Highest and Hardest by Chris Kopczynski

Author:Chris Kopczynski [Kopczynski, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

THE KHUMBU ICEFALL

The trail from Pheriche winds along the dry rocky lateral moraine of the Khumbu Glacier, climbing 3,000 vertical feet to the last “civilized” goat and yak herders’ outpost called Gorak Shep. Adjacent to the settlement is the huge glacier and above that, the famous Khumbu Icefall cascading off Mount Everest. From Gorak Shep, we climbed onto the ice and began building stone markers for our yaks and 900 porters carrying 20 tons of our equipment to follow up the glacier. On August 30 at 10:30 a.m., after 24 days and trekking 175 miles, Pizzo, Porzak, Boyer, and I found a relatively flat place on the glacier that we would call Base Camp. There was no cause for celebration. The real work was just beginning.

The first day we laid the base stones for what would be a covered cooking shelter and community gathering hall for a total of 75 Sherpas and climbers. Our personal tents and equipment would be placed outside, but the Sherpas would also use the community hall for their sleeping quarters. The preformed fiberglass igloo was erected solely for the science experiments, including the exercise bicycle for determining and monitoring our VO2 max.

The climb up the icefall began the next morning, August 31, at 6:20 a.m. Boyer, Porzak, Pizzo, and I led the way into the jaws of death, as I called it, as the infamous Khumbu Icefall had claimed so many lives. It was the scariest place I have ever been in the mountains, and I dreaded every minute we were in its teeth. As the Khumbu Glacier flows off the southern side of Everest, it is squeezed between the mountain’s massive west shoulder and the near-vertical Nuptse shoulder and ridge on the south side. The ice is twisted into a mass of jumbled, jagged, tumbling blocks, some as big as skyscrapers. Moving between two to three feet a day, the glacier drops 2,000 feet to the valley below. The tumbling ice had to be climbed directly because each side of the ice is walled in by huge cliffs. Unlike Makalu West Pillar, which was arguably the safest but one of the most difficult routes in the Himalaya, the Khumbu Icefall was statistically the most dangerous place. Thirty-four men previous to our journey had lost their lives in the icefall while trying to climb Everest.

Climbers love difficulty but abhor natural hazards they can’t control. The only way to gain any sway over the danger on the route through the icefall was to get up in the middle of the night and be climbing into the icefall by 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning. You always wanted to be out of the icefall by 11 a.m. Most of the movement of icefalls occurs in the afternoon direct sunlight and rising temperatures, but not always. In the Khumbu Icefall, it seemed to me there were serrac collapses during the night as well as the afternoon, so one could never predict when an ice tower or crevasse would break.

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