 | 

It was the hardest day of my
life, and I had decided that on the way *up* to the summit. Then came the long
night of survival outside at 7460 meters.
On one day (headed up to C3
for the first time) I was feeling great: strong, confident, acclimatized, and
happy. The climbing was getting more exciting the higher we went. Arriving at
C3 there were three standing tents and one flattened tent showing the
potential of the site. That night I was bracing my feet against the tent wall
to hold it up against the incredible winds (and to calm Monty’s
at-the-time-seemingly-over-exaggerated fear that ‘if we lose this tent, we’re
dead’), and checking my oxygen saturation, fearing it was too low.
Next day: resting in the
tent, luckily sleeping almost all day, rolling from side to side trying to
find the optimal snow configuration below my body (knowing there is none), not
being much of a conversation backboard for Monty, eating some and trying to
eat more (but a shared ramen with jerky for an early dinner was about what we
could handle).
Middle of the night (3am):
the alarm goes off, ready to send us on our way to the summit, but the wicked
winds are still there. We sleep in, waiting for the sun, happy for our
shelter.
Morning: I finally emerge
from the tent, wrapped in down, and the ridge to the summit calls me up. The
winds have died down just enough, we have put in our time; it is time to go
for it. First I get Monty on board--we have enough sunlight left to climb to
the summit and descend to either C3 (comfortably) or C2 (optimistically). I
stuff my pockets with the essentials: snacks, hard candies, mocha cliff shots,
sunblock, three emergency hand warmers, a tiny one-ounce emergency LED
headlamp, a lighter. I finish packing up my backpack for the way down, and
leave it inside the tent. My harness goes on with minimal hardware (one
ascender, one ATC, and a few carabineers); one liter of water comes up with me
attached to my harness. With crampons on, I grab my ice axe, and I am ready to
go!
The climb: step by step, this
is slower than I had expected, or anticipated, or certainly wanted. But little
by little, section by section, and breath by breath, we climb. Monty is about
ten minutes ahead of me, and occasionally we meet up to eat some, drink some,
and push on. We indeed push our bodies and minds. There will be one section
where snow has covered the fixed lines and Monty bends to yank the line up (oh
good, I get to catch up just a bit). One section will be flat, one will be
incredibly steep snow, one will cross rock bands, one will go around a corner.
The route follows the ridge, and the Himalaya open up around (and fall below)
us. The temperature is quite nice (for us two draped in down and technical
clothing). The hardest part of the climb for me is near the top where the
angle steepens (yet again) to perhaps sixty degrees, then turns through a
little mixed rock band (which is hard work up so high). I keep telling myself
if it is just up that section, then I can make it. Never give up, never give
up, never give up. My mind pushes my body on. I mostly focus on my footsteps,
but during rest breaths, the remoteness and power of the sky and the Himalaya
and Shishapangma and the ridges and the snow show their beauty to me. And then
there is more up, up, and up. And then there is Monty again and we can go
down. We did it!
The descent: this is so much
easier than going up, well only for now--the descent always gets harder some
how. I double-check every harness attachment (sometimes cumbersome underneath
the big down coat) as I rappel down a section, or walk straight down the hill.
Somewhere on the way down my water bottle fell off of my harness, but I
planned on re-hydrating at C3. Using lovely friction with my body and gloves
and lessons from past years, I quickly descend the fixed roped sections often
catching Monty as he gets into or out of a rappel. But then about 75% back to
C3, it happened--the descent (and everything) got harder mentally as we
finally got to see the C3 tents. Or what was left of them. No tents were left
standing. Our tent, which contained essentials to our survival, was flapping
viciously in the wind. What did that mean? Were any of our things left? What
would we do? After being the most physically tired I have been in my life, now
I have to deal with this? What even does dealing with this mean? These
questions swirled through my mind as the sun was setting over the Himalaya,
slowly tipping the highest peaks in the world. Near sunset I looked east to
see a colorful sky and a shadow of Shishapangma extending kilometers and
kilometers to the east. But this was no time for pictures; the last few
hundred meters into ‘camp’ were telling as we were blown to the ground by the
severe gusts several times.
