Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [86]
The long hours of slow ascent would be gone in a hour or two of rappelling back down the same icy faces. ‘Climb high, sleep low’ was the principle, and it was morale-sapping.
Ten hours to climb up, one hour to rap back down.
The highest that our bodies would be able to acclimatize to would be camp three at about twenty-four and a half thousand feet.
Above that and your body is effectively ‘dying’, as you enter what is grimly known as the ‘Death Zone’. Here, you can no longer digest food effectively, and your body weakens exponentially in the thin air and lack of oxygen.
It was clear that this climb would be a systematic war of attrition between acclimatizing our bodies and keeping our spirits fired. And that is before you add into the pot illness, exhaustion, injuries and bad weather.
Quietly we all knew that, to be successful here, many factors would have to come good at the right time. It is why luck has such a part to play on Everest.
Our aim was to be acclimatized to camp three as soon as possible, hopefully around the end of April. Our fight then would be against the weather and the fierce jet-stream winds.
It is these winds that make the mountain, for the vast majority of the year, completely unclimbable. Their ferocious strength can literally blow a man off the face.
But twice a year, as the warm monsoon heads north across the Himalayas, the winds abate.
It is known as the ‘silent beckoning’ – as the mountain goes strangely quiet for a precious few days.
When, and for how long this period lasts, is the gamble that every Everest mountaineer takes.
Get it wrong, or be unlucky, and you die.
Along with the mind-numbing cold, the endless crevasses, the daily avalanches, and the thousands of feet of exposure, it is these fierce jet-stream winds that contribute most heavily to Everest’s grisly statistics.
As the statistics stood that year, for every six climbers who reached the summit, one of us would die.
One in six. Like the single bullet in a revolver used in Russian roulette.
I didn’t like the analogy.
CHAPTER 79
On 7 April, Mick, Nima – one of the Sherpas – and I would be climbing on Everest for the first time.
The others would remain at base camp to give their bodies more time to adapt to the altitude before they started up any higher.
We sat at the bottom of the Khumbu Icefall, amongst rolling crests of contorted ice, and began to put our crampons on. At last we were beginning the task that had been a dream for so long.
As we began to weave deep into the maze, our crampons bit firmly into the glassy ice. It felt good. As the ice steepened, we roped up. In front of us were what looked like endless giant ice sculptures, disappearing into the distance above.
A few strong pushes and we would clamber over the next ice ledge, lying there breathing heavily in the ever-higher air.
We could soon see base camp below us, getting smaller in the distance.
Adrenalin surged around our bodies those first few hours that we climbed together in the early dawn light.
It was a familiar routine on a very unfamiliar mountain.
Soon we came to the first of the aluminium ladder systems that spanned the many, yawning chasms. These had been pre-fixed in place by the Sherpas in elaborate webs of rope, ice screws and stakes, to form bridges across the icefall’s giant crevasses.
Over the years, these lightweight ladders, fixed in place, and adjusted every few days according to the moving ice, had proved the most efficient way of slicing a route through the icefall.
But they took a little nerve at first.
Crampons, thin metal rungs, and ice are a precarious cocktail. You just have to take your time, hold your nerve and focus on each rung – one at a time. And remember: don’t look down into the gaping black abyss beneath your feet.
Focus on your feet, not the drop.
It is easier said than done.
Only a hundred or so feet below camp one, the route that the Sherpas had so diligently fixed through the ice had crumbled. The remains of the rope and ladder system hung like long strands of thread