100 meters. After three hours of forging my way by making a trench, I stopped, more exhausted by the slowness of the process than by the effort. I flattened the snow and sat down on my backpack. My eyes were overwhelmed by all the beauty as I sat there with Everest at my back and the Tibetan Plateau in front of me. Changtse had grown smaller, and the surrounding mountains competed to seduce me with their majesty. At their feet, the valleys sketched numerous glaciers that spread out like tentacles from the snowy peaks, then faded away into the brown hills. From that height, to my left, I could see clearly the tongue of snow emerge that Reinhold Messner had crossed to seek the Norton Couloir and reach the summit in 1980.

  The silence was so perfect that my own breath seemed to insult the peace. I stopped my lungs for half a minute and felt a part of all that surrounded me, that I had merged with the environment like a tiny, insignificant snowflake, one with the good fortune to have fallen on that mountain. A line zigzagged through the snow and disappeared where the glacier turned behind the mountains. It was a reminder that I was only passing through, that soon I would have to rejoin the human world. But I wanted that moment to go on forever, away from troubles, my only concern to breathe, so intoxicated by the altitude that I was free of thoughts.

  THE SNOWFLAKES WERE LUCKY, THEY COULD STAY IN THAT WHITE paradise, suspended in time, but human imperfections—hunger, cold, tiredness—forced me down. At the camp, four people were waiting for me.

  Forty hours later, on the last day of August, I was back there again, but this time the silence had dissolved and there was a sound so intense it was indescribable—the sound you may imagine of the scream in the painting by Edvard Munch. At an altitude of almost 8,000 meters, in the middle of the northeast wall of Everest, I wasn’t sure we would make it out of there alive. A few minutes earlier, everything had been euphoria.

  In the wee hours of that morning, Séb, Jordi, and I had left the camp knowing it would be one of the last days of good weather before a week of storms. We moved across the moraine in silence, each absorbed in our thoughts. Only the sound of our shoes making the frozen ground crack broke the early morning monotonous calm. As the sun roused itself in the east, we arrived at the glacier, where the multitude of platforms of stone and the leftovers from other expeditions showed us that a small city was established there every spring.

  We stopped at that ghost camp. We put on our boots with crampons and ate a little while we admired the sun, which was painting layers of red on the wall where we planned to ascend. When dawn broke and the orb shone on us, it was as if it were bringing a flower back to life. We took off our hoods and moved our heads freely to get a better view of our surroundings, and began to debate the best place to begin our attack on the 2,000 meters of snow and rock that would welcome us.

  Tic-tac, tic-tac, crampon, ice axe, crampon, ice axe. Just like two days earlier, the snow had a perfect consistency, neither too hard nor too deep, and we moved along at a healthy pace of 250 meters per hour. After just a few hours, we reached 7,000 meters, climbing up broad, snowy slopes punctuated by spurs of rock that rose up to the pinnacles of the Northeast Ridge, commonly known as the Boardman Tasker Ridge, higher than 8,300 meters.

  As we climbed, we were suspended inside a euphoric bubble. When you climb alone, your concentration must always be absolute, and you do your best to calm your emotions so they won’t control or betray you; but when you’re with others, feelings flow and the smiles are contagious. We were full of joy. The weather was the best we could have imagined, it wasn’t cold, and the conditions were ideal. The three of us were in shape, especially Séb, and we were opening a new route up Everest!

  Séb and I took turns in the lead, and Jordi followed us a short way behind. We went through some snow corridors and continued along a spur with some rock jutting out but a lot of accumulated snow, and we had to shorten the turns we took. Every 30 or 40 meters we switched off cutting a path through the snow, which was getting deeper and deeper. In the west, clouds were surrounding Raphu La, the pass separating the northeast slopes and the Kangshung Face of Everest, and they began to envelop the wall we were climbing. All week, small clouds had begun to form in the early afternoon and soon disappeared, so we didn’t feel daunted. Though we were at almost 8,000 meters, where breathing is laborious and it takes a huge effort to keep going, we were in the throes of euphoria, and while I went up ahead, cutting a path up to my knees, I heard Séb start singing, “Libéré, délivré, je ne t’oublierai plus jamaaais . . . Libéré, délivré . . . ,” a parody of the song from his daughters’ favorite cartoon, the only movie we had access to at the camp.

