It was raining, and though Dave described it as a soft rain (I believe hard rain is known as hail to us Europeans, but David is a Californian; they have their own linguistic imagery). It was cold and a slight breeze added to the general air of misery tainted with anticipation. We had seen only mist slowly swirling round the rocks and ponds on the trail up to our camp. Occasionally the full moon flitted between the clouds. Somewhere up there was our target wrapped up in unknown joys and dangers.

The next morning, umbrellas in hand, our little team set out for Ngga Pulu, the second highest summit in Australasia. As the rain and mists began to clear the bogs and wet cliffs brought memories of our homely, lovely Cairngorms. Scotland, the land of soft rain I suppose. Our local guide had pointed in the general direction of the mountain. As Edward Whymper once said; 'guides are mere pointers out of paths', in this case literally.

The path was not obvious, but here and there cairns left by earlier parties led first to a narrow corridor, an eroded trench, then a false summit that turned out to be a shoulder leading to a surprising equatorial glacier. The rock here was limestone and had petrified sludge marks, fossilised remains of the scouring from the receding ice cap. There used to be three glacier systems in the Sudirman Range, now there are just two [3]. Next to the glacial hump we found a rocky peak marked with a home made metal ice axe. In the mist and cloud it it looked like this was the highest point on the mountain. Just 50 metres lower than the top of Carstensz, Ngga Pulu was good for for acclimatisation.

It rained as we descended under our flock of umbrellas. In base we sat under an old blue tarp and ate a supper of cold chicken nuggets and rice in pools of head-torch light.

Two events took place at six am the next morning; it stopped raining and dawn, having no choice, arrived.

Carstensz Pyramid is not really a pyramid, more a series of whale back ridges and steep limestone walls either side. On the North side it presents a a series of glistening wet slabs seamed with eroded grooves where they overlap. The trail to the base of the wall was well marked and led to one of these grooves. An old fixed rope pointed the way. The first eight or so rope lengths followed a ramp leading up and right which in turn led to a narrow gully and then, by pitch twelve, a wide sandy glacis above which a one hundred metre wall of cliffs guarded the summit ridge. Pitch fifteen had rough, sharp edged holds and reached the ridge.

A few minutes of wandering along the easy ridge brought us to the main obstacle of the climb, a six metre deep brèche. Some-one had left a Tyrolean rope in place.

' asked Dave.
I replied.

Peering through the mist at the anchors on the far side, I could not be sure if the slings wrapped round sharp limestone edges were fraying or not. How long had the slings been there? Had the equatorial sun corroded the nylon? Was it nylon even?

After a short discussion we agreed to rappel down the gap and climb up again on the far side. It began to snow gently. There were two more small brèches before the short scramble to the summit, where it was beginning to snow more heavily. We found two small plaques there, one a memorial to a group of young Indonesians and (slightly alarmingly) the other was for Brimob, the armed wing of the Indonesian police force. [4]

On the way down the snow turned into heavy rain, the grooves into into waterways and the rock climb into a river canyon. Rapping down, the water streamed through through our clothing and filled our boots till they squelched water out with each step. The descent was rather slow, rappelling one at a time. The feeling of relief when we passed the last rope and were able to get under the shelter of the umbrellas for the walk home. It was a bit like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted I guess. It was just above freezing. By now I was suffering from uncontrollable shakes, cold and soaking wet. Back at the camp I crawled into my sleeping bag with the wet clothes on, hoping that things would dry out during the night. On the nylon of the damp tent a miserable and wet mosquito was eyeing me. Looking at the bent head, set an an angle from the thorax, I think it was an Anopheles. I had read that in Papua, all four forms of Malaria are present and resistant. I had also read that the friendly Anopheles vectors other ghastly diseases too. I fell asleep hoping the insect was too miserable and cold to need a blood meal, or that it was a male.

Forty hours later the team was in Kuta, Bali, soft surf rolling across the horizon. The sun shone, the water was warm, the beer cold. Life could hardly have taken a better turn.

asked Wim. Borodudur is an eighth century Buddhist temple in Java, it had been covered in volcanic ash when it was 200 years old, and rediscovered in the nineteenth Century. It is a magnificent ornate pyramid that once rose from jungles, but is now surrounded by rice paddies.

I replied

said Sam and Dave. And so they did.

=======================end==============================

Ngga Pulu 4852m
S.04°04.045'
E.137°11.299'
Carstensz 4887m
S.04°04.729'
E.137°09.557'

Base Camp 4280m
S.04°04.729'
E.137°09.557'

===========================END===================================

[1]Puncak Jaya (IPA: /'pʊn.tʃæk 'dʒaɪ.ɔ/), sometimes called Mount Carstensz or the Carstensz Pyramid, is the highest mountain on the island of New Guinea, on the Australia-New Guinea continent and in Oceania. It is the highest point between the Himalayas and the Andes and the highest island peak in the world. The peak is located in what is variously called the Sudirman Range or the Dugunduguoo, in the western central highlands of Papua, the Indonesian western half of the island, and is the highest peak in the country.

[2] The seventh is either Mount Kosciuszko, 2228m, Snowy Mountains on the Australian mainland or Carstensz in the Australasian continental plate. Sam and Dave have now climbed both; thus all 8 of the 7 summits!

[3]http://www.easternsnow.org/proceedings/2004/kincaid_and_klein.pdf#search='meren%20glacier'

[4] One of the oldest Indonesian National Police units was the Mobile Brigade (AKA Brimob), formed in late 1945. It was originally assigned the tasks of disarming remnants of the Japanese Imperial Army and protecting the chief of state and the capital city. It fought in the revolution, and its troops took part in the military confrontation with Malaysia in the early 1960s and in the conflict in East Timor in the mid-1970s. In 1981 the Mobile Brigade spawned a new unit called the Explosive Ordnance Devices Unit.
In 1992 the Mobile Brigade was essentially a paramilitary organization trained and organized on military lines. It had a strength of about 12,000. The brigade was used primarily as an elite corps for emergencies, aiding in police operations that required units to take quick action. The unit was employed in domestic security and defence operations and was issued special riot-control equipment. Elements of the force were also trained for airborne operations.

For the alternative view of Indonesian politics see John Pilger http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=38

The Western Cwm is deceptive, it looks so short, but in reality the steep reflective side walls of Nuptse and the West Shoulder make it a solar oven. It took us until the early afternoon to reach Camp 2, utterly exhausted and dehydrated. It had been a a clear day, burning hot. At Camp 2 my oxygen saturation was 70% of sea level, which in London would put me in hospital. Here we just walk more slowly!

On 15th we left early for Camp 3 and still arrived exhausted. It took an hour before we could summon up the energy to collect ice chips and boil water. It began to snow gently but persistently till around midnight, then the wind arrived buffeting the tents till early morning. An early start for Camp 4 was out of the question, the chances of frostbite too high.

Across the cwm from us a tragedy was unfolding that night. High up on left side of the South West Face of Everest a Korean expedition was making a new route. At the the top of their fixed ropes the highest team were in a small tent anchored to a single ice screw. They too experienced the same snow fall followed by the winds. But for them the winds brought a catastrophic avalanche which swept away the lead climbers in their tent.

The next morning saw us toiling up the Lhotse Face, unaware of the the Korean disaster. We were using bottled oxygen at about half a litre a minute. The idea was to arrive at the South Col (just under 8,000m) in a good enough state to rest for a few hours before leaving for the summit.

At the South Col we barely managed to produce a litre of melted water each before drifting off to sleep. The alarm had been set for 10pm, and by 11pm our team had picked up their individual Sherpas. Doug with Pemba Gyalzen, Wim with Tundu, Sam with Namgyal, Dave with Tika, and James with Dorji Gyalzin... and me bringing up the rear. That is usually where the problems are on summit day.

By early dawn we had reached the Balcony (c.8500m), it had been cold but windless and for some reason we all had cold feet except Wim who did did not have one-piece high altitude boots but used Scarpa Alphas with over-boots. I found this interesting and quite counter-intuitive; we are so used to believing the hype surrounding modern equipment it is sometimes easier to believe the publicity than our own experience. Shortly after dawn the absence of wind began to make itself felt. The final climb to the South Summit was so warm I tied my down jacket round my waist and took off my mitts.

=================================================================

The top from the South Summit. This is the view that Raymond Lambert and Tenzing Norgay had in 1952 when they turned back. The next year Tenzing returned with Ed Hillary.
===========================================================================================

The team reached the summit around 10am on 17 May 2007 after 11 hours climbing.