Down at C3: Like a magic
trick, the inner tent had been pulled from the table of snow, sloppily taking
with it my entire pack, but magically leaving Monty’s backpack and compressed
sleeping bag lying peacefully on the snow. Cautiously I explored a few steps
leeward of the tent, but found only a fuel bottle or two, a stove, a small
ditty bag of Monty’s; I found nothing of mine. My backpack, my sleeping bag,
my extra food, my insulating ground pads, my contact solution, even Moosey and
some prayer flags from home--these were all gone. All I had from here on out
was what was on my body and I was ready to get out of there.
Shelter at C3 (try #1): Those
same violent winds that kept us from descending in the dark to C2 were still
eating away at the fly from our destroyed tent. We had formulated a quick plan
to create a snow shelter using our available gear. Shovel: Monty will dig a
snow trench. Rope: we will line the bottom of the shelter with it. Tent fly:
let’s put it above us in the trench. One plan rolled quickly into the next:
okay, the fly isn’t easy to anchor above us, so we’ll use it as more ground
padding. One of my tasks was to free the tent fly from its flapping location,
but not to lose it thousands of meters down the mountain. For perhaps a half
of an hour I sat on three quarters of the fly to keep it from billowing into
the darkness with the wind, and with a bamboo stick attempted to dig in the
hard snow to free one of the corners. I was afraid to move to go for help, for
fear of losing the fly and part of our meager survival equipment, but Monty
was digging out of ear shot. So I sat there and dug with the stick, feeling
almost useless. Monty later came over and helped me free the fly, ripping one
section out of the snow and together we used a picket to free the final
corner. The rest of our Try#1 included modifying our snow trench into a very
small partial snow cave, trying to stuff my feet into Monty’s small backpack
with limited success, lying on the snow next to Monty with half of a sleeping
bag on top of me and a snow roof six inches above my face, and the feeling
that my toes were just too cold--this inactivity just wasn’t going to work: we
had to try to go down (again).
Descent attempt (#2): The
winds were still there, of course. They were there to whip tiny snow particles
into our faces, there to knock us down to the snow, there to impede our verbal
communications, there to obscure our visual path, there to chill us. But it
was Monty’s cerebral edema that truly turned us back. Hearing your climbing
partner say ‘I’m going to die’ as they fall into the snow at 7400 meters is
not something I’d ever like to repeat. Now it was my turn. My turn to assure
life and safety, to guide, to help. I felt an instant change in myself.
Shelter at C3 (try #2): The
long night was filled with endless tasks I gave myself, designed to address
our survival needs. I could not get Monty (and myself) down immediately and
all of our high altitude drugs had blown away with my backpack, so the best
thing I could do was work on the basics: shelter, warmth, and hydration. I
first got Monty in his sleeping bag in the shelter as it stood, then I worked
on the rest. My efforts were not all successful, but every partial success
helped.
There was the first try to
light the stove with lighter#1: inside the snow trench, with no pot, the
shovel as a base: no luck. There were the second and third tries with the same
lighter. Sparks but no nice flame. A search for another lighter in the
backpack led nowhere. I dug out a protected area from the wind: was the stove
getting too much or too little air? The fourth and fifth tries in the
protected area still didn’t light. Six, seven, eight. Back and forth between
shelter and hydration, I dragged a mylar blanket from one of the tents. I both
sat on this sometimes and sometimes isolated the stove from the snow with it.
Nine, ten, eleven. In the flotsam of one of the tents I found a pot (yay!).
Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Scrounging the remains of the other tent I found a
wood block: good, some more insulation from the snow. Fifteen, sixteen,
seventeen. My thumb stuck in the bent position. Monty found his lighter (#2)
in a pocket. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty. A 1/4 inch flame appeared for a few
seconds, but then it was gone. And it went on for hours. I was so thirsty that
the hard snow wall four inches in front of my face looked so good, I couldn’t
help but help myself (even knowing it wouldn’t cure my dehydration and would
chill me some). I just leaned forward and ate some snow, seeing some blood
from my lips remain on the snow. It tasted wonderful. I never got the stove to
stay lit. And shelter and warmth were similar, if slightly more successful.
