大象传媒

On Top of the World

• Rob
• 31 May 07, 04:15 AM

Dave continues...

Day six was summit day. In the afternoon we pack for the summit, rest, eat and drink (and drink and drink some more) and breathe from our oxygen bottles. To spend the day at the Col you do not need to be on oxygen. Everything you do up there makes you breathless, but you do just fine during the day without supplemental oxygen. Before you try to summit however, it is good to "suck O's".

By 8:00 PM we are all gathered outside our tents. The wind is howling and we are putting on crampons, filling water bottles with hot water, zipping up our down suits, putting on mittens and adjusting our oxygen regulators to between two and two and one half liters per minute flow. By 9:00 we start walking away from our tents. This is for real now: we will try to climb to the top of the world.

There is a bench to climb right out of Camp Four. Once on that bench, the angle steepens and you climb at a fairly high angle up a snow chute with the goal of reaching the "balcony". The balcony is nearly halfway from Camp Four to the summit and is a good workout. Interestingly, the South Col is often very windy, but once up on the climb the wind dies down. I was very careful to dress properly to avoid frostbite, which take the toes and fingers of so many climbers. I was very warm throughout the climb! I lead our climbing party to the balcony, climbing in front and comfortable with my own pace. There are six team members and 10 Sherpas, five of whom were first time summiteers. There are fixed ropes that you use to assist you in climbing. It is dark and we are climbing by the light of our headlamps, but I never had to route-find because I simply followed the ropes.

At the balcony we take a short rest. I have over half a bottle of oxygen left but had been told we would change here. I wait for the Sherpa carrying my oxygen and change cylinders. In the meantime others do not change oxygen and move out ahead of me. My desire was to stay out front for filming purposes. Now I find myself in the middle of a long line of climbers and for the next four hours I can take two to six steps and wait....wait....wait with my face twelve inches away from the backpack of the guy in front of me! This was very frustrating because I climb in a different way. I pick a pace that is just slow enough that I rarely stop. Others go a little too fast and have to stop and rest all the time. It is very difficult to pass. If something holds someone up toward the front of the line, everyone has to stop and wait. Not long after we had left the balcony we were on a narrow ridge when someone at the front of the line discovered they had a problem of some kind. They stopped. We all stopped. They had difficulty resolving the problem and we all stood motionless, in the wind, on a steep ridge for 25 minutes! The Sherpas were beginning to yell and I can only imagine what they were saying!

I kept watching for the first signs of the rising sun on the eastern horizon. Light would help break the monotony of seeing only my feet in the small pool of light from my headlamp. The first light I did see was at 4:09. (I checked my watch.) There may have been some before that but the east was over my right shoulder and my vision was obscured by the narrow tunnel of the hood of my down suit. To see anything other than the small spot directly in front of me took an unusual amount of craning the neck.

The second feature to reach after the balcony is the South Summit. The climbing is similar: steep snow with occasional rock following the fixed ropes. By the time we got to the South Summit we could see by the early morning light, and the world -- now all below us -- is too incredibly beautiful to describe. Seriously! One encouraging thing is that we can now look directly at the summit ridge and the Hillary Step and it is close. We can see now that it will not be long before we stand on the summit. We can see now that we can do it! This put an "encouragement" in our blood! (Perhaps it put air in our lungs!)

At the South Summit I got a chance to move to the front of the line. I want to go just behind the expedition leader so I can film him going to the summit, since after all, he is the focus of my filming. At this point I also begin to experience difficulty with my oxygen mask. I could not quite figure it out at the time and as our expedition leader left for the summit, and others began to follow him, I jumped up and started moving. The going got tough. I could not quite figure out why all of a sudden I was so tired, I was, as I think we all were, tired just from climbing. But now I felt MORE tired. As it turns out I was getting very little, if any, oxygen. I staggered to the top, arriving about in the middle of our group and mustered what energy I could to do a little filming.

I need to back up a little to the subject of the fixed ropes. Each year a group of Sherpas, usually supported by the bigger expeditions, fix ropes along the route to the top of the mountain. These ropes provide both a climbing aid and protection for all who climb. The problem is that the old ropes from years past are never removed. New ropes are simply added to the route each year. There has become a huge tangle of old fixed ropes. Many times you do not know which rope to clip into. You may be depending on a rope, hanging on it with your life totally committed to it, only to find near the top of that rope that it is old and nearly frayed in two. There are places where many old ropes come together: new ropes tied into old ones, broken ropes tied together to make a continuous line, ropes looped in a such way as to inevitably get caught in your crampons. It is a mess. The Hillary Step is the worst of all. The hazard there is not the climb but the ropes that impede the climb.

Unfortunately the top is similar. There are prayer flags strung everywhere. They create a terrible trip hazard, and climbers had to be careful not to get them caught in their crampons. For some reason, people have a habit of carrying some memento to the top of Everest and leaving it there. Do they really think that when I get there I want to see a picture of their wife or baby? There is all kinds of junk up there, and when one person leaves a picture (yes, in an 8x10 frame with glass) it becomes a broken bit of trash that litters the summit. From this perspective, the summit was a real disappointment. Nothing pristine and beautiful about it. Something so beautiful and special tarnished by inconsiderate man in a way that is no different than industry polluting a stream or lake or ocean. Think about the climbers 25 years ago who reached the summit of Everest to find nothing but a snowy top! (Well, and the Chinese tripod.)

But there is the bright side. The beauty I mentioned that I cannot describe. I will not try except to say that when in Nepal you spend all your time looking up at the mountains. When at Everest Base Camp you spend all your time looking up at the mountains that surround you. When in the Western Cwm, from Camp One to Camp Two, you spend all your time looking up at the mountains that are closing in all around you. Even at Camp Four you look up at the mountain you desire to climb. UP, UP, UP, and they are soooo high! But now, on the top of Everest, you look down, way far away down. And all those big towering mountains are but small bumps and hills and ridges that creep and flow and poke way down below you and that is what is so incredible about being on top of Mount Everest.

I think I will leave it at that for now. We got to the top and we had to get down. We did. Rather than to talk about going back down I would like to leave you with the thought of being on the top with the world stretching out far in every direction, with everything down below. It was wonderful.