The Chomolungma Diaries: What a commercial Everest expedition is really like (Footsteps on the Mountain travel diaries) Read online

  What a commercial Everest expedition is really like

  by Mark Horrell

  All text and photographs © Mark Horrell, 2012

  The Chomolungma Diaries

  1. The only way to acclimatise in a dirty old town

  2. Everest from the Tibetan plateau

  3. One of the world's great views; meaningful conversations

  4. The Everest shortcut

  5. Base camp communications

  6. Base camp IT support and cinema hell

  7. Remembering the Everest dead

  8. The puja to end all pujas

  9. An Australian climbing legend

  10. Remembering George Mallory and Sandy Irvine

  11. To Yakshit Camp

  12. The Magic Highway

  13. Everest lassitude

  14. The view from ABC

  15. A walk to Crampon Point

  16. Climbing the North Col Wall

  17. The sweetest beer in the world

  18. Everest news

  19. How cold the wind doth blow

  20. Everest blog wars

  21. Memoirs of a superstar climber

  22. We're all adults

  23. Jamie the Weather Man

  24. The world's most enjoyable acclimatisation programme

  25. High altitude disco

  26. The Ladder of Death

  27. East Rongbuk monotony

  28. "Visiting the monastery"

  29. Lock Unlocked

  30. Russian hospitality

  31. The Tibetan Village

  32. How not to write an expedition dispatch

  33. An emergency meeting

  34. The summit mindset

  35. The summit push begins

  36. Bottleneck on the North Col Wall

  37. Climbing the North Ridge of Everest

  38. The highest campsite in the world

  39. The First Step

  40. The Second Step

  41. The Third Step

  42. The summit pyramid

  43. The world's highest graveyard

  44. Dicing with Death

  45. The last reserves

  46. The indescribable feeling of being alive

  47. Heavenly rest

  48. The last obstacle

  1. The only way to acclimatise in a dirty old town

  Wednesday, 11 April 2012 - Nyalam, Tibet

  There are nicer places to spend the first day of an expedition than Nyalam, about an hour up the Friendship Highway from Zhangmu on the Chinese-Nepalese border. It comprises a single curved main street on a hill containing concrete buildings with red-curtained doorways. It's cold and damp, and a grey mist hangs in the air, air that's already thin because the altitude here is 3500 metres. Wood smoke drifts from doorways and mixes with the mist, and the atmosphere is unpleasant. Streams of dirty water slide down the hill on each side of the street. Dark brown hills rise above a town which sits on a hill high above a deep river gorge, a continuation of the Bhote Khosi river which we followed up from Nepal yesterday.

  A thin layer of snow has dusted the hills, and sleet is falling this morning. It's quite a culture shock from Kathmandu, where we spent the previous day. Although a noisy storm kept us awake as it battered the shutters of the hotel windows the night before we left, sending a solar panel clattering to the ground from a rooftop nearby, Kathmandu had been warm and pleasant. Here in Nyalam it's grey and dull, and much colder than any of us were expecting. There's no real reason to stop for a night here, except to acclimatise. The border town of Zhangmu, although only an hour's drive away, is much lower at 2300 metres, so not as much would be gained by staying there, while the next town Tingri at 4300 metres is too high to stay for people not yet accustomed to the altitude.

  Only last week Tibet was closed to visitors. As soon as the Chinese government opened the border there was a flurry of people applying for visas. We got ours on Monday and travelled up yesterday. Consequently everyone is here at the same time: climbers on their way to Shishapangma, Cho Oyu, and Everest like ourselves, and trekkers bound for Advanced Base Camp to coincide with the big expeditions. To add to the congestion we're all eating in the same restaurant owned by the China Tibet Mountaineering Association (CTMA), who are providing all our meals, accommodation and transport while we travel through Tibet. We eat in a small room up a grubby step ladder, and have breakfast, lunch and dinner there. We have to wait for other teams to finish before we can get a table.