There was no wind and we stayed there around one hour before re-descending. It was so comfortable that for the first time we were able to make satellite phone calls with bare hands. Sam called her mother. I called Jo. Among the group on the summit was our good friend, the tousled haired Omar Samra from Egypt. He turned to us and said;

“With 75 million people and after five thousand years of civilisation, Egypt has finally got someone on the top of the world.”

We had one hiccup on the descent, Omar's Sherpa, Chawang, had unclipped himself from the ropes at the South Summit, where he was found unresponsive by Kenton. Doug arrived soon after and administered Dexamethasone, after which Chawang was able reach Camp 4 under his steam in Doug's company.

The conditions had been perfect, and Willie Benegas's team had made a superb job of fixing the ropes above the Balcony. While we recovered at Camp 4 Willie managed to descend all the way to base camp where, appallingly, he was physically beaten by an American staying with the Nepalese “Super Sherpa Expedition”. I will not name the execrable little man (but you may call him Jerry the Trekker if you like) who decided to take on a man who had just come down three and a half thousand metres. It must have been a singularly one-sided contest. This was not the only example of appalling behaviour; some time between the 18th and 19th our tents at Camp 3 were trashed and shredded by people leaving behind Korean food wrappings. Some calling card eh?.

By 18th May our little team had gathered at base camp. In the intervening week since we left base, the good weather had melted out the glacier, and now our tents stood on stalks like glacier tables. The weather continued to remain excellent till the 23rd making this one of the longest summit windows in recent years. 2007 looks set to be a record year for successful ascents. The next day I walked down to Pangboche with James to make our thanks at the monastery.

This was the end of our adventure. I now head off to Chamonix, James to Bristol to work on his properties, Doug and Dave to their respective medical practices. Wim remains on holiday till August when we all regroup for an attempt on Carstenz and 18 year old Sam, well she has to deal with becoming an overnight celebrity. The youngest non-Nepalese woman to climb Everest!

======================End=================================
copyright Victor Saunders 29 May 2007

After Guy Cotter's letter about the ice fall (see previous blog), the Ministry of Tourism instructed the SPCC to employ more ice fall doctors.
The SPCC sent one more fairly soon after the instruction. People said it was still difficult to see where the accumulated ice fall fees were going. I think they suffered from a lack of imagination. So, the ice fall is going to be safer. A bit.

“There is a dead Sherpa at the bottom of the Face.”

The accident was not in the ice fall but at the bottom of the Lhotse Face; a normally safe place, the place where everyone clips in to the fixed ropes. What had happened? There were no witnesses. Probably the man was killed around an hour before Kenton arrived at the bottom of the Face.

“He was still clipped into the rope “ Kenton said. “Massive head trauma... No chance. No chance”

The man was called Dawa. He was from Solu Khumbu, a little below Lukla, where he lived with his family of four small children. They would recuperate his body, to be cremated at home; the pyre of sacred juniper, cymbals, drums and brass hand bells calling out to the local gods, the anguish of his family calling out to him. In mountains tragedy cannot be avoided.

We were a sad little procession walking down from base camp where the night time temperature inside our tents was minus nine Centigrade. As we lost height, we passed from winter through spring. The world was thawing. First came the flowers, then a flock of wild mountain goats (they were the Himalayan Thar; a silky brown haired animal with short curved horns), and then the first brood of baby yaks; they were the size of small sheep and curious about new world they had just been born into.

And so on to the warmth and safety of the wonderful Sonam Lodge in Pangboche. The owners are Gurmin (I have stood at the summits of Everest, Cho Oyu and Amadablam at his side) and his his wife Nima Lamu (we shared expeditions to Amadablam and Ombigaichen). Nima Lamu is the niece of Kame Nuru my current base camp sirdar, sister of Ang Nuru who once came third in the Everest Marathon and who also helped UK vice consul, Serena Brocklebank, to the summit of Everest last year. The extended family tree in Pangboche is complex and interwoven. Similar villages in western Europe might be the subject of the pointing finger and jokes of cretinism, but here, where one in three young men have climbed over 8000m and one in four have summitted Everest, such humour holds no weight.

Our team was joined by Kenton's team; Ben, Tori, Greg and Omar (www.everest2007.net) and the ten of us proceeded to watch no less than fifteen videos in the next three days. We were also joined by Jean Clemenson, aged sixty nine and three quarters. Jean is my old friend and ex-neighbour from Argentiere and for years has been telling me about his friend, a certain Henri Sigayret, author of the Le Khumbu and other titles. Noticing that the menu in Sonam Lodge was in French, Jean asked Gurmin why this was so.

“My sister, she is married to a French man; Henri Sigayret.” Jean was temporarily lost for words.

The next day the entire team, in twos and threes, climbed up the short hill to Upper Pangboche where Lama Geshe said a small prayer for the soul of Dawa. And the day after that we began our slow haul back to base
camp.

Everest expeditions break down into three phases. Phase One: Acclimatisation, Phase Two: Weather Anxiety, Phase Three: Climb. We are in Phase Two, we examine weather forecasts everyday poring over them
like priests examining the entrails. Soon it will be time time to decide. But for now we are waiting for the right moment.

During the period from the first ascent in 1953 to the late 80s the few expeditions that came this way fixed the Ice Fall themselves, collaborating with any other expeditions that happened to be around.
The first commercial trips (with clients and mountain guides) probably started with Rob Hall's Adventure Consultants (NZ) in the early 90s.
AAI (USA) joined the fun in 1993. By 1994 these two were joined by Himalayan Guides, though there were still several strong amateurs such as Alison Hargreaves and and Erhart Loretan on the South side that year. In that year the Nepalese firm of Thamserku fixed the route through the Ice Fall. The expeditions continued to fix the Ice Fall (sometimes in collaboration with the others) the leaders arriving weeks early to do the work.

Fixing the route was cooperation tinged with anarchy. This did not go unnoticed by Mal Duff (UK) who, together with Henry Todd (UK) of Himalayan Guides, began the fixing of the Ice Fall by just one organisation. They used the experienced Sherpas Nima (Dingboche) and Gylazin (Pangboche). These two were their "Ice Fall Doctors".

In 1997 Mal Duff died of unknown causes at base camp, leaving the organising to Himalayan Guides, who continued "managing" the Ice Fall until 1999. In 2000 the Nepalese Government gave the job of fixing the Ice Fall to the NGO, the SPCC (Sagarmartha pollution Control Committee), who have fixed the route to date. The main Ice Fall Doctors were now Nima and another Gyalzin from Namche. By 2004 they were joined by Ang Kami and Nawang Nuru. The SPCC raised a charge of around 3k USD per expedition for the fixing of the Ice Fall, and the fee is quite separate from the climbing permit cost of 10k USD per expedition member. Over the last 7 years the number of expeditions has steadily risen and there are around 20 expeditions here this year. So the total cash raised by the Ice Fall Fee is around 60k USD. This is significant because that is quite a lot more than is evidently being spent on making the Ice Fall route a safe one.

The job of the Ice Fall Doctor is not only to establish a safe route through the Ice Fall, but also to maintain the route which changes on a daily basis (remember this is a moving glacier, the blocks shift continually, new crevasses open up and ice cliffs collapse). They also need to replace the 10 or so ladders lost every year. (About 60 or 70 are needed in any one year).

This is not to blame the Ice Fall Doctors in person, but to point out the lack of funding for their job. Nevertheless there has been increasing criticism of the route choice over the last two years. Our names for the parts speak for themselves... part of the route this year passes unnecessarily under London Bridge (an unstable block of ice the size of a sea container), the Boulder of Damacles (a barely attached block the size of a garage) and Darwin Award Corner (you guess why!).

When the expeditions themselves fixed the Ice Fall there was an element of control and management by the users, and this is what seems to be missing now. We appear to have no say in the safety of our route.

The gist of Guy's letter then is the SPCC should be able to easily afford to employ more Ice Fall Doctors to safely maintain and revise the route. It would be hard to disagree.

"...blah...blah ...going up to Khumbu again...blah ... blah...you must have one of the best jobs in the world!"

"Yes, I suppose I have..." I shouted back.