  We decided to stop and wait for the clouds to flee, but they refused. In fact, they did the exact opposite. They became denser and denser, until we couldn’t see more than a dozen meters ahead. As if that weren’t enough, it started snowing.

  Our situation was precarious. The wind had begun to blow and now it was lashing us violently, and between the snow that was falling and the snow already accumulated, slabs of an alarming size had begun to form. We were right in the middle of a wall that could become an avalanche trap in a matter of hours, or even minutes. Séb’s eyes met mine in the midst of the storm. There was no need to say anything more: it was impossible to go on.

  We had only three choices: wait, go down the way we came, or find a new direction to head in. None of them inspired much confidence. We could go back the way we came about 500 meters with no serious technical complications, but the accumulated snow could be dangerous. Crossing to the right in search of the north ridge meant less of a risk, but to get there, we would have to cross a fifty-degree slope with over a meter of freshly accumulated snow. In those conditions, waiting didn’t seem like a good idea.

  When Jordi caught up with us, we asked him what he thought.

  “I think we have to cross over diagonally toward the ridge,” he said.

  “I’m not crossing if I can’t see where I’m going,” replied Séb, trying to orient himself through the thick fog. “We can also go down really fast—that’s another option.”

  Jordi tilted his head to one side before interjecting. “But there’s the ice, and the ridges, and now they’ll be completely loaded with snow.”

  “You can see the ridge now,” I added, trying to mediate as I glimpsed its silhouette when the wind lifted the fog for a moment. “After the first spur there’s another, and then there’s the crest, about four or five hundred meters away.”

  “Okay,” Séb agreed. “We’ll go one at a time.”

  “All right, I’ll go,” I said, without thinking twice.

  “Are you going because you don’t have children?” Séb wanted to know.

  “Yeah, that’s part of it.” My words had come out in a whisper. Immediately I began to walk.

  I heard Séb’s voice behind me. “When you get to the ridge, give a shout and we’ll follow, eh?”

  With each step I took, my body sank until the snow came up to my knees. Despite the crampons, my wide boots, ankle boots, and all the clothes I was wearing, I felt each millimeter of snow I crushed, the consistency of every crystal. When I felt a very hard layer of snow, I breathed relatively easily, at least until I began the next step, but when the layer sank suddenly, I held my breath for a few moments until I could tell everything was still. One step more. I’m still crossing. I’ve stopped. Should I turn back? If I turned back, I would just be postponing our fate. One more step. My knees disappeared beneath the snow. A thousand meters of wall above and a thousand below. All completely laden with snow. The wind was turning it into an enormous slab. Fuck, this is a trap. It’s a minefield! With every step, I thought I would trigger an avalanche; I didn’t know whether it would be 20 centimeters or a meter thick. Each movement was eternal, never-ending. When I stepped forward, before putting all my weight on my foot, I was already shaking at the thought of the next step. True, if I died I wouldn’t be leaving that much behind, but . . . Emelie was on my mind and in my heart. We had planned
a shared life together. I was also desperately counting the mountains I still hadn’t climbed, which would remain in my head and never become a reality. I didn’t want to die, not yet. I moved one foot forward and stopped again. I repeated the same process, with the same fear. Walking was hard, but the decision to take one more step was even harder.

  “Aaaagh!!!” I cried at the top of my lungs as the snow that surrounded and supported me began to detach and slide down the wall.

  Instinctively, I sank two ice axes as deeply as possible into the snow, scratching through each millimeter to find the ice beneath. A wave of snow crashed quickly onto my head from above, and I clung to the ice axes with everything I had, waiting for it all to end. The force of the avalanche dragged me feet first, and I ended up hanging by the arms, with the cascade of white passing over me. And all of a sudden, it stopped. Fucking hell, I’m still alive! The ice axes were still driven into the snow. Shit, I don’t want to die like this.