  After lunch Ian and I find a much nicer bar up the hill, accurately if unimaginatively named the Base Camp Western Food and Coffee Bar, where we have a coffee and escape the snow while wandering the town in the morning. We like it enough that we decide to return with our friends in the afternoon. I'm here with Mark Dickson and Ian Cartwright, whom I've climbed with on many previous expeditions, most recently Manaslu in Nepal, and Phil Crampton, who was our expedition leader on Manaslu and again here on Everest. We're joined by Grant "Axe" Rawlinson, a compact New Zealander who reached 8300 metres on Everest last year and has come back for a second attempt. Opinion is divided on whether drinking beer in a bar is a sensible way to spend an afternoon while you're still acclimatising. On the one hand it's important to keep hydrated, but drinking to excess certainly wouldn't be a good idea. While Phil and I drink from thimble-sized glasses to try and moderate our intake, Ian and Mark go at it like the clappers. I noticed on Manaslu they bear a passing resemblance to Laurel and Hardy during a hard drinking session, with a tall, thin, quiet one who is always getting blamed for the nice mess the pair of them keep getting into, and a short, stocky, boisterous one who is always leading the way but denying responsibility for it. Mark keeps calling for more beer and Ian keeps saying yes.

  We only met Grant a couple of days ago, but already Mark is wasting no time in getting to know him better.

  "So why do the call you 'Axe', Grant – is it because of the size of your chopper?"

  Grant replies that he used to tackle hard and low when he was a rugby player. He used to be a scrum half, and they have a reputation for being small and garrulous. Mark used to play rugby too, so they should get along nicely once these formalities are over.

  I sip gently in quiet witness while Phil, who as expedition leader should be taking more care of us, really isn't helping much.

  "It's good you guys are keeping yourselves hydrated," he says.

  Ian is a likeable character who reached the summit of Manaslu last year then gave his oxygen away to another climber who was in difficulty on the way down, an act which says much about him as a person: generous to a fault, even when his decisions aren't that wise (Manaslu was his first summit of an 8000 metre peak, and without his oxygen he might have had trouble himself).

  "We'll have plenty of oxygen available on Everest," says Phil, "and there should be no reason for any of you to give yours away."

  "Ian will be setting up a gazebo with his bottles on the North Col," says Mark, "shouting at passing climbers: 'come and get it, free oxygen'."

  Phil is something of an unsung hero too. We talk about Lincoln Hall, a climber who died of cancer a couple of weeks ago. He was famous for collapsing just below the summit of Everest in 2006 and being left for dead. He survived the night there and was found alive the following morning. He eventually survived. Phil was part of the team who found him, but he was suffering from frostbite, so instead of waiting with him like the other climbers in the team, he returned to Camp 3 to rouse Sherpas the
re to help with oxygen. While the other climbers involved in the rescue have justifiably received a great deal of publicity and praise for their part in it, Phil's role has been largely forgotten, but this is typical of him. As owner of the high altitude mountaineering company Altitude Junkies he might have made publicity out of our rescue of the climber on Manaslu, where four members of his team were involved, but he chose to say nothing. Ian wasn't so lucky: I blogged about it myself because I felt he deserved some credit.

  By the time we leave for dinner there are fourteen large 628 millilitre Lhasa Beer bottles on the table, although we've tried to dilute them with pakoras, chips, coffee and yak balls (which are balls made of yak meat, rather than what you're thinking). Back at the restaurant more teams have arrived and there are people waiting outside. Nobody is eating at the bar up the road, even though the food is better, because we've all paid the CTMA to travel in Tibet, and our meals are included. It's going to be worse at breakfast, and Phil is even thinking of leaving early and having breakfast in Tingri. Our sirdar Dorje talks him out of it, and after another greasy Chinese meal we turn in for bed. Even our hotel does nothing to raise Nyalam's reputation. Although the rooms are comfortable enough, there's no running water. We brush our teeth with mineral water, flush the toilet with pans of water from a butt outside the door, and will be waiting to reach Everest Base Camp before we shower again.