Glancing up at the television, I was just in time to see a superb catch being taken by the slip fielder. It may have been the alcohol, it may equally have been the noise; but I think it was the cricket. I just could not concentrate. I kept thinking back to my student days, huddled over a drawing board. It was high summer. Windows open, doors banging in the wind. A leaf or maybe stray blade of grass blowing into the room. The radio purring away in the back ground, .I used to listen to TMS (Test Match Special) on long-wave. In those days the voice of summer was John Arlott. A west country poet who brought out the beauty of cricket with his language. He loved it. I don't know what Arlott would have made of the modern game. The betting, the corruption, and now the suspicion of murder.

Where was I ? Oh yes, back in Tom and Jery's... Yes, like Arlott, I love my work too. What could be a better office than the high mountains? And it is wonderful to see the climbing, the trekking and the travelling through the eyes of others. My brother Adam has come from San Francisco to trek up the Khumbu valley with us. Earlier in the day we were sipping coffe in the Java coffee house, looking down on the world. He has never been in Asia before, he saw the same things as me here in Kathmandu but observed a different world to the one I saw. I saw a bustling city. I saw heat dust and the danger from motor bikes to microbes everywhere. Amid all this confusion and distraction I have to pack for the expedition, sort out kit, find out where the less than helpful banks have wired the money to, and worry about the hotel bookings. Meanwhile this is what Adam saw; in his own words;

"The most overwhelming thing here is the traffic and the polution. The streets are crouded and full of tiny little cars, motorbikes, rikshaws and bicyclists who all compete to run over pedestrians. I heard someone mention that breathing Kathmandu air is worse for you than smoking. So many wonderful sights and sounds.

I woke this morning to the sounds of two crows fighting over a dead rat. Along with these crows there were more crows, starlings whistling and dogs barking, and of course, cars honking. This afternoon I stood at the balcony of a resturant watching the street below in which I saw an itinerant cobler sitting on the ground repairing shoes, a bhudist mong talking on a cell phone going by in a rickshaw, and two orange-turbaned and bearded old men playing strange pipes to several baskets of semi-comatosed snakes which occasionally tried to make a half-hearted strike at a passing tourist or a child.

This evening, as we walked past the royal palace, we stopped to ask directions of a Nepali soldier armed with a sten gun. He was small - no more than the size of a child, but in full battle uniform with a helmet and fatigues. He turned out to be very friendly and it was 5 minutes until we could tear ourselves away from his strange pleading questions and observations about England - mostly about what a beautiful and cultured place it was. The conversation was a little slow because of frequent repetition and the fact that the person wanting to do all the talking could not speak English (and we speak almost no Nepali). In short, I am having an absolutely wonderful time."

That was so different from what I had seen in the same time that I resolved there and then to look on the world with fresh eyes; to step back and really look. Even with the best job in the world you sometimes get too wrapped up to see the other, more interesting picture. Step back. It is wonderfully refreshing.

I clutched my beer to my chest, and looked up at the screen again. A near run out, hands going up to appeal.. Ah yes, I remember now, the tiny little trigger for all this rambling. John Arlott, sometime poet, cricket commentator and wine writer for the Guardian newspaper. He also said, and no one could disagree with him, that he had the best job in the world; being paid to watch cricket and drink wine. Not bad eh?

For reasons that I will not explain (I don't understand them) we chose to spend four nights at CBC not two. Accordingly we made ambitious plans to pre acclimatise as much as possible. Just above the camp is a castle shaped outcrop of rock, we spent an enjoyable afternoon at the castle, rock climbing on a steep loose cliff; belaying well back to keep clear of the boulders that fell crashing into the scree at our feet. (For the technically minded the routes were: Loosifer; F6a and oncetherewasaroute; F6a) . Wim, our Vin Diesel clone, did his best to aid entropy, attempting to turn the castle back into sand.

Two days later we followed the ridge above camp to a knoll at 5900m where to our surprise and joy there was a gymnastic trapeze.

We all took turns to try pull-ups. When it was my turn I remembered why I don't do this kind of thing... asthmatics don't. I wheezed all the way back to the tents where our cook Sete had prepared another great meal. With fifteen opinionated climbers meal times were sometimes challenging, but always entertaining. Here are a couple of examples;

One eveing Ben told us how he had observed the Coriolis effect a few metres either side of the equator. It had been shown to him, a bucket with a hole in it, the water spiralling out clockwise north of the line and anti-clock south. Spend a little time on the math and you will come to the conclusion that the difference in velocity either side of the bucket (which is what drives the spiral one way or the other) is of the order of ten to the minus ten, plus or minus a zero. Now this is a very small difference, certainly far too small to be effective outside near laboratory conditions. But, and this is the thing, Ben is such a lovely, engaging person that I would rather be wrong that tell him he had been conned. So, I guess I will have to do the math again.

On another occasion Doug (the immaculately dressed Doug, who was still looking like he was on a business trip) casually reflected on the prevalence of the CF (Cystic Fibrosis) gene in North Europeans. "How prevalent?" I asked. "Oh about 1 in 20". Hmmm, that means 1 in 400 chance of two carriers mating; which means 1 in 1600 chance of inheriting both genes, the actual figure of 1 in 1000 probably reflects multiple matings. "So" I asked "if 1 per thousand dies young from CF, what is the advantage to the other 49?" "Tuberculosis" he replied. "The single gene confers resistance to TB. It is analogous to sickle cell anaemia and malaria". "Oh". I went to bed wondering if the 1 in 20 figure is tied to the mortality of TB. If TB was more fatal, or more quickly fatal, would the incidence of CF be higher? And the corollary? I snuggled deep into my sleeping bag scribbling sums; but got nowhere fast other than to sleep.

On 11 September our team arrived at ABC, 5700m. This is high for a base, though not as high the base on the North side of Everest at 6400m, we were still near the top of Elbrus, a thousand metres higher than Mont Blanc. There we met up with our Sherpas, who had already set up the camp for us. Gurmin, Thundu and Padawa were old friends, some of the strongest high altitude climbers in the world. They were joined by Namgyal from Khumbu and Pema and Chimi from Tibet. Lakhpa and Sete were cooking, Tashi from Tingri assisted in the kutchen. We were all set. The fifteen of us broke up into smaller teams to acclimatise, but when we returned to base, to our large communal mess tent, the conversations continued as before. One of the Lost Tribe, Guy, was planning to ski the mountain. He appeared to be training for this by smoking twenty cigarettes a day. This provoked the following exchange;

David the Anaesthetist (Anesthesiologist in American): "Someone needs to tell Guy that smoking like that is not the best way to train for your first eight thousand metre peak."
Doug (radiologist and surgeon): "Well, it can increase your Hematocrit, but you probably need to give up two weeks before climbing."
David (suddenly looking concerned) : "Oh... is it too late to start, then?"
Guy exits smirking. Smoke drifts in through the tent door. Meanwhile my good friend Katie Moore began to bang her head on the table. We had a surfeit of doctors and this was one medical conversation too many. She had mild backache, and said what she really needed was not doctors but a Reiki Healing [1] or laying on of hands.
Victor: "I can do that."
Katie. "No, you don't believe in it."
Victor. "But I've read the web site. It says it works whether or not you believe!"
Katie. "Go away and leave me alone, you'll only pass on negative energy!"

We began to acclimatise by visiting C1 (6400m). At about 6000m there was a small crowd round a collpased man. He had just had a stroke and his right side was paralysed. Minutes later Luis and his Adventure Consultants team turned up, and they helped organise the rescue. The victim was carried down to the the twenty strong medical team and then out to the road the next day. These days there seems to be a presumption to recommend aspirin to everyone who goes to altitude, and in the case of this stroke victim at least, our gaggle of medics agreed, it would not have done too much harm. That was probably not the case with our colleague, and polar walker, Tom Avery who had been already taking aspirin. He developed a blind spot right in the centre of his vision. There was an ophthalmologist with the team of twenty medics who said it was a haemorage behind his macula lutea, whatever that is. It appears that taking aspirin would definitly not have helped. In fact it had probably made it worse. The medics all agreed that Tom had to go down. Bo, a skier in our extended expedition, decided to read a poem in Tom's honour after he left. It was sweet and touching, but to an Englishman... excruciating. A few days later the ophthalmologist also developed retinal haemorages, and after resisting the inevitable pressure from his colleagues for three days, eventually he too agreed to go home. The final word on aspirin and altitude would appear to be: Unless you already taking them, then no. Not until you are over the trip and your way out, then take them in small doses for a couple of weeks.

