by Mark Horrell
‘Are you getting your own back?’ I shout back at her. ‘And here comes the famous Supergran,’ I say to my camera as she approaches.
At 10.15, we reach the Mountain Paradise Lodge at the far end of the village. It’s another spectacular setting here in Dingboche. Ama Dablam rises right above us, its twin summits looking very different from any other angle I’ve seen them from. Its sheer north face now looks horrendous, a giant wall of rock draped in ice. These lily-white sheets are marked with stripes, the telltale sign of avalanches hurtling down its surface.
‘You were walking so fast at the end,’ Edita says as we settle into the dining room. ‘We thought you must have taken some pill.’
There is a mischievous glint in her eye, and I clock what she is talking about.
‘Don’t tar me with the same brush as Robert.’
Robert once admitted to taking Viagra on a climb, and he said it helped him significantly. Last year he even encouraged Margaret to try it during their Everest expedition, but she declined.
‘I know Robert says it helps him to get up,’ I say.
The lodge is comfortable, and there are windows across two walls of the dining room, providing a grandstand panorama of Ama Dablam and Kangtega. But the furniture seems to have been designed for lighter people than us. I sit down next to Margaret on a plywood bench and hear it crack beneath me, causing her to roar with laughter. Then Phil sits on a plastic chair and it breaks. He stands up just in time, but this sets me off laughing too. Despite watching us destroy her furniture, the lady owner of the teahouse doesn’t seem to mind, and she joins in with the laughter.
After a short snooze in the somewhat darker bedroom that I share with Ian, I return to the dining room at six o’clock. The others are already celebrating Phil’s birthday; I see empty tins of Tuborg and Everest beer on the table. At the end of dinner Dorje comes over with a proud expression on his face. He announces that we have drunk the whole village out of Tuborg. But if we want any tomorrow night, they can send someone over the hill to Pheriche to see if there’s any there.
I arrive to dinner carrying my copy of The Ascent of Rum Doodle, W.E. Bowman’s great comic novel about an expedition to a fictional mountain. Mel has picked it up before I can start reading it, and by the time our dinner arrives he is already on the second chapter. When I tell him he is welcome to hold on to it as long as he carries it up to Base Camp with him, he gives it to Edita. By the end of dinner she has passed it on to Ricardo, who says he was looking all over Kathmandu for a copy.
Luckily we have finished eating when Phil decides to tell his peanuts story.
‘I think it was 2008. I was sitting on the South Col preparing for my summit push when Tim Rippel of Peak Freaks put his head into my tent. He asked if I wanted a bag of peanuts that he didn’t want to carry down with him. They go down well, and by the time we leave for the summit I’ve eaten most of the bag. We go up, summit, and come back down again, but by the time I get back to the South Col my stomach’s feeling a bit dodgy. I decide to continue all the way down to Camp 2 in the Western Cwm where I know we have a toilet tent. When I get there I’m desperate to go, but find I’ve got the worst constipation you can imagine.
‘I hear over the radio that one of my clients is having problems higher up the mountain. I’m in no position to go and help him. I’m having problems of my own just trying to shit, so I go over to the Himex tent and ask Phurba Tashi if he can help me. He agrees right away and begins getting ready.’
Phurba Tashi Sherpa is an Everest legend who has climbed the mountain twenty-one times. It’s a record he shares with the equally legendary Apa Sherpa.
‘You asked Phurba Tashi to help you go to the toilet?’ I say in astonishment.
‘No, with the fucking rescue, you idiot,’ Phil says. ‘It was a bit of an epic, but the guy survived. Meanwhile I’m struggling so hard in the toilet tent that I pass out. I fall forward with my pants around my ankles, and when I wake up there’s a group of people taking photographs.’
‘Hang on a moment,’ Kevin says, brow furrowed. ‘What’s the significance of the peanuts?’
‘I think that’s what blocked him,’ I reply.
‘I realise there’s only one thing for it. I’m going to have to unblock myself by hand,’ Phil continues. ‘I go to the kitchen tent and ask our chef Jangbu if we have any laxatives in the med kit. “Do we have any lubricant?” I ask. He goes into the store tent and returns with a bottle of oxygen. “What am I supposed to do with that?” I say. Then he produces a tin of tuna. “That might just do the trick.” I take it to the toilet tent, and with a bit of prodding around I’m able to get my bowels working again.’
