by Mark Horrell
‘Don’t you think it’s a beautiful mountain?’ she says.
‘So is K2,’ I reply. ‘But it wouldn’t be my cup of tea.’
Pumori and Lingtren seen from near the Everest memorials
The valley opens out, with moraine ridges and glacial boulders on either side. At some point in the past the Khumbu Glacier must have extended all the way down here. Now we have just a few short sections of ice to cross. [Unbeknown to me the Khumbu Glacier does indeed extend this far down the valley. It is hidden behind the moraine ridge to my right.]
We reach Lobuche at 10.30. It’s an inhospitable location for a village, but a lovely setting for trekkers and climbers. The village consists of three large trekking lodges looking across the valley to the crinkled black fortress of Nuptse.
We have ascended to 4,900m, and the rooms of the Mother Earth Lodge are cold as hell, but the dining room is warm and insulated.
At dinner I have a conversation about waste management on Everest with Dia, Louis and Phil. Dia asks what arrangements have been made for disposing of rubbish. Phil explains that we’ll be packing everything out, including all food packaging and human waste. The human waste is taken to a place where it can be turned into fuel (biogas).
‘An awful lot of shit is produced. If you can imagine thirty Sherpas having two meals of dal bhat every day, you start to get the idea,’ he says, a little unnecessarily.
Louis leans across the table and says something to Dia in Afrikaans.
‘‘N ton se kak.’
Phil and I look at each other.
‘Did he just say “I don’t suck cock”?’ Phil says.
‘That’s what I heard,’ I reply.
‘‘N ton se kak,’ Louis says again, and we roar with laughter.
‘‘N ton se kak,’ Dia says. ‘It means “a ton of shit”.’
‘You means it’s an actual phrase in Afrikaans, and not just some joke sentence?’
Louis says it again, and this time everybody round the table starts laughing. He spends the rest of the evening teaching us rude words in Afrikaans, but I’ve forgotten them by the time we go to bed.
Day 8 – Peace and solitude
Thursday, 10 April 2014 – Lobuche, Nepal
We all seem to be carrying some sort of bug. Ian was wide awake most of the night coughing. I have a severe cold and have turned into a one-man snot factory. I’ve used up every square inch of my handkerchief and have to buy a whole extra roll of toilet paper just to sneeze into.
Phil left at 5.30 this morning to head up to Base Camp. One of our kitchen Sherpas, Karma Gjalje, has been sent back down to help at the lodge here.
We have a rest day in Lobuche, and I spend the morning walking along the ridge of moraine opposite the village. From the top I find myself staring down onto the Khumbu Glacier, dusted grey with moraine. There is a cold breeze up here, but in the moments when it dies, or when I gain shelter behind rocks, the air is still and I enjoy the total silence.
The scenery is too beautiful for words. For the next three hours I amble along the ridge towards Base Camp on my elevated perch, contemplating peace and solitude, and the wonder of the mountains. This truly is one of the most magnificent places on Earth. The white cone of Pumori, its wedge-shaped sister peak Lingtren, and smaller Khumbutse rise ahead of me. To my left a green valley divides me from rocky Lobuche East, with a vast hanging glacier beneath its summit. To my right I look across the silvery Khumbu Glacier to Nuptse’s citadel.
Lobuche East rises above the community of teahouses at Lobuche
Twice I stop in the shelter of a rock and think about nothing at all in this haven of the mountain gods. When I turn around and wander back, the view is no less magnificent. Taboche and Cholatse tower over me in walls of ice-crowned rock. The fluted pinnacles and ridges of Kangtega and Thamserku rise more distantly at the end of the valley.
It’s a dusty, sandy track. I have my buff pulled over my nose and mouth, but by the time I return to the Mother Earth Lodge I feel like I’ve swallowed a great many particles – whether dust or strands of my buff, it’s all the same. I may well remain ill for a couple more days, but there is plenty of time to recover at Base Camp. In any case, I wouldn’t have missed this walk for anything.
Subdued by illness, it’s a quiet team in the Mother Earth Lodge this evening. They are sitting around the stove in the centre of the dining room when I come down an hour or so before dinner. I creep to a nearby table to read my book, but Ian notices me and buys me a beer.