On 16 September Russel Brice, searching the mountain with a telescope, noticed strange tracks in the snow above C3, consistent with some kind of accident or fall. No one was reported missing, no expeditions report activity so high up the mountain. Yet there were the tracks. It was a mystery. That day our group of five set off for C1 and C2 (7150m) to complete our last cycle of acclimatising. Four days later, as we returned to base, the snows arrived. It snowed for four days, on the last day of snow, on the night of 24 April, around 50 cms of snow fell. We spent the morning digging out our tents and listening to snippets from the world service. While it snowed here, Bangladesh had it's worst floods since 1988. Millions of poor people were displaced, crops un-planted because of the waters, 280 deaths with more to come from desease and malnutrition. It put our travails in perspective. We were to spend the next week arguing about the safety of the mountain. It had snowed heavily. The winds were forecast to blow from the south over the north face, and we reasoned that this would make for dangerously loaded windslab. It was 26 September, and I was almost alone in arguing that we should just call off the trip and go home. By 28 September I had changed my mind. The wind seemed to have been strong enough to blow the loose snow clear of the mountain, maybe that was why there was so much down here in the valley, and also the forecast was now for three days of low wind starting on 1 October. When asked I replied "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"[2]

On 29 September we set out for C1 reaching C2 early in the afternoon of 30 September. The same day Sete walked down to CBC to go back to Kathmandu. He had been running a temperature and nothing the doctors did seemed to help. Our plan was now to leave C2 at midnight, avoiding the traditional C3 at 7400m and going straight for the summit. At C2 we dozed in the afternoon, and at 8:30pm, half asleep, I misread my watch, pulled on my boots, staggered over to the tent of Dave,Sam, Doug and Wim and was still shaking their flysheet when a dazed Wim said..."Victor... it is only 8:30!" "Oh shit, oh all right. Sorry." Sheepishly I crept back to my sleeping bag.

The night climbing at midnight was wonderful. Nightclimbing always is. For hours we were cosseted in our own pool of light. In the distance, like fireflies, the headtorches of other climbers flickered up and down the slopes. By dawn we were close to 8000m. By 7:30am we were on top. Everest was to our east, the west side of the mountain in shadow. From Cho Oyu you can see both the north ridge and the south col routes. You can see down into Khumbu and Gokyo and further round, Shishapengma. Way over there, behind Shishapenma the Tibetan plains stretch for a thousand kilometres to the Taklamakhan desert and Xinjiang. For David, Sam, Wim and Doug, it was the first 8000m peak. Quite an achievement.

Our ascent had been without incident, but on the way down David pointed a shaking hand. Sam and I looked down to see an orange figure sliding towards the band of cliff above C3. As we watched the figure began to roll, then like a rag doll, flipped over and tumbled over the cliff. I felt slightly sick. David went quiet. Doug and Wim witnessed the start of the fall. It was a Chinese man, he had tripped, made a grab for the fixed rope, and missed. The snow was hard, and though not steep, offered no resistance to sliding. The man fell over 300m, that is a thousand feet, yet at C3 we found he had not died after after all. Far from it. Doug did a preliminary inspection, borrowing a knife to slice open the down trousers. The faller had no head or back injuries. The only thing wrong appeared to be a twisted knee and a sprained ankle. And sliced up down pants. It was extraordinary.

Twelve Chinese and Tibetans made a temporary stretcher from foam mats and rope and hauled him down to C1. On 2 October we were nearing ABC when we met up with the Sino-Tibetan group. The Falling Man was now walking and pleased to see Doug. Somehow he seemed to attribute his recovery in part to our Doug. The major part of his luck , though, was due to a visit to a buddhist temple in Lhasa before starting on the expedition. "My name is Wang Feng!" he said. "Feng means mountain in Chinese. The mountain has given me a new life! Now I am starting on my new life!" I asked him what he was going to do with his new life. "I will go to the temple and ask!" And later, with a strangely appropriate prescience, he sent Doug a case of beer.

The news was not so good at base camp. Several climbers had witnessed a very distressing spectacle on 30 September. Several figures were seen making for the Nangpa La (5700m) when a military group started shooting at them. One fell down, but rose again. Another fell and was left there till the next day. There were several rumours about what was going on, but one thing that was abundantly clear was that from ABC the witnesses were a kilometre away from the action, and could not have identified anyone with any certainty. An hour after the shooting a herd of load carrying yaks were brought over the La from Nepal.

As my friend Ed Douglas says, the yak herders had probably paid the correct amount of bakshish. Some papers carried the story that the victim was a 25 year old nun. Other sources suggest there may have been an incompetent attempt to smuggle children out of Tibet. None of that could have been corroborated by witnesses. More bad news was to follow. On arrival in Kathmandu we found that Sete, our cook, had collapsed with encephalitis. He is currently paralised down one side and wiill be in hospital for a while. We have started a fund to care for him, but most of all I hope and pray he recovers his health.

In June I had flown to Canada with United Airlines who I note from a web site run by other unhappy passengers had over 4000 letters of complaint and managed to reply to just 66 [3]. So I don't feel too bad about my thirty phone calls, five letters and and four faxes, all without a letter in reply. It is companies like UA that make travelling a truly unpleasant experience. From Kathmandu to London I flew PIA. What a relief it is to fly with a responsive and helpful airline, who not only make a habit of returning your phone calls but also able to keep your baggage with you. I shall be using them when we set out for Everest next spring. Meanwhile the next blog will be from Chamonix.

========================================================================================================================================================
[1] see www.reiki.org/FAQ/WhatIsReiki.html "Reiki is a Japanese technique for stress reduction and relaxation that also promotes healing. It is administered by "laying on hands" and is based on the idea that an unseen "life force energy" flows through us and is what causes us to be alive."
[2] this quote is usually attributed to John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), but I have not found the origin
[3] see www.untied.com

Our Cho Oyu expedition is well under way. It consists of the Christmas Mount Vinson team: Doug, Wim, David, Sam(antha) and myself. It was great to meet up again in the flesh pots of Kathmandu; inspite of the usual morning headaches. The local beer just is not clean enough. The headaches, though, are clearly very good training for the first signs of altitude. It is best to get used to the headaches as soon as possible.

Flying in to Lhasa we were met by our travel LO (Liaison
Offiicer) Dorji, who remembered me from our 1998 Sepu Kangri expedition. He asked me how Chris Bonington and Charlie Clark were doing, and how old they now were.
Eight years older , I replied. We had just passed through immigration, in the background David's stock of books was rasing unusual interest. Odd really as there was nothing particularly high brow there. Perhaps he just looks a wee bit of a subvert. Turning his back on the commotion, Dorji said he would only be with us till Tingri. After that he was going to be the LO for Shishapengma.

Outside the airport the clean clear Tibetan air filled our lungs. It was fabulous to be back. The sky was that colour of blue you only get at altitude, azure.
And it was dotted with clouds that resembled the cotton balls you seed in Tibetan paintings. It was just over a year since I had last been here. We drove down past the Tsangpo, past the Drepung Monastry, once home to 10,000 monks and now inhabiteed by 700 monks and 10,000 tourists. Well, maybe a thousand. Most of the tourist are now Chinese, and this is different. This is new. Earlier this year the Beijing to Lhasa railway project was completed, and a daily influx of up to a thousand Chinese visitors arrive by way of Chengdu. You can feel the sense of national confidence that is now surging through this developing economy.

David, anesthetist by profession, had led several travel groups to Mongolia and Tibet, and in the monastries took the job of tour leader. He recognized the different Buddhas and Bodisatvas, the White and Green Taras, and a large part of the hagiography. It was truly impressive. We all wandered dazed round in his wake. Yesterday the Drepung and Sera by Lhasa. Today Shigatse. We make quite a group. Wim, shaven headed and tank topped, looks like Vin Diesel. He is from Belgium and rolls his "R"s like no one else I know. Doug from Oklahoma in a pressed shirt and black loafers dressed as if on a business trip. Sam, well she at least looks like a normal Californian teenager, tee shirt and jeans. And me; all following Dave in awe. The slightly subversive Dave with a slightly Jonny Cash quiff, and the slightly unshaven chin. We follow as he explains the icons and statues.

Tomorrow we head off to Old Tingri, 4300m, for two nights and a day of acclimatising treks before driving to up the to the road head camp at 5,000m. There we will experience headaches, lethargy, and loss of appetite. And we will look on these symptoms as old friends, precursers of the changes the body must undergo to climb to 8,200m.

