Me and Chawang
Lobouche summitWe left high camp at 5am. It had taken us an hour to get our gear ready and I was feeling a bit stressed. I’m not good when I’m rushed and I work better under a cool, methodical, relaxed but efficient approach. When I’m stressed I tend to have a bit of a melt down, I make mistakes and my coping mechanism falls apart. But this morning I internalised my melt down and didn’t let anything show. I thought of what my good friend Jo Bradshaw aka Bradders would say, “suck it up buttercup”. I have learnt a lot from Bradders, my roomie (or tentie) on Denali.
We set out in the dark with head torches. The route was all snow covered and made it quite slippery until we reached crampon point and put on our crampons and got the ice axes out.
The way to the top was really steep with lots of pitches of jumaring. A jumar is a device designed to slide up a rope but when pulled on it, it stays in the same spot so one can hoist themselves up the fixed ropes helping the legs out a little bit. The going was very steep and Its hard to breathe in the thin air. It was like three steps forward and then 3 breaths and towards the summit, it became take one step, then 3 breaths then another step and 3 more breaths. It was much tougher doing Loubouche east then when we did Loubouche west with Tim Rippel from Peak Freaks in 2016.
On the way up, I was getting quite tired, it’s such hard work. Chawang said to me, “you very strong, you make summit” and he wasn’t talking about Loubouche summit. It’s taken for granted we all reach Loubouche summit. Or you shouldn’t be on the big mountain really. This gave me great satisfaction and some more confidence. Still a long, long road ahead but I’ll stick another 5% on my summit chances which now lie at 65/35% against. But it’s better than 70/30.
I reached the Loubouche summit in beautiful sunshine and blue skies. Chawing and I ate our packed lunches of boiled eggs and cheese. There had been two Snickers bars in there but I’d eaten them at crampon point while waiting for Bob. There was still a packet of cheesie biscuits so half of these went down rather well too.
I was still waiting for Bob to come up when suddenly the clouds started to come up the mountain from the valley. I had been waiting over an hour and was getting cold so I said to our Sherpa Chawang that I was heading on down. I rappelled off the top and coming down all the pitches I thought to myself, “Jeez, this was a bloody long way up and steep”. You only really appreciate how much you’ve done on the way up when you’re on the way down. I passed Bob who was still going up and told home I’d just got too cold. He was fine and still heading up to the summit. He’d had some blister issues to take care of so he’d had to take his boots off to sort out.
The vertical elevation we climbed this morning is roughly equal to that of the Lhotse face to camp 3. The Lhotse face is 1000m of almost vertical ascent on sheer blue ice and snow. It’s very difficult so to find that I managed the same 600m ascent of steepness that will take me to camp 3 on the Lhotse face is something of a comfort. We don’t need to do the whole 1000m face in one go thank god. We sleep at camp 3 in tents cut into a narrow shelf in the face. You cannot leave your tent to go for a pee or poo without clipping into a rope or you could simply slide right off the mountain. Any peeing will have to be done in the same tent as Bob in my pee bottle. Any pooing will be done with great difficulty.
Eventually I was so pleased to see the tents of high camp. I got back about 2pm but I had done quite a bit of waiting around and descended slowly thinking Bob might catch up.
I crawled into the tent and was brought cups of lovely steaming hot tea and bowls of noodle soup.