It takes me a long time to drink it, and I’m not sure it was what I needed. Earlier in the afternoon I bought Margaret a beer too, but she was also feeling ill and Edita told her not to drink it. The beer sat on the table for quite a while. Eventually I noticed Edita drink it herself. Not everyone is quite so ill then.
Day 9 – Arrival at Base Camp
Friday, 11 April 2014 – Everest Base Camp, Nepal
We leave for Base Camp just after eight o’clock. Just as we’re leaving I see someone I recognise shout instructions to his porters from the neighbouring teahouse. It’s David Hamilton, leader of the Jagged Globe expedition, with whom I climbed Muztag Ata in the Chinese Pamirs a few years ago. I also recognise one of his clients, Denis, and his assistant leader Chris Groves, from previous expeditions.
They are just leaving for Base Camp themselves, so I chat to them as we walk along. They stayed in Dingboche like we did. They tell me that afterwards they continued up the Imja Valley to Chukung, and came back over a high pass, the Kongma La. They will be well acclimatised by now.
It’s a long time since I last saw Chris, when he led my first expedition to Aconcagua in 2005. Since then he has become one of Jagged Globe’s top 8,000m peak leaders, though this is his first time on Everest. Jagged Globe have had a remarkable success rate recently. Every one of their clients reached the summit in each of the last two years. Chris is non-committal when I ask him whether he thinks it will happen this time.
It’s another lovely walk, but the trail is bustling with trekkers and climbers heading to Base Camp. The land becomes increasingly barren. As we approach Pumori, standing sentinel at the end of the valley, the grassy outcrops present at Lobuche give way to scree and boulders.
We ascend a steep bank, then drop down to Gorak Shep and the last few teahouses on the trail before Base Camp. The lodges stand beside a huge sandy area which, in 2009, hosted the world’s highest cricket match.
We sit and drink Sprite in one of the teahouses while a group of Sherpas sit opposite sipping hot lemon. Dorje doesn’t introduce them, and they watch us in silence. We have been there for ten minutes when I suddenly recognise one of them. It’s Chongba, who stood beside me on the summits of both Manaslu and Everest. He will be climbing Lhotse with me too.
I rush over and give him a big hug and a warm handshake. He grins broadly, and I believe he may have recognised me earlier, but he said nothing. It says something of his character that we’ve shared such experiences, yet still he was reluctant to come over. It’s no surprise. Many of the older Sherpas exhibit this behaviour, which we take to be humility (though I don’t know whether this is true). The younger Sherpas are different. Most speak better English and are more confident with western clients.
‘They are all Altitude Junkies,’ says the teahouse owner as he walks past.
There is a huge Taiwanese flag pinned to the wall, scribbled with the climbers’ names from a particular Taiwanese expedition. Mel has a big grin on his face as he reads it. He points out some additional Chinese characters scrawled across the middle.
‘See that,’ he says. ‘They are not from Taiwan expedition. It says “Taiwan belongs to China”.’
I’m too polite to ask whether he too believes Taiwan belongs to China, but judging by his reaction I suspect that he doesn’t give a toss, any more than I would care if someone scrawled ‘Las Malvinas belong to Argentina’ across a poster of a lonely sheep in a windswept field on the Falkland Islands.
It takes an
other thirty minutes to reach Base Camp, and it’s an exhilarating experience for me. I have read about this place so many times and carried a mental picture of it in my mind. Now I am seeing it for real. I recognise many of the peaks from photos. Pumori, Lingtren, Khumbutse, Changtse, the West Shoulder and Nuptse enclose this natural amphitheatre.
At first, I find it hard to piece things together. The Khumbu Icefall, our route into the Western Cwm, is hidden from view during the approach. It’s a secret opening onto Everest’s upper reaches from the south side, but until you realise it’s there, Everest appears to be guarded by impossible faces. For a long time I look at the towering glaciers and cliffs of the Lho La, believing it to be the Khumbu Icefall. This wall of rock and ice, which forms a pass into Tibet, looks nothing like the obstacle I imagined.