Matt and Duncan were heading home and I was en route to Cho Oyu after our Great Tango expedition. It had been an interesting trip, laced through with snippets of seemingly connected news. As we left Europe Israel began their short invasion of Lebanon. The incursion was to be measured in hours. They should have guessed the guerrillas would be more intractable than that.

Inspired by their ascent of Amadablam 3 years ago, Matt and Duncan saw in Great Trango a peak of exceptional beauty, a climb difficult enough to be interesting, and of the right height; 6300m. That is to say a mountain climbable in a three week outing London to London.

To make things go quick and smooth we used the agency of Nazir Sabir and hired a lovely Hunza man, Asfar-Jan to help us with loads on the mountain. For our minimal time frame it was essential that we catch the Islamabad to Skardu flight both into and out of the Northern Areas. The flight was a 45 minute affair. The alternative, the KKH (Karakoram Highway) would take 24 hours of driving split over two days, providing there were no landslides. Otherwise it can take a week. It was in fact so important to our plans that we catch the flights that it became inevitable that we would not.

Part of the KKH follows the Indus into the hottest place in north Pakistan, Chillas, where the temperature in the shade was over 40 centigrade and to sleep you have to cover yourself with wet towels. In summer this must be one of the hottest places on earth. Even in Skardu some 1000 m higher, the heat in the middle of the day is near to unbearable. Skardu is at the center of a large Shia population and we arrived to find the streets blocked with processions, battalions of bare chested men beating themselves in remembrance of the assassination of Hussein by the Suni. It was August, in the heat and the dust the songs of remorse and self-flagellation reflected a sense of mass piety not seen in Europe since medieval times. Everywhere were posters exhorting the people to live like Ali and die like Hussein. There was not a woman in sight.

In my opinion it continued to be unbearably hot all the way to Askole (scary eight hour jeep ride) and on through the three days trekking past the Biafo and Panmah valleys with their enticing arrays of distant unclimbed peaklets. Past Payu, across the snout of the Baltoro Glacier, up the Trango Glacier. All too hot by far. But the base camp at Trango is one of the finest, no question at all, so in the end I guess it was worth it.

Trango Base Camp shelters in an ablation valley bordering a lake, its sandy shores giving way to an immense smooth orange slab arched over with granite overlaps. The first 24 hours were spent relaxing, acclimatizing and enjoying the atmosphere. Before us the rose Uli Biaho’s’s magnificent north east face, with the Roskelly route, all 64 pitches of it, soaring into the clouds. Right a bit and the Hainabrak towers on side and pinnacled shoulder of Trango Ri on the other framed the Trango Glacier disappearing towards the Sarpo Lago pass and the Chinese Karakoram. It was easy to be impressed.

Our route lay up a broad scree couloir leading to the base of the Nameless Tower. Eight hundred metres of rubble and boulder scree, just halted at the last angle of repose. Camp One was in the lee of a small cliff in the middle of this couloir, the cliff giving protection from the stonefall. From both sides and, sometimes from above too, there were sporadic and frightening showers of boulders. They left yard wide craters all round the camp. The cliffs around us were so steep that some of the rucksack size rocks had fallen two thousand feet without touching before exploding with the force of artillery shells in our couloir.

The route to our Camp Two continued up the deadly couloir to the base of the Nameless tower and then struck off up a broad ramp of unstable rocks on sloping ledges, before reaching over a small col, more steeply piled boulder scree and finally a quite beautiful Camp site at 5500m. Camp Two on Great Trango is certainly the finest high camp I have ever occupied, bar none. It nestles safely in a fork of granite outcrops and has a perfectly flat sandy base big enough for three tents and running melt water. The views of Masherbrum, Uli Biaho and Payu on southern horizon are balanced by the upper Baltoro giants and Chinese Karakoram to the North.

On 7 August Matt, Duncan, Asfar-Jan and I stocked Camp Two, and in worsening weather hurried down to base. It rained all the next day. We had been at base since 3 August and it had rained at least a little bit every single day we were at base camp. A pair of American climbers, Micah and Eric, said we had just missed 16 days of perfect weather. Somehow, this seems to have been a constant refrain in my life “Oh, you should have been here last week…”

The Pakistan weather forecast now predicted 4 days of good weather, so up death alley we went again in the afternoon of 9 August. The following day we made it to Camp Two in four hours and after setting up the tents and making a brew left at 11am to look at the upper part of the route. It was all crampons and ice axes now. A short 50 degree pitch led to a rather trying traverse on front points. We were now on the edge of a steep glacier and a couple more steep pitches led to a day of zigzagging between the rows of blunt seracs. “How do you say that in French?” ask Duncan. “You won’t believe the answer” I replied “Zigzaguer is the verb… the subjunctive would be something like il faut que nous zizagions…. I think.” We plodded on.

At 2 pm we still had a long way to go, but the main difficulties were behind us. We had intended to do no more than this, but the weather was looking reasonable for once, and we had taken the precaution of carrying spare head-torch batteries. Duncan clinched the discussion by saying he did not want to repeat the horrible traverse with the aching calves again tomorrow. So we went on, and on, and on. A final steep pitch led to a small summit platform at 6:00pm. Now the weather was deteriorating again.

Fortunately we had prepared for the descent by pre-placing a large number of Abalakovs on the way up. It began to snow gently. Night fell, the head torches went on. We made our way down in individual pools of light, the connecting rope disappearing into the darkness. Three rappels and a lot of down climbing later we reached Camp Two. It was still 10 August, but only just.

At Base Camp the next day, the radio brought intermittent news of a bomb plot and the subsequent arrest of British Pakistanis. We left our lakeside base on 12 August after just nine days there. The four days of good weather never did arrive. We had snatched the summit in the only half decent spell while we were there.

With some kind of holistic symmetry Israel withdrew its troops from Lebanon as we left Pakistan, 34 days after entering. Before the final withdrawal, in what appears to have been an act of supreme spite, they bombed the villages they could not otherwise destroy. We read the accounts from both sides. What emerged was the story of the inexcusable piled on the unacceptable. Kidnapping on one side leading to cluster bombing of villages by the other. The unexploded bomblets are even now killing and maiming civilians, old and young. Shamefully it is our British and American companies who have made, supplied and profited from the cluster bombs. We can only watch as the politics of vendetta and adolescent revenge fail to establish stability or peace. Both sides are adopting policies that could never further their stated aims; they should have read Machiavelli. I listened as one Israeli settler compared his country’s future to a modern version of the medieval 100 years war. Not so modern I thought while wondering if Israel could survive that long.

Most of the news in Karachi airport was about the cricket; the local media was outraged at umpire Hair’s decision to accuse the Pakistani team of ball tampering, and worse, to disqualify the team for leaving the pitch. I was watching the TV screens avidly for cricket is, after all, the finest of all team sports, when I heard a voice call my name. It was Mingma, the gathering had begun.
=================end==================================

PEAK FACTS
Name: Great Trango 6286m
Location: Baltoro Glacier, Pakistan Karakoram
Route: West Couloir then North face, FA 1984, Andy Selters and Scott Woolums.
Technical difficulty: AD

The second time we met the Koreans was seven days later when our little team were back in the Cwm wilting under the sun at Camp Two. They were camped next to us and I had just been over to ask when they thought they would be making a summit bid. The Mifune character gave me an agressive stare as if I was a spy. The older man, Mr Sang Bae Lee, was apparantly their leader, but too tired to be rude. Ms Kwak stared into the distance looking bored with the whole thing.

It was 15 May. The day before 60 people were report to have summitted from the North side, including my Chamonix colleague, Shaun Hutson. A further North side wave on trhat day included Mark Ingles the double amputee. Meanwhile an Englishman, David Sharp, had been left behind high on the mountain on 14 May and somehow was still alive on the 15 May. Forty people passed David in the dark on their way up, not noticing that he was curled up in a small cave. Forty people including Sherpas, yet the gutter press would later choose to focus their blame on Ingles. Weird, really. Thirty nine able bodied people pass by and the journalists were later to pick on the only guy with no legs. Bizarre. We spent the day resting at Camp 2, where Andrew, who had been so quiet thus far began to regale us with his special brand of humour;

Holmes “What do you deduce when you look up?”
Watson “I see the night sky filled with constellations.
Each constellation a collection of thousands of galaxies.
Within the galaxies exist a million stars. There are an infinity of planets many hundreds, if not thousands, of which will support forms of life. I deduce that as we gaze in to the dark sky a being is even now turning to gaze in our direction... what Holmes?”
Holmes “No Watson you fool! Someone has stolen our tent!”

