this is a long one!! Posting now that I’m back down with wifi!! All these were written on the days I was climbing – hence why they’re so long! I was very bored!
The day started bright and early at 12am, as we had 12:30 breakfast. I put on my climbing gear and triple checked I hadn’t forgotten anything.
I headed over to our dining tent, and the German film crew were already there and filmed Dad and I having breakfast and gearing up. We had a quick porridge and boiled egg, put our packs on, and left our camp at 1am.
I was excited, but of course there are always some nerves. The icefall is the most dangerous part of Everest so it’s normal to feel nervous about what we can’t control there.
Even though I had been through the icefall last year a few times, because it moves so much due to seracs constantly collapsing, the path always changes. Even within the season!
It started off the same as last year, with a pretty flat, and slight uphill walk on snow and ice. This brings us to “crampon point” where the terrain changes from then on and we need those metal spikes.
I’m not going to detail every section of the icefall, but we had a few ice walls to climb up, crevasses to jump over, but this year’s big feature was the 5 horizontal ladders over a big crevasse. The ice walls were definitely physically harder but the ladders were cooler. I thought it would be a lot more wobbly in the centre, but it was very stable and super fun to cross!
We climbed all through the night, doing the steep walls and crevasse jumps in pitch black (apart from our head torches), but by the time we got to the 5 ladder crossing, it was starting to get light and we could properly see the icefall. We were already above what you can see from base camp, so we couldn’t see all of the yellow tents. I said it last year and I still stand by it – the Khumbu Icefall is probably the most beautiful place I have ever been. I couldn’t even take photos because it was SO cold!
Along the way we had 2 rests, where we could drink some warm water, and I had some gel. We have big bags of high-carb gel that we can portion into tubes with 150g of carbs each (equivalent to about 5 normal gels) that we can gradually eat. We also LOAD our water with carbs too. This expedition I’m trying to eat more, and more frequently on climbing days, instead of only eating when I feel very tired or exhausted. This was a bit of a fail, since it was too cold to stop much. But I was never tired, so a win is a win!
Something that did surprise me, was how little members (climbing clients like us) we saw. I thought that because of the icefall delays that there would be big queues, but we literally only saw Sherpas carrying up loads to the camps, and maybe 2 other members. Maybe we just left earlier than most people?
Anyways the icefall was much nicer than last year in the sense that the route was much more direct. Last year we were constantly zig zagging and not making much vertical progress at times. For reference, this year it took Dad and I 5.5 hours to get to camp 1, and last year 8 hours.
I thought I should also mention the area that had been causing a lot of issues with the opening. I recognised it from the photos I had seen online and we passed it as quickly as we could. It’s hard at almost 6000m to climb up fast, but the most important is that we don’t rest in that section. We passed the area at about 4:40am (we still needed our head torches). However, at about 5:40am we heard a lot of panicked talk on Pemba’s radio. The serac had partly collapsed and had injured 3 people, 2 of them were very seriously injured. One of them was a Sherpa from our camp, another was an Indian climber from another camp, and a Pakistani woman from our dining tent at base camp was partly injured too. The 2 who were more severe, were luckily both immediately helicoptered straight off the icefall to Kathmandu to get medical help. The strange thing is that this happened at the coldest time of the day, right before the sun hit it – so in theory the coldest part of the night. We couldn’t hear the collapse as we were a bit too ahead, but we heard the helicopter. It is honestly a little scary.
Just before camp 1, the icefall flattens out and the climbing is less steep. I got really excited when I saw the first tent, but our agency’s camp is one of the last so we still had a little bit to go.
We arrived at camp 1 at 6:30am, and I was super happy to see our friends from base camp who had left the night before! When we got to camp 1 they were just getting up, and getting ready to leave for camp 2. Dad and I felt great when we arrived, but it was very cold so we sat in the cook tent and had some tea and then some porridge.
We then decided that we wanted to push onto camp 2! Partly because we didn’t want to get out all our gear and set up our sleeping mats, just to pack it up the next day when we headed to camp 2. Now we can stay 3 nights in camp 2.
To make it easier for me to process a bigger day like this, in my head I broke it up into 2 days. Day 1 being 1am to 6:30am – getting to camp 1. Day 2 is 6:30am onwards – getting to camp 2. So I will break this day into 2 blog posts.
STAY TUNED