  2. Everest from the Tibetan plateau

  Thursday, 12 April 2012 - Tingri, Tibet

  Our Russian team member Mila Mikhanovskaia is a bit more perky at breakfast this morning. She's been feeling under the weather these last few days and Phil is convinced it's been stress-related. While the rest of us have tourist visas for Nepal, Mila has a business visa, and this was a problem when it came for us to apply for visas for Tibet. At one point there was a concern that none of us would be able to get into Tibet because of the need to travel on a group visa. Through a combination of diplomacy, paperwork and payment this was resolved, but then there was the worry of her "dharma book". It's wise not to carry anything into Tibet supportive of the Dalai Lama or critical of the Chinese government because all bags are searched rigorously at the border. Any items deemed offensive are confiscated, and in the worst cases entry is refused. Mila has a big blue book of Buddhism that she wants to read at Base Camp, and she was worried the Chinese border guards might consider it subversive literature and refuse entry to all of us. The guard opened it up and read a few paragraphs before handing it back to her and waving her through. By yesterday evening it was evident all of Mila's worries had evaporated into the thin Tibetan air, and all of us would be making it to Base Camp safely to begin our attempt on the mountain.

  At breakfast there are still lots of people queuing for tables and waiting to pounce as soon as one is vacated. I seem to be a slower eater than the rest of the team and am still finishing my last few mouthfuls of Tibetan bread and marmalade when everyone else gets up to leave. I'm immediately engulfed by a party of half a dozen mixed Europeans as I remain in my seat, chewing frantically and trying to wash it down with a few swigs of jasmine tea.

  We leave in a mini-bus at 9.45 China time (this is slightly confusing, but because China time is set thousands of miles east in Beijing, many people here remain on the more appropriate Nepalese time zone which is 2 hours and 15 minutes behind). It's much clearer today and a complete contrast to the damp misty sleet of yesterday. The road continues up the valley into a dry dusty desert landscape, and I regret leaving my sunglasses in my bag as the sun sears through the thin high altitude air. We pass clusters of traditional white-washed Tibetan houses with their walled compounds, and piles of yak dung and firewood drying on flat roofs. At the top of the valley the road rises in a series of zig-zags onto the Tibetan plateau. We reach a pass, the Tong La at 5120 metres, and stop for photos of a classic Tibetan landscape. Prayer flags and prayer wheels bedeck the pass and to the north the land stretches endlessly across a desert plain. To the south a ring of snow-capped mountains rises above the border with Nepal, and to the west is the solitary giant of Shishapangma, one of the world's fourteen 8000 metre peaks, and the only one wholly in China. Today its wall of ice stands wreathed in its own personal cloud, but it's still the best view I've had of it, having passed this way twice before.

  We continue onwards and cross another high pass before descending 600 metres. An hour later we get our first view of Everest straight in front of us, with its black pyramid leaping in a steep wall 4000 metres above the plateau. From the south in Nepal, where it's surrounded by other huge snow-capped mountains, views of Everest are less dramatic and it's not always obvious that it's the highest. From this position on the northern side our views are mainly of brown hills and it's easy to believe that I'm looking at the highest mountain on Earth. On the skyline to its right are Gyachung Kang and Cho Oyu, two more of the world's highest mountains. They are more heavily snow-capped than Everest but less prominent, huge sprawling massifs wreathed in cloud. Everest is more of a lofty perch towering above the horizon, the Northeast Ridge slowly rising up to join the summit pyramid, from where a rock wall drops away sharply to the south. Features such as the North Ridge and Norton Couloir scour its northern face prominently. Murderous jetstream winds pound its summit and leave a huge plume of cloud firing off the length of the Northeast Ridge and beyond. I think it's the blackness which is most forbidding, a combination of its steepness and the jetstream winds which mean snow has little chance to accumulate.