  I reached the ridge with a gargantuan effort and gave the shout we’d agreed on for Séb and Jordi to start to cross. Though it was beyond the steepest wall, the ridge was blanketed in a meter of fresh snow, and we couldn’t see even 10 meters ahead. How would we know where to go? It would be tricky to find our way down in the fog. If we took a slight detour to the right, we would return to the highly unstable northeast face, and if we went toward the left, the north face would give us the same treatment. Then it suddenly occurred to me that yesterday I had made it up the ridge to 7,000 meters, and I searched my watch for the GPS stamp of that climb. When Séb arrived, we discussed the situation and agreed we had to follow the route shown on my watch without straying even a little, and hoped to God that it was precise. Jordi emerged from the fog, and as he approached, I saw him look up warily and wave, signaling something I couldn’t understand . . .

  “Look out!” I heard him cry.

  “Fuck! Drive in the ice axes!” I blurted.

  An avalanche, fortunately a small one, covered us in snow that came to above our waists. We couldn’t even get a break from them on the ridge.

  “Shit, shit,” said Séb. “We need to get the fuck out of here! We have no control over anything!”

  Séb went ahead and began the climb down the ridge. I went a few meters after him, telling him the directions from the watch. Jordi followed me about 50 meters behind, half lost in the fog. We went down as fast as we could, trying hard to cut a path above our knees and dodging the avalanches that slid down the ridge from time to time, camouflaged by the thick fog. Time was arbitrary. One minute it went quickly, the next it was standing still. Jordi had had trouble with the altitude and was getting disoriented. The snow remained highly unstable, triggering minor avalanches. The sound of the effort and breathing, rough and intermittent, was constant, yet at the same time the silence persisted, and we were trapped in a single endless moment. Everything flattened, and some crevasses appeared. Suddenly, we saw the wall of Changtse before us. We were in the North Col! We looked for the ridge, and with a couple of rappels, abseiled down to the bergschrund and the glacier.

  When we arrived, I fell flat on the ground, my mind totally empty. Séb and I merged with each other in an embrace and began to laugh and cry. At the same time.

  “What in the hell just happened?”

  Jordi joined us, and right at that moment, we saw an avalanche sweep the wall we’d been climbing a short time before.

  In silence, we set off across the moraine toward the camp. We were 10 kilometers away. As night fell, I wondered how we had gone from euphoria to nightmare in less than a minute. How many lives have I used up today? I wondered.

  More Than Five Hundred Race Numbers

  I hear the alarm on my phone go off just when I’ve managed to get to sleep. With a clumsy hand, I turn off the thunder that breaks the nocturnal silence, then feel around for the light switch. My eyes are assaulted by the sudden brightness of the hotel room bulb, and I can’t open them fully yet. I get up and grab the slice of bread left over from my dinner. I press it to make sure it isn’t too stale and spread a thick layer of jam over it with a knife. A mouthful. I close my eyes and feel like order has been restored. It feels so good when the grit beneath your eyelids goes away! A second bite, and a third. The bread becomes a ball in my throat. I can’t eat this early. One last mouthful, and I go back to hiding beneath the sheets. I set the alarm to go off again in an hour. I close my eyes and try to sleep. I try to make my mind go blank but don’t manage it: thoughts of the upcoming race, provisioning and strategy, seep in through all the cracks in my sleep.

  The alarm goes off again. The sheets no longer stick to me; my eyelids aren’t weighed down. I leap out of bed, and the frenetic routine begins: go to the bathroom, drink some water, take off the boxers, and put on the race clothes I laid out the night before, with my number pinned to the back of my shirt. I drink more water and go to the bathroom again. I put on a jacket as a top layer. Now I’m ready. I turn out the light, close the door to the room, and leave the keys under the mat. I jog toward the exit.

  When you’ve repeated this sequence hundreds of times—over five hundred—it loses the charm of a special ceremony and becomes no more than a mechanical, routine way to optimize time. Every once in a while, very sporadically, you get a feeling close to excitement.

  Yes, I’ve accumulated over five hundred race numbers.

  The first was pinned on me by my parents before I could walk, for the La Molina New Year’s descent. I was two months old, and my father, Eduardo, took me, hanging by the arms, my skis barely grazing the snow. I wasn’t yet eighteen months old when my mother pinned another number on me, this time for carrying my own weight during a group hike. I also remember myself at three years old competing for the first time in the cross-country skiing Marxa Pirineu, which includes the 12 kilometers that lead from the Cap del Rec refuge, where I grew up, to the Aransa cross-country station. I managed to complete half the route and finished the last stretch on top of the snowmobile that brought up the rear. From the following year on, I completed the whole race.