Meanwhile we were surprised to hear of so many summiteers from the North as the wind appeared to be blowing hard and plumes flew from the summits, and no one had yet reached the top from the South.

On 17 May the AC team made it's way up to C3 in perfect weather. Meanwhile my good friend and fellow UIAGM guide Kenton Cool made a memorable climb with his team, reaching the south summit at 2pm, when he was heard to say on the radio;

“Before anyone says anything, I know what time it is, and we are going for the summit.” He reached the top at 3:15, and was back in C4 by 18:30. It had been perfect weather. I cannot help thinking that sometimes the better mountaineers just make their own luck. They were the first summiteers from the South this season and running out of rope on the summit ridge had fixed alength of 4mm cord above the Hillary step; 60 metres of shoe lace.

The next night a member of the IMG team reached the top at 3 am and returned to C4 by 5 am at dawn! The Korean Dream team also set out for the summit the same night but making much slower progress.

On 18 May we laboured from C3 to C4. We planned to leave for the top at 9 oclock the same evening, but the weather turned wild and windy. The weather forecasts were deteriorating from all sources. The Swiss had raised their prediction of wind from 3 knots to 30 knots. The British was too vague to be of any use. An American forecaster predicted a “spike” of 50 knot winds (60 mph) at 5 pm. It was a prediction that concerned us enormously. It turned out to be completely wrong, but it strongly influenced our choice of plan. We needed to to be back in our tents before the predicted storm winds arrived.

At 9pm on the night of 18th the wind was still blowing across the South Col, clouds had set in, it was snowing and a white-out. Guy, Dean and I agreed to reconsider our options every hour till 11pm. At 9:30pm I heard shouting in the distant whiteness. Paul and Ang Dorji set their head lamps on the tents and soon the shouting began to sound nearer. We did not know it, but it was the Korean Dream team returning... very late. We would find out why later.

At 11pm we looked out and saw the clouds had lifted and felt the wind has dropped a bit. The weather forecasters had indicated that the weather would only get worse during next two days. We woke the rest of the team and shortly before mid night, in moderately strong winds the team gathered in front of the tents, suited up in down, carrying two bottles of oxygen each. The walk from the tents to the bottom of the Triangular Face always takes longer than you imagined it would. There the fixed ropes disappear into the darkness above. We all began to exist in pools of torch light. Step by step. I had stripped my footwear to one pair of thin socks to give my toes the maximum free space in my boots and now I began to clench and reclench them to keep the blood moving in my feet as I climbed, rythmically and slowly shifting weight from one heavily cramponned foot to the other. In a way it was like meditation. Buddhist mantras kept floating through my hypoxic mind.

Om a hum, benza guru pema sidhe hum!
Om a hum, benza guru pema sidhe hum!
Om a hum, benza guru pema sidhe hum!
Om a hum, benza guru pema sidhe hum!

This is the mantra for the Guru Rinpoche, who will look after you in the present life. (The prayer for the next life is Chenrezi's “om mani padme hum”). Om a hum... was also the prayer that the Sherpas were using as they passed through the ice fall.

The balcony is four hours from the tents. It is a long road at over 8000m. We were heading due north. The 'long road to the north' is also the name of that volume of travel writing by the eternally great Basho, author of the most popular ever Haiku. I kept thinking about Basho as I wriggled my toes, panting with each breath. In this slow rhythm I recited his famous little poem

furu i-ke ya
kawazu tobi komu
mizu no oto

time and again till rewoken by the crackle of the radio.
“Who is at the back?” Guy asked. It was me of course.

I went back to the meditation and slow stepping. Two breaths, left step. Two breaths right step. I remembered there was once an English Haiku by Ezra Pound that I kept trying to recall, I think it went something like this

On a Paris Metro
faces peer through the window
Petals on a wet bough

I probably got it all wrong, but I just could not make it scan, neither with my steps nor within itself. Surely Haiku should be in three lines of five, seven and five sylables, shouldnt it? As they say in Haiku;

It is so very
difficult to write a poem
in only seventeen syl...

Stange how meditation always begins with the sublime and drifts inexorably towards the ridiculous. Slowly the hours passed by till sometime during the night Paul began to have problems with his mask and decided to return from just below the Balcony (8500 m). I watched him descend with great sadness, I knew how hard the decision must be have been for him. Now I had to try and catch up with Chris and Steve who were perhaps 150m above.

The team reached the balcony with the first light of dawn.
At last we had turned a corner on the mountain would be out of the wind till near the south summit. Only four mountains were now higher than us by now. Sonam pointed down the valley to show us the overnight snow level, it had snowed down to Pangboche.

Ana, Andrew, and Guy were now at the front of our group. A few other climbers had settled between us. Dean, Steve, Chris and then me at the rear. A man in a huge yellow duvet jacket was stuck between me and Dean for much of the time between the Balcony and the South Summit. Only the next day did I discover the coincidence, it was Karl, a professor of medicine who had been in the ant-arctic during the same period as our Vinson expedition. We were nowing sharing our second summit together.

At the south summit we were no longer protected from the wind, though by now it had dropped to 20 kts. From here you look at the view that Evans and Bourdillon saw in 1953, the view that turned them back. Till now Everest has been physically draining, but not too technical. Suddenly you come round the corner and for the first time you see an alpine climb. A ridge; a barrier, the Hillary Step, then the corniced summit ridge reaching out into the distant sky like a springboard.

Our team reached the summit in ones and twos shortly after 10:30am. It was still very cold and windy, and after 15 minutes and as many photographs as we coud manage before freezing our fingers, we hurried down.

At the balcony a short length of fixed rope was missing, without thinking too much about it I went down the first few metres of the triangular face, cut off some loose coils and finished off the fixed line up to the balcony. It must have been there that the Korean dream had begun to unravel the night before.

On 21 May our team safely reached base camp; the only injury being Chris who tripped on the last ladders of the descent and broke his arm. On the radio Guy to Luis about the accident;

Guy; Chris has got a broken arm. Fell off the ladder.
Luis; Was the ladder loose?
Guy; No. Slipped on his dick.
Luis; That big?
Guy; Small ladder!
Luis; Oh. Which arm?
Guy; Right. 'll ruin his sex life.
Luis; Can always play the stranger.

Whith his arm bandaged Chris soon aquired the soubriquet...Chicken Wing. About this time rumours began to circulate about the Italian Uber-Athlete Simone Moro. He had climbed from South Col and descended to the Tibetan North Col on 20 May. Some how he managed to blag his way through the Chinese border post by saying he got lost on the summit and found the wrong way down. And as a coincidence he also happened to have his passport in his back pocket. The rumours turned out to be true.

Chicken Wing was able to catch a lift with a helicopter on 22 May from base camp. The helicopter had been called up to to transport several serious frostbite cases including the young Korean, Ms Kwak. The unfortunate woman had fallen from the balcony, presumably at the missing stretch of rope, and continued 300 metres down the Triangular Face, where she remained, becoming severly frost-bitten in both hands and feet. It was six hours before she was picked up by her team members. Ms Kwak had no rescue insurance, and the Korean team began to haggle over the cost of the Helicopter. It was a sad and disturbing sight, the woman was in danger of losing her hands and feet, and her team members were refusing to pay her share of the Helicopter. In the end they paid only part of the $ 3500 cost leaving the rest of the bill to be picked up by others. That was the third time I saw the Korean team. I expect it will be the last.

During the trip we have seen success, tragedy and sometimes farce. We are packing up to leave for home, so I will report at greater length from Kathmandu in a few days time, when we will have had time to think about our experiences and digest the meaning of it all.

According to the plan (always the first casualty in times of changing
weather) we trek back up to base camp on 12 May. After that we run our summit attempt.

Throughout our third cycle climb we were dogged by Shipton, a small Tibetan Mastif. At the top of the Ice Fall he followed us up double ladders. We were astonished on arriving at Camp 2 to find the mutt curled up in the entrance to Paul’s tent, exhausted by his efforts, having visited the base of the Lhotse Face (6600m). Shipton’s efforts were recorded in the AC dispatches
(www.adventureconsultants.co.nz) where the oddest feature of the story was the emails we received from animal activists asking “can’t some one save the poor dog” yet at no time did we get any concern for the three Sherpas who were killed in the Ice Fall (see last blog). Odd isn’t it? For the information of those animal correspondents; Shipton was not lost in a crevasse, nor frozen to death, nor delivered to the nearest kitchens, but carried down by Sherpas who are convinced that he is a reborn mountaineer. I am still trying to guess which of the late climbers I know of might have been reborn as a camp hound. I can think of quite a few living candidates.

