Today we did some climbing refreshment “training” in the Khumbu Icefall, and some oxygen training.
After breakfast Dad, me, and a few others got geared up and we walked down to the base of the Khumbu Icefall (huge glacier). It felt really good to finally put my boots on again, since the last time was on the 19th of October, when we summited Ama Dablam.
On the glacier, the guides found a flat spot to sit, with a few different ice walls, and a practice ladder to cross. We put our crampons, harness, helmet, and jumar kit on, and played around!
The Khumbu Icefall is a huge, constantly moving glacier, made of huge ice blocks the size of buildings. It is extremely dangerous because these blocks constantly collapse and this can happen on the trail, whilst there are climbers. When climbing Everest via the South side, passing through the Khumbu icefall is mandatory to get from base camp, to camp 1. To minimise the risk, we climb during the night, when the ice is most frozen. Despite this, as I am writing this blog post at 11pm (when the wifi is strongest!), I still can very clearly hear the icefall collapsing, moving, and avalanches happening. So there is always a risk.
When climbing Everest, you have to do rotations, which means to go up and down the mountain multiple times, touching higher altitudes on the mountain each time. This is so our bodies can acclimatise more (generate more red blood cells), and be physically able to go to altitudes above 8000m. By no means does this acclimatisation make the climbing easy!! So as you can imagine, with each rotation you have to go through the icefall, up and down. Dad and I are doing 2 rotations and a summit push, so in total we will pass through the icefall 6 times!
Anyways, climbing over these ice blocks (called seracs) can be tough, so we just do a couple of practice rounds so that we don’t freak out when we have to do it at night, for 7 hours straight. We climbed a steep wall by jabbing our metal crampons (heavy spikes) into the ice, and sliding our jumar (device that bites onto the rope and only goes up not down) up the rope, and we can step up. We do this until we reach the top of the wall.
My biggest issue was that I forgot to breathe when climbing, so after 4 steps I was extremely out of breath (because of the high altitude, even though it’s just base camp), and needed a short rest.
After we reached the top, we could abseil down which is always my favourite part!
We walked back to camp, had lunch and soon after we did some oxygen training. I have already used oxygen before, but it’s always good to have a refresher because most of the high altitude accidents are related to oxygen malfunction. We were told how to put the regulator and mask on a new bottle, and details like ice stuck on the nozzle to watch out for.
The important thing with oxygen is the chemistry/physics of it. We need to calculate how long a bottle will last us, at a certain flow rate (1-4 L/min), by having the relative pressure of the bottle (around 250 Bar at 8000m) and the volume of the bottle (4L). Since we definitely cannot do maths in our foggy brains that high, we just remember key time stats like: a bottle at 3L/min is about 5.5 hours. If we use the wrong numbers, a bottle might not last as long as we anticipate, and we could be in trouble.
Anyways, if you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading along! See you tomorrow!