There are sections of rock leading me to speculate that there hasn’t been much snowfall this year. This feeling is reinforced when Everest’s black pyramid appears above the West Shoulder. It’s as bare of snow as it looked when we climbed it from the north side two years ago. Then gradually the opening appears to the right of the valley, and the Icefall spills out.
When they first explored Everest from the south side in 1950, Bill Tilman and Charles Houston must have had a similar experience. They would have needed to walk almost to the top of the valley before they spotted this route up into the Western Cwm. Only then would they have realised Everest might just be climbable from Nepal.
It’s a picturesque approach along a ridge of moraine. At 11.30 we drop down and cross a jumble of boulders to the maze of tents that is Base Camp. Tents of all shapes and sizes sprawl across the moraine like a shanty town. We see Phil waiting for us above the Altitude Junkies’ encampment. When he ushers us into the plush, carpeted dining tent, which I recognise from previous expeditions, it feels like I am coming home. Those of the team who have never been on a Junkies expedition are impressed.
The approach to Everest Base Camp. The yellow tents of Base Camp can be seen front left. Changtse is the rock peak back left. The Lho La is the pass in front of it. The main triangular peak in the photo is Everest's West Shoulder. The black summit of Everest can be seen peeping up behind the West Shoulder. The peak on the right is a shoulder of Nuptse. The Khumbu Icefall spills down the gap between the West Shoulder and Nuptse.
When we are all assembled for lunch I decide to try a little mischief.
‘Mel graffitied “Taiwan belongs to China” on a Taiwanese flag at the teahouse in Gorak Shep,’ I say.
Mel looks horrified. ‘No, no,’ he says. ‘I not write it myself, I just said someone else write it.’
I feel embarrassed. He’s so upset that we might suspect him of such a mischievous deed that I end up having to apologise.
Our first happy hour of the expedition begins at four o’clock. Our chef Da Pasang serves red wine, cheese, Pringles and sushi in the dining tent. Ian leads the way. Every so often he gathers up the glasses to replenish them from the kitchen tent. The wine is very good. I’m already feeling light-headed after the first one, but Ian makes me drink three more.
Conversation inevitably turns to Everest, and we talk about Tilman and Houston’s Everest reconnaissance. The great British mountain explorer Bill Tilman made the first ever exploration of the southern approach to Everest in 1950 with American mountaineer Charles Houston. They had only two days to explore a possible route. On the first day they headed towards the Lho La. George Mallory had already looked down from here into the Khumbu Icefall and Western Cwm when he explored the Tibetan side in 1921. Tilman knew there were two keys to climbing Everest from the south. They needed to find a practical route from the top of the Western Cwm to the South Col, and there must be a route up the ridge from the South Col to Everest’s summit.
Their first exploration proved unsuccessful. As they walked towards the Lho La, a ‘trick of lighting’ (as Tilman described it) prevented them even seeing a route into the Western Cwm. Trick of lighting, my arse. As I noticed myself earlier today, the Khumbu Icefall spills down from a narrow gap. Tilman and Houston were a mile short of the foot of the Lho La when they turned around. The Icefall was still concealed, as it had been for me, initially. They spotted it easily the following day. On the second day they decided to climb Kala Pattar, the well-known viewpoint above Gorak Shep. Here they discovered what many trekkers know: a shoulder of Nuptse obscures the South Col from Kala Pattar. With the South Col hidden, there was no way of knowing whether there was a possible route up from the Western Cwm.
The second question, about a route from the South Col to the summit, also proved elusive. From Kala Pattar they thought the south ridge of Everest looked a bit too steep, but Tilman deduced correctly that he wasn’t looking at the ridge, but a buttress protruding from the South-West Face. In fact, Everest’s southern approach is not a south ridge, but a south-east one which is not as steep as the angle looks from Kala Pattar. Tilman’s friend Eric Shipton answered some of these questions the following year.
Phil is pleased to see us. He said the Sherpas made him eat on his own in the dining tent last night instead of letting him eat with them. He seems upset by this.
‘But what’s the problem with that, Phil?’ Louis says. ‘If you ate on your own then it means you were with all your friends.’