This time everybody around the table is looking on with open mouths. If last night’s story had shocked me, I have no idea what to say this time. Two things I won’t be trying at Base Camp are peanuts and tuna.
We turn in at 9.30, not long after Phil’s peanuts story, but before I fall asleep, I overhear voices through the plywood wall that separates our rooms. There is more laughter, and I hear Ricardo quoting passages from The Ascent of Rum Doodle to Kevin. It makes me smile.
Day 6 – Acclimatising on Pokalde
Tuesday, 8 April 2014 – Dingboche, Nepal
There are a few niggling illnesses at breakfast this morning. Ian has the Khumbu cough, the dry high-altitude rasp that he seems to suffer from on every expedition. He apologises for keeping me awake all night, but I wore my earplugs and hardly noticed. Kevin has a stomach problem and Dia is also feeling ill. She doesn’t emerge for breakfast.
Phil produces the medical kit and hands out throat lozenges, ciprofloxacin and aspirin.
‘Dia wants to know if you have any Viagra,’ I say.
Louis laughs louder than anyone else, though it seems to me a nervous sort of laugh.
It’s supposed to be a rest day today, but after breakfast I set off up the hill behind our lodge for a modest hike that lasts longer than I anticipate.
The main trail to Lobuche slants across the hillside to a mini pass bedecked with Buddhist prayer flags and stupas. The sky is completely clear, and the sheer faces of Ama Dablam and Kangtega stare down at me across the valley. Both mountains look intimidating, but at the pass two equally impressive peaks appear to the west. They are Taboche Peak and Cholatse, a fiendish pair of snow-capped needles whose summits look severe. Sheer cliffs guard the lower sections of Cholatse. It looks to be the hardest peak I have seen in the Khumbu.
None of these peaks would be my cup of tea to climb, but they are indescribably beautiful, and it is a privilege to look at them from below.
Taboche Peak rises above Dingboche
It’s a pleasant morning for an acclimatisation walk. I turn right and follow dozens of other people up a ridge. Some are trekkers, but most, like us, are climbers heading for Everest and Lhotse. When I arrived yesterday morning I had no idea so many people were staying in Dingboche.
The trail is steep and dusty. I plod up grassy slopes beside the path to avoid inhaling the clouds of dust kicked up by so many hikers. After an hour I have ascended 300m and overtaken the largest of the trekking groups. I find myself alone on the slope with only a few isolated figures above me.
Two of these are Ian and Caroline, a nurse from New Zealand with whom I climbed in Alaska last year. At the time I had no inkling she had ambitions to climb Everest. I was surprised when Phil contacted me a few months later asking for a reference.
‘Hey, Horrell,’ it read (Phil’s prose is very similar to his speech). ‘I got an email from this Kiwi chick asking if she can sign on to my Everest expedition. So I Googled her name to get her climbing experience, and discovered you climbed Denali with her.’
I must have talked about Altitude Junkies while we were on Denali. I was tempted to ask Phil for a commission for referring a client to him, but I knew what his response would be (the second word would have been ‘off’). Instead, I gave him an honest assessment of Caroline’s climbing skills. It must have been OK
, because here she was.
I catch up with Caroline and Ian a short while later. Ian has pulled his buff over his face to avoid the dust. He has decided to descend, but Caroline is keen to continue.
I see Louis on the trail behind me. I head for a rocky sub-peak a short distance above us, and reach it by way of a gentle scramble over rocks. We meet Margaret and Edita on the summit.
After a great acclimatisation hike, it’s eleven o’clock and we’ve climbed 700m to an altitude of 5,050m. None of us had any intention of climbing high when we set off. Edita doesn’t even have any water, and only came up here looking for 3G. She didn’t find it, but has no regrets, for the view is incredible.
Everest and Lhotse hide behind the mountain we are climbing, which turns out to be a trekking peak called Pokalde, but the giant black pyramid of Makalu has appeared in the distance to the east. Far beneath Makalu, tiny Island Peak is camouflaged against higher slopes behind it.
