Everest: Alone at the Summit by Stephen Venables

Author:Stephen Venables [Stephen Venables]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912560042
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc.
Published: 2018-12-28T16:00:00+00:00

Wednesday – 27 April

Robert and Paul left in the morning – the first clear morning for ages. Mimi, Joe, Ed and I remained here with P and K. I continued with the biography of Hemingway – what an obnoxious shit.

Very windy here at BC. Big cloud build-up in evening and some snow. Anxious about weather and my own health – legs feel unduly weak, pain in chest nagging … if only we could finish this job quickly.

I had been through all this so many times before on expeditions, the needless anxiety and hypochondria after spending too long at Base Camp. There was nothing wrong with my health and the next morning I raced back to Advance Base in a record three hours, enjoying the familiar journey through the wasteland of Everest’s detritus. The rocks littering the glacier were a shifting mosaic of slate, quartzite and marble, pale granite studded with garnets, rose quartz and some beautiful olive-green crystals, all testifying to the geological complexity of the Kangshung Face. The route was marked with our cairns, not the shapeless heaps of rock which you find in Wales or the Lake District, but beautiful, funny, idiosyncratic sculptures designed to show up amidst the gargantuan mound of rubble. On the last two miles to Advance Base the route passed huge glacial lakes, enclosed by hollowed walls of ice, carved and marbled in every shade of green and blue. The water of one lake had escaped through a submerged crevasse, causing the surface ice to collapse and shatter into a jigsaw of jagged slabs. I remembered Monet’s ‘Break-Up of the Ice at Lava-court’ and thought what a field day he could have had on the Kangshung Glacier.

The A Team was still at Advance Base, as it had snowed heavily during the night, prohibiting a dawn departure. By the time Ed arrived in the afternoon it was snowing yet again and I wrote in my diary: ‘Dreaming of wine, gardens, piano playing and women.’ Robert dispelled my worries about being paired off into unequal teams. I have always preferred to keep changing the combinations on a big climb, and I was glad now to hear that Robert envisaged a summit push with all four of us going together. As he pointed out, it was unlikely that all of us would make it up the final stretch and having four people together allowed for swapping partners to suit circumstances. Also, if the four of us stayed together, at least as far as the South Col, there would be some hope of evacuating an injured climber in the event of an accident.

If everything went well, four of us would climb together to the South Col, but for the moment Robert and Paul would start the recce to Camp 2. When the weather allowed, the plan would be: Day 1 – Ed and Stephen do final load carry to Camp 1 and descend; Robert and Paul sleep at Camp 1. Day 2 – Robert and Paul start wallow

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