The first time we climb from camp 2 to camp 3 is often considered the hardest single day of the trip. It is exhausting. We arrived burned and dehydrated from the intense sun and gasping in the rare dry air. Paul, George and I shared a tent and I began to melt ice for tea. It was to take an hour to make each two litre pot from ice.

In the neighbouring tent we heard the sound of someone throwing up over his companions; “Its OK, I always do this at altitude” we heard him say afterwards.

In order to keep the flame protected from the wind I wrapped the stove with its windshield, not realizing the potentially disastrous consequences of restricting air to the flame.

In the night, while brewing I felt suddenly hot, nauseous, and dizzy. I turned off the stove, threw away its windshield and opened all the tent flaps; with the thin breeze that flowed through our tent I slowly began to feel better.

It was not till morning that the ensuing bitter headache began to abate. My tent companions, Paul and George were very understanding (perhaps fearing that I would throw up on them) and pressed analgesics and sympathy on me.
Paul, an ex-paratrooper, said that CO poisoning normally leaves no clue other than loss of consciousness. Perhaps, George the Anesthetist suggested, it had provoked some kind of AMS episode. He kindly explained the basics to me. I have summarized them below;

(1)
Haemoglobin + oxygen = oxy-haemoglobin
Haemoglobin + carbon-monoxide = carboxy-haemoglobin Haemoglobin + carbon dioxide = carbameno-haemoglobin
(2)
carboxy-haemoglobin prevents oxy-haemoglobin forming so reduces the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood.

“Oh thank you” I said, “that makes me fell much better.”
“Yes,” George continued “and don’t forget;

(3)the carboxy-heamoglobin has a half life of about twelve hours.

“So, you should start to feel better sometime tomorrow.”
“Oh wonderful” by now I was looking for a plastic bag to be sick into.

The descent on 6 May was no less tiresome than the climb. Stumbling down the Lhotse Face we passed Italian Uber-Athlete Simone Moro. He had just had his rucksack stolen from the bottom of the Lhotse Face. 26 kg of prototype tent, down clothing, sleeping bag and other equipment.
“What kind of person would have done that?” I asked.
“Someone short of money.” He replied sadly.

Yesterday was our first rest day here in Pheriche, our first day of “deep descent”. There is some hypothetical basis for this, according to George (quoting John West and Michael Ward). The aim is to achieve “an un-compensated primary respiratory alkalosis”.

“This is maybe ideal on summit day”, said George, “but not necessarily during the rest of the expeditions.” I confess to being too brain tired to ask him elucidate. Perhaps in the next blog.

Also yesterday, Paul and I walked two hours down to Pangboche to visit the serene Lama Geche again. He said we needed to visit him on our way back; in order to stop him praying for the team. He could go on for years if we do not drop by.

Meanwhile, other members of the group found the local newspaper had a story about Keith Richards. He had fallen out of a coconut tree in Fiji, but was said to be in good spirits (surely the wrong type of drug) reported the ‘The Himalaya’ 9 May 2006.

It has been a month and a half since we have seen our partners. Conversation always turns to food and sex at this point in any expedition. I am going to conclude with just one example. Over a pot of fresh breakfast coffee today, Guy recalled a Rob Hall story;

Rob on phone to girl friend after very long expedition; “Make sure you have a mattress strapped to your back when I get off the plane!”
Girlfriend; “Make sure you are the first off the plane!”

To visualize the Ice Fall imagine a bin full of skyscraper size sugar cubes poured down a giant stairwell. Every so often one of the building size cubes moves or collapses. Now imagine threading a line through this maze of towers and crevasses. In fact this important job has been done for the last few years by a team of Sherpas from the SPCC (Sagarmartha Polution Control Committee; don’t ask, long story, nother time). These guys refer to themselves as the “Ice Fall Doctors”. The Doctors are paid to fix a line of rope through the Ice Fall, bridging crevasses with wobbly ladders. Because the Khumbu Ice Fall is the glacial equivalent of the Niagra Falls, the line of ropes and ladders need constant maintenance. The whole thing is slowly grinding its way downhill till it can flow to the Bay of Bengal.

Our team had planned to climb through the Ice Fall to Camp One on 18 April but by early morning the dainty patter of snow on our tents signaled the change in weather. By morning a silencing blanket of snow covered the base camp village.
It was an obvious decision to postpone our climb for the day. Up at Camp One my friend Kenton was having difficulty descending his group to Base Camp; it had snowed so much he could not find the top of the fixed ropes above the Ice Fall, this in spite of wandering around the lower edge of the Western Cwm in a white out for two hours in the snow storm. He kept finding himself teetering on the edge of gaping holes in the snow. The next day he still could not find the way down and radioed down to borrow food from our Camp One tents. Meanwhile Ang Dorjee, our climbing Sirdar, had been marooned in Camp Two with several Sherpas. On the third day the weather cleared sufficiently for the Sherpas to break trail down to Camp One, up to waist deep at times.
Another group of Sherpas cleared the ropes to Camp One re-opening the route home for those stuck there. We decided to let the snow settle and avalanches pass (Kenton had seen huge billowing clouds flowing down the North Face of Nuptse and across the Western Cwm). Some of our group trekked for the day to Kala Patar and the others towards Gorak Shep.
Though our group is Anglophone (except for Anna the Brazilian Plastic Surgeon) not all English is easily assimilated; Darrel (from LA) was a accosted on the trek by a group of Cockneys, who asked “Mai’? Yer nao ther wai ter bais cam’?”
“I am sorry” he replied “I don’t speak your language.”
It was the 20th.

The next morning radio traffic woke us up at 7:30. Urgent Sherpa voices alerted the Base Camp village to the unfolding events in the Ice Fall. A serac had collapsed near the top.
The news trickled in through the air waves. The big teams began to identify available rescue equipment already at Camp One. We (AC) had one stretcher and oxygen. So did IMG. AAI was in the process of moving a stretcher up the Ice Fall. By 8:30 the news was that at least three Sherpas were either in a crevasse or buried under ice and three others were injured. Our team had six Sherpas above the Serac Fall and several below; none of our guys were involved. The news continued to dribble in. By late morning it was clear that the buried Sherpas were beyond help, they were too deeply buried to be recovered. Ang Dorjee returned to Base Camp. He had been just below the collapse, his description was chilling. After the first big collapse he heard voices from a hole in the jumble of ice blocks, and jumped in, but when the ice began to move again he leapt out and retreated to safety.

The injured men were ambulant, and would arrive in Base Camp under their own steam. No rescue was possible, but in case the injured men needed a helicopter evacuation, the entire climbing population of the Base Camp cooperated to turn a moraine wave into a broad heli pad. It was quite an emotional occasion, everyone trying to do something useful; almost internet like, with common purpose but no overt leadership; from an icy gravel hill a flat landing platform emerged. I calculated that 200 people worked for three hours on that project. The dead Sherpas were from Thame and Phortse where the Shetu (the wake) which will have continued on for several days, should be over by now. This is a Buddhist country and the men will be reborn, possibly into a better life. Meanwhile most of the climbers agree to withhold the tragic news till the families had been informed; unfortunately the sleazier Everest websites published the news immediately.

The Ice Fall Doctors re-fixed a safer line after the tragedy, and our team ascended without incident to Camp One on 24 April, en route to the Western Cwm and Camp Two where most spent three nights. (I descended to Base Camp for one night before climbing up to Two, to help down one of our team who was not feeling well.)

It is an unavoidable fact of life here that there is in any climbing day just ten minutes of heavenly pleasure. Ten minutes when the sun breaks across the face of Nuptse and floods the Western Cwm and brings respite from the invading cold. Just ten minutes before the Cwm turns into an oven of reflected heat waves that will cook you from the inside out.
It is either too damned freezing or too damned roasting. We all arrived in Camp Two some what wilted.

This is our second cycle of acclimatization, our next cycle will take us to Camp Three after which we will be ready for a summit attempt.

