Today we went to camp 1 through the Khumbu Icefall!
Honestly, I was so nervous beforehand, as this is the most dangerous part of the Everest climb, that cannot be controlled much. Even though relatively, I have quite a lot of experience, I was still nervous about the actual climbing through the icefall. My upper body isn’t as strong as the male climbers. I knew I would get up it but I didn’t know with how much difficulty. Turns out I was so fine!
The Khumbu icefall is the giant glacier that flows from Mt Everest, down the valley that the Base camp trek follows. It is filled with giant blocks of ice (seracs), and huge crevasses, that are massive cracks in the ice that can be hundreds of metres deep. These ice blocks constantly collapse, often on the trail and the icefall doctors (Sherpas who just focus on the icefall) have to either add more ladders, or change the route through the icefall.
We climb at night so the danger is minimised, but we are still taking a risk.
I woke up at 12am (because I threw up 😭), we had breakfast at 1:30am with some other people from our team, and Dad and I left at 2:40am from base camp.
We put our harnesses, helmets, boots, warm layers, gloves, and head torches on and did a “mini puja”. The altar was lit, and we threw some rice over it repetitively to ask for safety. We began the real deal climbing!!
We walked on flat ice until crampon point, (where we put our crampons on, the metal spikes on our boots) meaning that the climbing would intensify. I then felt strangely calm, just being able to see what my head torch lit up. The climbing slowly intensified, with steeper ice/snow walls, but I was really enjoying it! I felt confident with my steps, my climbing gear, and our pace.
There was a section with 4 LADDERS strung together, over a huge crevasse, on quite an incline, that we had to climb up. Despite this, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the ice looked like Swiss cheese 😆. It was so cool!
We then were stuck in a huge queue over a trickier ice climb, for about 1 hour. It was definitely tougher, but I made it. I really had to worry about my hands not freezing!!
As the icefall came to an end, the last part was JUMPING over crevasses (huge, deep cracks – that’s what she said). At first they were small, but by the 10th jump they were about 1.2m long. We are attached to a rope, but just by a small carabiner, plus there is a massive drop below so the consequences of missing the jump are big! This was pretty scary actually. Right after I did a jump, the Sherpa behind me placed a ladder because it was too dodgy and probably the limit of what one can jump before qualifying for the Olympics.
When the icefall ended, after about 7 hours of climbing, up and over ice blocks, there was still another 2 hours of “walking” up, down and around crevasses. This was awful and so boring. Dad was also sick so we were slower than usual. We finally made it to camp 1 (6100m) after 9 hours 😭.
We had some soup, got set up in our tent, and slept a lot!