Day 10 – Settling in at Base Camp
Saturday, 12 April 2014 – Everest Base Camp, Nepal
My health seems to be deteriorating. I didn’t get much sleep last night, and this morning I have a headache, a cold, and a bad cough. Not surprisingly, I’m still tired.
There are a couple of nice day hikes from Base Camp for elevated views of Everest and Lhotse. Both summits are invisible from Base Camp, hidden behind Nuptse and Everest’s West Shoulder, but you only need to trek a short distance up Pumori, the mountain opposite, to see right into the Western Cwm.
It’s only a short hike up to Camp 1 on Pumori. Or if we prefer, we can trek back to Gorak Shep and walk up to the famous viewpoint of Kala Pattar, a shoulder of the same mountain. But until I’ve got over this illness I’ll be staying in camp and resting. I hope I’ll be able to shake it off in a couple of days.
It’s a cold morning, with little sun to recharge the solar panels. There is much talk of technology. We have two main methods of communicating with the outside world. The first is the Nepalese NCell phone network, meant to provide 3G connectivity for those members of the team who bought NCell SIM cards when they were in Kathmandu. The second is the BGAN/Inmarsat satellite system.
The leader of another team tells Phil that both systems were working well until a couple of days ago. Then Asian Trekking, a Nepalese trekking agency, pitched up with giant satellite dishes. Now the 3G and BGAN no longer work, but there is a third option: Asian Trekking are selling internet packages at $7,000 USD for the season. I try not to make a connection between these events.
I have a lazy morning reading, shaving and sleeping. At one point we are summoned outside to meet our thirty-strong Sherpa team. I know many of them already from previous expeditions, but our team is much bigger this year. Half of our Sherpas are new to me. The new guys have worked regularly for the American operator Mountain Trip, but Mountain Trip do not have a team on Everest this year, and they are very happy to be taken into the Junkies’ fold for a season.
We all stand in a big circle beside the stone platform that is being erected for tomorrow’s puja. One by one Dorje introduces the Sherpas by name. Then it comes to us, and we each have to introduce ourselves.
‘I’m Mark from England. This is my fourth time with the Junkies. I have twice summited with Chongba,’ I say, pointing towards him as he grins back, ‘on Everest north side and Manaslu.’
After lunch Phil demonstrates the new Summit Oxygen apparatus we will be using on the summit push. This is a new brand that hasn’t been available before. The old system that I used on Manaslu and Everest had several drawbacks. The regulator gave inaccurate readings – I wasn’t sure how much oxygen I was breathing.
It had a bottle-shaped oxygen reservoir that swung around my chest as I walked, and got in the way. One of its valves, for taking in ambient air, was always icing up. The outlet valve dripped water onto the zipper of my down suit, freezing it closed.
Most annoying of all was the rubber mask that came with it, which often formed a suction gag against my face. This might have gone down well at Ann Summers parties, but on the North Ridge of Everest – where you need every gram of oxygen you can get – it was less than convenient.
Phil says the new system doesn’t suffer from these deficiencies. I have a love-hate relationship with oxygen apparatus. When it works it’s great, but often I’ve felt I wasn’t getting much benefit from it. It’s been too unreliable, and I’m hoping this new kit will be better.
At dinner this evening we have a discussion about Mallory and Irvine, who disappeared on Everest in 1924. Nobody knows whether they reached the summit, and we speculate about what happened to them. A research team found Mallory’s body high on the North Face in 1999, and his injuries suggested he had died in a fall. The researchers had hoped to find a camera on the body, which could have confirmed whether the pair reached the top, but they were disappointed. Irvine’s body has never been found, and many Everest historians believe he must have been carrying the camera instead of Mallory.
But Phil believes that the Chinese team who climbed Everest in 1960 did find Irvine’s body. He thinks they kept his camera to hide the evidence. The Chinese ascent in 1960 is now regarded as the first ascent of Everest from the north side, but Phil thinks they didn’t get there. I tell him I think he has bought a conspiracy theory. I have read their account of the ascent. It’s a bit weird, with lots of Communist propaganda, but their description of the summit route is plausible.