To the right of Makalu a series of fluted peaks and faces continue to the whaleback ridge of Baruntse and the less prominent Kali Himal. Ama Dablam, Kangtega, Taboche and Cholatse have remained visible all along, but up the valley to the north two more peaks have appeared. The steep snow ridge of Lobuche rises in the foreground, and the snow plateau of Cho Oyu stretches out behind it.
We stay on top for forty-five minutes, taking many photos and videos. I’m the only person who knows the names of all the peaks, so Margaret asks me to video the panorama for her with commentary in what she calls my ‘beautiful British accent’ (I have a slightly stupid Yorkshire accent, but she’s Australian, so I can see her point).
The rest of the team are standing in front of me. I describe the mountains as Margaret asked, but I ruin her footage by making a series of inappropriate jokes as I pan the camera past each of them.
It takes just forty-five minutes to run down the dusty slopes back to Dingboche. Halfway down we meet Phil on his way up. He says he was concerned that Edita might discover an internet connection and end up missing lunch, so he came up to find her.
The sky has remained clear throughout the morning. It’s been a perfect acclimatisation hike to a grandstand seat above this shining mountain amphitheatre, and I feel blessed.
At dinner I sit next to Margaret. This is her fifth Everest expedition in as many years (Lhotse counts in my book). She climbed on the south side in 2010 and 2011, reaching the summit at the second attempt. Then she joined us on the north side in 2012 but turned around at the Third Step. Last year she tried again from the north side and was successful.
That’s four expeditions and two summits, from both sides. Not bad for a grandmother. I ask her to compare north and south.
‘The trek to Base Camp on the south side is very beautiful,’ she says, ‘and then you climb through the Khumbu Icefall. On the north side I didn’t enjoy the drive to Base Camp. Nyalam and Tingri are not very nice places to stay, and the walk up from Base Camp to ABC is a bit boring. But above ABC the north side is beautiful.’
I ask her about the difficulties on summit day.
‘On the north side you leave camp and begin climbing straight away through rocks, and it’s hard. The only place you can relax is on the ridge between the Second and Third Steps. Everywhere else is very exposed. On the south side you begin by crossing the South Col. Then it is steep, but it is wide. Above the Balcony all the way to the South Summit the ridge is very wide. There are two ropes, but if you want to overtake people you can unclip very easily and get past. You cannot do that on the north side.
‘Between the South Summit and the Hillary Step it is very exposed, but this section is short. On the north side you have the triangular face above the Third Step, which is much longer. It seems to go on for ever. The Second Step is much harder than the Hillary Step.
‘On the south side you have a lot of ascent – nearly 1,000m from the South Col. But when I got back to Base Camp last year, I told Phil the north side is much harder than the south.’
It’s a good summary, and makes me feel better about my eighteen-hour summit day on the north side, which I only just survived. One thing’s for sure, though: whatever anyone says, neither side is easy.
Day 7 – The glare of the Khumbu
Wednesday, 9 April 2014 – Lobuche, Nepal
It’s another beautiful day. We take an early breakfast and leave Dingboche at 7.10 bound for Lobuche, a few hours up the main Khumbu Valley.
We climb slowly up to the pass we ascended yesterday morning. Beyond it, instead of heading up the ridge as we did on yesterday’s acclimatisation walk, we descend over the other side onto a long plateau.
Almost immediately, a small group of us drops behind the others. Phil is keen to reach Lobuche in good time to ensure we have rooms at the Mother Earth Lodge. All the Everest climbers, and Ian, keep close on his heels as best they can. By the time I reach the pass they are already some distance across the plateau.
Meanwhile, Margaret, Edita, Louis, Dia, Dorje and I linger at the back in our own little group. We are four fifths of the Lhotse ‘Dream Team’. While Louis may be walking more slowly to keep his wife Dia company, how do you explain the rest of us? Are the Everest climbers stronger than we are, or are they pushing themselves too hard? Does our greater number of 8,000m expeditions make us wiser, so that we are content to take it easy at this early stage?