  It's impossible to believe that in a few short weeks we might be tiny figures creeping towards the summit, but there's still a long way to go before we find ourselves in that position, if at all. More easy to credit is why Sherpas believe this place to be the abode of mountain gods at whose mercy you may be permitted to tread its slopes. Today it would be impossible. Only when the winds vanish and the plume melts away will permission be granted, and that's something no human power can control, not even the Chinese.

  The billiard table smooth tarmac of the Friendship Highway, which was resurfaced all the way from Lhasa in time for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, means that we reach Tingri in around three hours. It's a different world to Nyalam here. From a damp misty gorge we find ourselves on a wide dusty plateau surrounded by brown desert hills. Although the sun is fierce we're at 4300 metres and it's hardly warm. Tingri is a single street which, but for its white-washed Tibetan houses, could be somewhere straight out of the Wild West. We check into the amusingly-named Ha Hoo Hotel in a little walled compound on the eastern end of town. It's one of the few places which is clean enough for westerners and our delicate western stomachs, so I've actually had lunch here twice before on previous expeditions. As with the hotel in Nyalam, the rooms are clean but the toilets are grim, and again there's no running water.

  We arrive in time for lunch, which is standard fare when travelling in China, of a big bowl of rice and a series of Chinese dishes to share in succession until everybody round the table can take no more. All restaurants have round tables with a revolving tray in the middle to rotate dishes around (what Phil calls a "lazy Susan"). They are providing us with Lhasa Beer to go with every meal, but I'm a bit concerned because Mark has stopped drinking. A bit like when a dog stops licking its balls, this means something must be very wrong.

  In the afternoon we get some exercise by strolling up the wide dusty main street. I walk with Grant, and he tells me about his attempt on Everest last year, also from the north side.

  "Our summit day was a bit of a disaster. The straps of my crampons were so frozen that it took an age to tie them, and by the time I managed it my fingers were so cold. Then I broke my snow goggles trying to put them on, so I started out with no goggles. I walked about 50 metres out of camp into the teeth of a gale. 'Fuck this,' I thought to myself, and headed back to my tent for the wind to die down, but it just got worse, so that was that. It wasn't the right summit weather and the winds hadn't been forecast. Our expedition leader was going up ahead trying to get everyone to turn b
ack. Only one of our team summited, and he said his Sherpa was doing everything for him, clipping him into all the ropes. When he got to the summit a cornea in one of his eyes froze and he had to descend half-blind. His Sherpa was doing each rappel with him and the pair of them were tied together. Eventually they got far enough down that his cornea unfroze and he was able to descend by himself. I don't want to get to the summit like that, you know. I want to get up and down by myself."

  I agree with Grant, but you don't always know what it's going to be like when you get up there. If I find myself struggling then I'm sure I will accept every little bit of help my Sherpa Chongba can provide, as I did on Manaslu.

  A cold wind whistles across the plateau and whips up the dust into our faces. Up ahead of us Mark and Ian have turned around and are coming back.

  "Fuck this!" says Mark. We head back to the hotel.

  Phil has a few logistical difficulties at dinner time. He was hoping to send the truck with all our equipment and a bus with all the Sherpas to Base Camp tomorrow so that everything is ready when we arrive the following day. But all the buses are busy ferrying other teams between Nyalam and Tingri, and only four people are allowed in each truck. Four Sherpas to unload seven tons of equipment and set up camp is asking a bit much, so he thinks he will have to charter another vehicle to take some of the Sherpas, but this takes time and is expensive. It means we'll have to wait for some of the facilities to be set up after we arrive, but this is OK.

  3. One of the world's great views; meaningful conversations

  Friday, 13 April 2012 - Tingri, Tibet

  I have a slightly disconcerting experience when I go to the toilet after breakfast this morning. It's a standard Tibetan long-drop where you crap through a hole in the floor into a deep pit. Halfway through I catch a glimpse of movement beneath me and look down to see a cow moving around there. It's too late to do anything about it and I have no choice but to continue what I'm doing, but happily the cow doesn't seem to mind.