  Without knowing it, those first forays into sport planted the seed of a lifestyle that has led me to travel all over the world. I’ve risen in the early hours of the morning over five hundred times to put on a little rectangle with a number stamped on it. Now I’ll tell you the story of some of those numbers.

  Zegama 2007

  The fog was softening a late summer landscape of deep green, fern-filled forests. A delicate layer of microscopic water molecules hung in the air, immobile. If you pass through them quickly, they are refreshing, but they can soak you through in the blink of an eye. A thread of fluorescent orange wool zigzagged between fields of cut grass and marble-white rocks as sharp as knives. My friend and race organizer Alberto and his companions had put the thread there so we wouldn’t get lost in the hills of Aratz, before going back into the forest and frightening away the fog demons to find the mud and stone path.

  It was Sunday, September 23, and I had a college exam the next day. But at the time, I couldn’t have cared less since I was deep in contemplation of the orange tank top up ahead, worn by Raúl García Castán from Segovia. That year, 2007, we had come face-to-face in Andorra, Malaysia, and Japan. Zegama, the most important mountain marathon in the world, takes place in Guipuzkoa. It was the final of the Skyrunner World Series, and if Raúl won, he would take the Skyrunning World Cup. Though the results I’d achieved that season made me feel confident, I knew my opponent performed at his best in long-distance races. For my part, in training, I’d done stretches of 40 kilometers, and even 80, but I hadn’t completed the distance of a marathon in an actual race until a week before Zegama, in Sentiero delle Grigne.

  During the first half of the route, a group of four of us had run and played nicely together. Apart from Raúl, Jessed Hernández was there, and Tòfol Castanyer from Mallorca too. Jessed was a young talent I’d known for a few years, since when he turned eighteen he’d gone up to live in Estana, a village near wh
ere I lived in Montellà. Though he was four years older, we connected immediately, since it was unusual to meet other kids who also liked running in the mountains. That year we had run the Caballos del Viento together, and we’d done 80 kilometers around Cadí and Pedraforca in just over ten hours. Without a doubt, he was one of the most talented runners I’d ever seen. He had a lot of strength. He was pure power. Who knows how far he would have gone if his mind had been more focused on running and training well. His father, Manuel Hernández, and Enric Pujol had formed part of the third expedition to reach the highest point of Broad Peak, at 8,051 meters, in the summer of 1981. When they began to descend, they had an accident and Enric lost consciousness. They had to spend three nights at 7,600 meters, waiting to be rescued. Enric Pujol never woke up.

  THE SILENCE WAS ABSURD. ALL I COULD HEAR WAS THE SOUND OF breathing, interrupted by the impact of our steps as we descended at full speed, the crunch of our feet landing on a pile of dry leaves that drew impossible, jumbled shapes in a thick sea of mud. We looked like a group of guys fleeing the enchanted forest in a fairy tale. Suddenly, through the fog, our pursuers caught up with us. They were like two ravenous animals leaping to pounce on their prey, which caused a racket among the dry leaves and branches. It was local runners Zuhaitz Ezpeleta and Fernando Echegaray, who joined us just before we reached the midpoint of the race. Their pace didn’t slacken, and they moved ahead of us at a high speed. They were giving it their all, as if they had to end the competition with a sprint. At that moment, I didn’t understand why they were doing it. I would soon find out.

  Almost at the end of the descent, you go through a tunnel carved out of limestone. It’s not very long, but for a few meters in the middle it gets completely dark, and the ground is dotted with rocks of every size that demand your complete concentration. I had never experienced the Zegama race, and YouTube hadn’t been invented yet. Despite how much I had heard about what it would be like, the loud murmur that sounded like dozens of distant voices spreading and echoing through the valleys gave me a fright. I was concentrating on treading carefully among the stones, immersed in the darkness, and couldn’t allow myself to pay attention to the noise. When we came out into the light at the end of the tunnel, I ran straight into thousands of people equipped with bells and trumpets.