For my part I want to enjoy this experience for as long as I can. I walk among truly breathtaking scenery – towering rock walls and shimmering horizons of ice – and I know we have only a short distance to travel to Lobuche. I am in no hurry to get there.
We are climbing out of the alpine zone now, into high-altitude desert. The plateau is dusty and brown, the only vegetation a few isolated patches of dwarf juniper. The trail drifts to the left of the plateau, and soon we are looking down into the Khumbu Valley and the village of Pheriche. This is the place we’ll return to at the end of the expedition to catch helicopters back to Kathmandu. From here it looks like a small farming community in a flat valley, surrounded by stone-walled fields.
Across the valley the two impossible peaks of Taboche and Cholatse rise in sheer walls of ice-crowned rock. They remain our companions for the next couple of hours. As we move north they change shape, but at no point do they become any less frightening. I can see no feasible routes up for any but the most talented, bold and committed climbers. I’m none of those things.
The path keeps to the edge of the plateau, looking down on the valley to our left. Gradually we descend to join it and cross a bridge beneath a community of teahouses known as Dughla.
Just before we reach the buildings Dia tells me she has lost her sunglasses. She thinks it happened when she stooped to tie her shoelaces. The peaks around us are snow-capped only in isolated places, but with such a bright sun I’m worried about snow-blindness. When she tells me she thinks she lost them on the short section before the bridge, I insist we return and look for them.
I drop my pack and we walk back for about ten minutes, but we don’t see them. Several porters and yakpas have passed us by. If any of them saw Dia’s glasses lying on the trail it’s likely they would have picked them up and pocketed them.
We return to the teahouses where Louis is waiting for us. I suggest to Dia she pulls her buff up over her face to form narrow eye slits. Though not as effective as sunglasses it will provide some measure of protection from the sun.
Margaret, Edita and Dorje have started a steep climb up to another pass, and are some distance ahead. They don’t know why we have been delayed, but when I set off after them they stop and wait a short distance above.
‘Are you OK?’ Dorje says when I arrive.
‘Dia has lost her sunglasses, so we went back to look for them.’
‘You find them?’
I shake my head.
We stop for water and I take out my trekking poles to help me on the steep ascent ahead. Within five minutes Dorje has stopped a porter coming the other way and negotiated a price of 2,000 rupee
s (about $20 USD) for his sunglasses. Well, I say negotiated, but Dorje is a determined man and not someone to mess with. Most likely he just said ‘you give me those for 2,000’ and the porter didn’t argue.
The sunglasses are a decent pair of Bollés, and Dia is happy again. We reach the pass, the Thok La, spanned by an archway of prayer flags. Passing underneath, we find ourselves in a memorial ground to climbers who have died on Everest (and other mountains). A bewildering number of stupas have been erected on a bank beside the trail. Stupas also line another short ridge 100m away.
Although I have never heard of most of the climbers, every so often I come across a name I recognise. Scott Fischer, who died during the Into Thin Air tragedy of 1996, has the biggest one. Pete Boardman has another, to go with the one he shares with Joe Tasker at Chinese Base Camp on the north side of Everest. Alex Lowe died in an avalanche on Shishapangma, but is remembered here too. Most poignant for me is the memorial to Shriya Shah-Klorfine. She was a desperately inexperienced Canadian climber who reached the top of Everest from the south side on 19 May 2012, but died of exhaustion on the descent. I ascended from the north side that day, and it’s conceivable that I stood beside her on the summit, a few hours before her final breath.
We pause for a few reflective moments before continuing. We have only half an hour to walk to Lobuche, but those few minutes will live long in the memory. The valley flattens out and bends to the right. The snow crown of Lobuche East is high overhead, and we see the yellow tents of the Himex expedition camped beneath it. To acclimatise for Everest, they will be climbing this 6,119m trekking peak instead of passing through the Khumbu Icefall.
Pumori rises up like a giant church bell at the head of the valley in front of us. It’s not quite perfectly symmetrical – it falls away in a gentler ridge to the right – but it still looks a very difficult climb. It has a reputation for being dangerously avalanche prone. Edita tells me she would like to climb it some day.