Nautical dawn: Finally. The
stars were disappearing, and I could see the horizon. Soon the sun (both light
and warmth) would help us get down from C3. Monty was doing much better, and
we would soon be away from our cold shelter. With the light, however, I
discovered that my eyesight was clouded--I had worn my contacts through the
cold night, and now was having trouble. Now it would be Monty’s turn to guide
me down the mountain, Monty’s turn to find our path. However, communications
on the mountain sometimes get muddled.
Getting down: After ten
minutes (on our second try) heading down to C2, I found myself alone on a 40
degree snow slope, ice axe in hand, wind still whipping around me, able to see
the range of about three footsteps below me. I yelled to the wind “Monty!
Stop! Where are you? I can’t see!” No response--he couldn’t hear me in the
60+mph winds. I slowly downclimbed a few minutes, trying to follow the
footsteps I could see, then repeated my yells, searching visually for any rock
shape that might be moving or yellow and red (like Monty). And then I would do
this again. “Monty! Stop! Where are you? I can’t see!” Finally, I determined
I needed to speed up and get down this slope on my own. I needed to catch up
with Monty on my own. And so I did. Monty had downclimbed much too fast for my
limited-sight climbing speed, not realizing that even twenty feet of distance
was enough to isolate me in my blindness. He would downclimb a ways and
thought he was waiting for me, while I thought I was on my own. We were in
completely different worlds.
Reunion, rehydration, and
rewarming: After about half an hour I finally caught up with Monty, the extent
of my sight was clarified, and we headed down to the sunshine. We were
rehydrated extremely well at the first tent (almost the last on the mountain)
we found (part of the Marmot team, and their team members were awesome in
helping us out). After one more day we were warmed with hot soup from Dorji, a
hug from Bemba, and heat packs on our toes. Rewarming can sometimes hurt, but
we will recover.
There are no certain items
you need to survive. Even if I am stuck at one of the highest, coldest places
on earth, I do not need a tent or sleeping bag, ground pad or stove and pot.
The will to live and protect myself and my partner is in the heart and in the
mind.
-Val
Updates
 |
Millet One
Sport Everest Boot has made some minor changes by adding
more Kevlar. USES Expeditions / High
altitude / Mountaineering in extremely cold conditions / Isothermal to
-75°F Gore-Tex® Top dry / Evazote Reinforcements with aramid threads.
Avg. Weight: 5 lbs 13 oz Sizes: 5 - 14 DESCRIPTION Boot with semi-rigid
shell and built-in Gore-Tex® gaiter reinforced by aramid threads, and
removable inner slipper Automatic crampon attachment Non-compressive
fastening Double zip, so easier to put on Microcellular midsole to
increase insulation Removable inner slipper in aluminized alveolate
Fiberglass and carbon footbed Cordura + Evazote upper Elasticated
collar.
Expedition footwear for
mountaineering in conditions of extreme cold. NOTE US
SIZES LISTED. See more here. |
|
 |
A cold
weather, high altitude double boot for extreme conditions The Olympus
Mons is the perfect choice for 8000-meter peaks. This super lightweight
double boot has a PE thermal insulating inner boot that is coupled with
a thermo-reflective outer boot with an integrated gaiter. We used a
super insulating lightweight PE outsole to keep the weight down and the
TPU midsole is excellent for crampon compatibility and stability on
steep terrain. WEIGHT: 39.86 oz • 1130 g LAST: Olympus Mons
CONSTRUCTION: Inner: Slip lasted Outer: Board Lasted OUTER BOOT: Cordura®
upper lined with dual-density PE micro-cellular thermal insulating
closed cell foam and thermo-reflective aluminium facing/ Insulated
removable footbed/ Vibram® rubber rand
See more here. |
|
|  |