- It all depends on scale. Sitting behind our prayer flag (and there are a great many others here on wave-crests of the Khumbu Glacier)and surveying the landscape, the panorama is magnificent. It has been so every morning since we arrived at base camp. Looking down the valley southwards is the lowest point in the ring of mountains that surround us. Once huge and dominating the view from Namche; Kangtega and Thamserku now are now surprisingly small triangles damming the distant horizon. To their right the broad inviting north face of Taboche and the elegant north face of Cholatse lead to the various peaks of Lobuche. Right again and high above Gorak Shep the towering massive Pumori dominates our western Horizon; it somehow recalls the classic pyramid shape of K2 from here. We will know we have reached Camp 3 when we can look down on it. Right again is Lingtren, from whose glacial plateau ice bergs calve off at irregular intervals all day and through out the night. Their rumbling thunder and the sudden crack of the glacier under our tents, alarming at first, will become as comforting as nursery tunes by the time we leave. After Lingtren comes Khumbutse under whose southern flanks the twenty or so base camps are scattered like a handful of smarties. Now comes our next project; the Khumbu Icefall. This is flanked by the west shoulders of Everest and Nuptse. More about this amazing feature in the next blog. Strangely, apart from a tiny section of the Lhotse wall, we can see nothing much higher than 7000m. The view is still overpowering.

Reduce the scale a bit closer; the sun glints off the ranks of penitentes marching down to Lobuche where they will
finally melt under the deep surface moraine. Although it looks like the moraines and surface-waves on the glacier are formed by pressure, in fact and counter intuitively, nearly all the features are the result of differential melting. The base camp village stretches out for over half a kilometer almost as far as the wreck of the Russian MI-17 adjacent to the new helipad; located there with either a sense of irony or as a grim warning to other pilots.

Pull in the lens once more, back to our dry stone chorten and its umbrella of prayer flags. Our team; guides, members and sherpas sit on foam mattresses and plastic chairs as a local lama conducts the Puja. Whisps of incense, Juniper twigs, rhythmic drumming and nasal droning are carried away in the icy wind. The flags flutter like sails in gale. The sherpa lama who conducts the ceremony is wearing an incongruous scarlet trilby with a matching scarlet carnation in the hat band. A family of choughs circles the enticing food offerings. They are eying up the cakes of Tsampa resembling pointy mountains, packets of biscuits, sweets, cans of drinks. I overhear the following conversation from behind me as I try to focus on the ceremony; “What is the point of the all the snacks and food?”
“For the gods, it is a kind of sacrifice.” “Will the gods be pleased there is 30% extra in that packet of biscuits?”
Sometimes meditation can be so hard. I guess that must be the Buddhist way.

Next week, the Ice Fall and the other things.

The other team members have traveled from both east and west, all suffering positive or negative jet lag. We have come together from France, UK, Eire, USA, New Zealand and Brazil. One Portuguese speaker, the rest from all over the English speaking world. There is a huge variation in accents and nuances. I guess we will learn to better understand each other during next few days, for our journey is not yet over, now we are ready to fly to Lukla, which, if the weather is good, we will do tomorrow. The next week or so will be spent trekking up to Everest base camp. Our home for the next two months.

For me the traveling began a week ago leaving Chamonix for a short break in London with Jo and Adam. We exchanged skis for tourism and took a mini tour of Hawkesmoor's east end churches. These magnificent structures still take my breath away. You cannot say they are the high point of English baroque, look at them and you will realize that Hawkesmoor was far too strong an individual to pigeon hole like that. There is something pretty modern in the way he carves out the massive rhythms and the way he dispenses with unnecessary detail. As an added bonus, throughout the day we kept meeting the most interesting people. At breakfast was Robin who has started a new stock exchange. (www.opromark.com). A whole new exchange! And later we had tea next to a Belgian professor who screens natural anti cancer products. His field of research was very specific; cancer of the uterus and cervix. He had started his company because the Pharmaceuticals were just too slow.

We finished the day in a pub with beer and television. The English news was delighting itself with a foreign story that day: At the EU Summit, the head* of the European employers' association (who happens to be French) announced that he was going to give his speech in English “because it is the International Language of Business”. It is, of course, disgraceful that a Frenchman could say such a thing, so Jaques Chirac stormed out of the conference. (http://news.ft.com/cms/s/50891a92-baab-11da-980d-0000779e2340.html) If I remember correctly, Chauvin was also French. The English news organizations love a bit of schadenfreude. But there is a more interesting aspect to this below the gloating; Lingua francas (is that the correct plural?) change with time. The international business language maybe English now, but if the BRIC economies grow and if, again, China's population determines it, the lingua franca of the future may not be English at all. The logical thing would be a symbolic language such as written Chinese. We all use at least one written symbolic language in math. Numbers can be pronounced in any way in any spoken language, but always mean the same thing. (2+2 is the same in Japanese as English). The same is true of written Chinese. Perhaps we need to learn Chinese ideograms, but with English (or French) words. Is this possible? I do not know, but I remember reading that the Amerindians communicated across their mutually unintelligible tongues by signing; another symbolic language. Symbolic languages; ideograms and signing, might just be the way to cross language barriers. I doubt that Chirac would agree though.

All this was brought to mind at dinner last night, when it became clear that England and America really are separated by a common language after all. My friend and fellow AC guide, Luis Benitez, explained that he is working on a project for the ABC news people. The idea is to film the professionals on Everest. The ones who return year after year. It could make an interesting story. Dean Staples (also an AC guide) suggested he could contribute a bit.

Luis: I spoke to ABC about that and they are going down with it.
Victor (looking puzzled): Is that good or bad?
Luis: What?
Victor: Is down on it good or bad? I mean when James Brown gets down on it, is that good?
Dean: Down on it could be bad.
Luis: With it! with it! .... ABC are down with it.
Dean:Eh?
Victor: Yes, I understand the words, but is that good or bad? And can I have a translator please?

OK, I give up. Maybe Chirac is right. Lets all speak French.

 
we exchanged our skis for tourism

*Ernest-Antoine Seillière, président de l'UNICE, la fédération des entreprises européennes, basée à Bruxelles.

During the last week we have had some of the best snow this year. It has been snowing on and off for the last ten days. Weather men were comparing the quantity of snow to 1999 when, on 8 february, seven feet of snow fell in 48 hours. (This time the difference is just that, the time. Ten days of cold alternating with warm foehn and melting up to 1600m has created a stable base in the valleys. The strong winds at altitude have loaded many of the east facing slopes higher up.) As in 1999 for a week most of the ski lifts in Chamonix were closed, and Vallorcine was cut off from the rest of France. Les Houches was crowded being the only ski station completely open within an hour of Chamonix.

Then last Monday something interesting happened. The clouds were predicted to clear briefly in the morning but there were supposed to be accompanied by strong winds at 4,000m. Looking up we could see only the flimsiest of snow plumes from the the Aiguille du Midi. A quick phone call confirmed there really was no wind, and the lift would be running to 3800m. The guided Vallée Blanche crowds were absent (the forecast was for gale force winds after all) but the usual locals were there with their wide powder skis. The first lift of the day was filled with the urgency of a football crowd on their way to a grudge match. They were going for the Grand Envers and Col de Plan variations. Not one track led into the the "normal" Vallée Blanche. Patrick, Miles and I opted for the Petite Envers and then gingerly traced a route through the maze of crevasses and seracs into the bottom of the Vraie Vallée. Beautiful untouched champagne powder was our reward.

Photo: Patrick McGrath, 6 March 2006

In the afternoon we picked huge sweeping lines through La Combe des Glaciers. The next day was special in a different way. The weather was great, the Vallée Blanche and Grandes Montets lured the off piste skiers. It always seems slightly ironic that the the great off piste zones become so quickly tracked out that the best off piste skiing is in the lesser areas, where the competition for untracked snow is less. We spent the day tracing sublime lines at La Flégère and on the ski lifts we talked about irony. Irony and politicians in particular.

Our minister of culture, Tessa Jowell, has been forced to save her political career by dumping her husband who is accused of accepting bribes during a corruption trial. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4773468.stm). Ah well, if you are going to take alleged bribes, what better place than a corruption trial?

Meanwhile the top policeman in Britain, Sir Ian Blair, has apologised to the attorney general and the Independent Police Complaints Commission for secretly taping calls." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4801032.stm). The phone calls were about wire tapping rules. Well, if you have to secretely tape conversations, when better? What a great day. We almost choked with laughter as we sliced through the spraying powder.