My Big One?

As I started talking to people about my blog and more importantly my project itself, I found 2 of them who summited the Mera Peak. There is a debate about the actual altitude of the summit, currently estimated above 6400m. The more I think about my project, the more I think my decision will favour the Mera Peak, but „with style“. By this I would mean crossing the Amphu Lapcha pass after conquering the Mera Peak, and then climbing the Island Peak.

The Mera Peak, although pretty high (very subjective statement on my behalf), is known as an „easy“ wander up a glacier. If you take care of your acclimatisation in the previous days/weeks, the Mera Peak should not be too much of an issue, allowing you to conquer the „highest trekking peak“ of the Himalayas. Meaning without ridiculous effort you can summit a 6400m+ mountain. I make it sound like a walk in the park, but in further posts I will have to explain that it's still far from easy to summit at that kind of altitude. These days the real summit is sat above a roughly 50m wall which you need one last shot of power to ascend. From „base camp“ and from the summit you can see the Cho Oyu, Everest, Lhotse, Makalu and Kangchenjunga. This alone is good enough a reason to go for this option!!

 The sight from the Mera Peak over a bunch of 8000m Mountains.

This Amphu Lapcha pass seems like an interesting challenge. No real technical move expected, but ease with crampons and ice axe is required to progress through seracs up to the pass. Then some abseiling and a walk down to the area below the Island Peak, which involves walking past the Baruntse. This sounds like an amazing experience in itself!

Amphu Lapcha Pass is not a walk in the park!

Island Peak, unlike I've said earlier in this blog, is slightly more technical, only because of this „little“ wall that has to be ascended. Doing the trip in this sequence, acclimatisation shouldn't be a problem anymore at this stage, so Island Peak should be doable.

This little wall on the Island Peak would not be an issue at 3000m, but at 6000m it's a different story!

This expedition would give me the best chances of success on a 6000m peak that requires basic mountaineering skills. It would show me some of the most amazing mountains on the planet, allowing me to claim Nepal on my beginner's mountaineer resume. I might be able to go bigger and higher, but like I've done in alpine adventures, a decent build-up starting with reasonable objectives carries the least risks of me giving up at the first try because it's too crazy/cold/dangerous/tiring etc... I regard a Mera Peak + Amphu Lhapcha + Island Peak expedition as something crazy enough anyway, totally fitting the purpose of my „The Big One“ project.

Now I'm pretty sure about what I want to do, the next steps are:

- Pick the organisation that will work the best for me, the most practicable compromise of quality, safety, price, dates, service. Definitely a subject for a further post.

- List and procure the required equipment. Also definitely worth a couple of posts. Seems like my alpine gear will not do the trick!

- Train hard enough to be fit for purpose, but easy enough not to be totally broken when flying to Nepal (nor 10 years later when my knees can't take any more of this!). Also a good point to discuss on this blog!

Altitude

In a number of activities, going the extra yard tends to be harder than the couple of yards just before. If you run a 10K, it will be very demanding to add another kilometer onto it, although running one kilometer might sounds like a piece of piss for you. If you work 50 hours a week, the 51st hour will be extremely painful, a lot more than the first hour of that week (well, depending on the night before I suppose!). For a number of natural reasons, it goes the same with altitude. I regularly jog 450meters of positive elevation here in Heidelberg, but when you're at 3000m, the next 450m will take you a lot more energy. If you're at 4000m you might start wondering if you're even able to do the extra 450m and you don't stand a chance if you didn't prepare. At 5000m, you might actually put yourself in real trouble by attempting further elevation gain without adequate acclimatisation.

The following website is amazingly interesting for those who want to know more about high altitude: http://www.altitude.org/high_altitude.php

Basically air gets thinner with altitude, and the closer you are to the poles the less oxygen you will find at a given altitude. Your body needs the oxygen to keep going, so you start breathing harder and faster and your heart starts beating harder and faster to keep muscles and brains fed. With lower air pressure, a red cell will carry less oxygen than it would at sea level. At a certain altitude this won't suffice, as your lungs and heart cannot race forever. This is where you need long periods of rest so that your body adapts to the fact that there is simply less air to breathe. Your body starts producing more red cells, so that you can capture more oxygen out of a given amount of air going through your lungs. With more red cells, your blood becomes thicker and therefore harder to pump.

The best way to acclimatise is to rest at high altitude, ideally spend a night up there. In the alps you can stay over at one of the huts, try ot catch some sleep. After a couple of days going around in the mountains, you might attempt to climb up to 4000m, maybe 4200m, but to have a go at a Mont Blanc and its 4810m, you need almost a week of acclimatisation, making this summit more challenging than it looks. On the Kilimanjaro we spent the whole week accliimatising at altitudes between 3000m and 4600m before attempting the summit (5895m). On the website above, I read that this is nonsense and we were not properly acclimatised when attempting the summit. Testosterone might get you there, but you're putting yourself in danger!

Some medicines might help you bear the effects of altitude for a given amount of time, but the only way to keep going is to spend time acclimatising. On the summit day (or night) of Kilimanjaro our little group was affected in various ways by the high altitude: cold, headache, belly ache, dizziness, loss of balance, loss of consciousness, heart&lungs limit.

On summits above 6000m, you would typically set-up a base camp around 4500-5000m, and wander to higher altitudes on one or two days-trips to further stimulate your body acclimatisation process. Depending on the altitude you're trying to reach, you will then move to your advanced camps and have a go at the summit. For Mount Everest there are typically 3 or 4 acclimatisation climbs from base camp before climbers attempt the 8848m summit, most of the time with additional supplies of oxygen.

Of course the temperature falls with altitude, so you don't only fight the lack of oxygen, but also arctic temperatures. Altitude complications include hypothermia (dying of cold), acute mountain sickness, high-altitude pulmonary oedema, high-altitude cerebral oedema. Above 7500m your body is not able to acclimatise, it can only deteriorate. This is called the death zone, a countdown to your death. Depending on people and on your preparation, you have a certain number of hours to live before you die. If you can't reach your summit before then, you have to hurry back down the mountain. And by the way, forget helicopters. Above 4000m-4500m, there is not enough air for them to fly.

Objective danger

The first couple of times I heard "objective danger", it puzzled me as the objective in extreme sports should be to stay out of danger. A few weeks later I understood that danger is not THE objective, it is objective =)

Objective dangers are the risks you can identify besides the human factor. Of course your condition, training, equipment, the weather are factors which impact the overall level of danger on a route. Objective dangers are the things which are objectively putting you in a dangerous position when you're on the route: steepness, loose rocks, seracs, altitude, known avalanche trajectories, retreat possibilities, isolation... For instance, the normal ascent route on the Baruntse, although very high with its 7129m, is rated as "objectively safe".

If you're evolving on a steep slope, the slightest mistake or tumble is more likely to see you fall hundreds of meters below. On some faces, depending on the season, the altitude and the exposition, rock might be frozen in the morning, but warm up to the sun and become loose, therefore presenting an objcie danger of rock fall. If you don't know what a serac is, see picture above. These things all break free one day, you just shouldn't be under it the second they do. So if your route goes through a field of seracs, it is dangerous! Altitude deserves its own post, to follow later on. Avalanches tend to have a pattern in terms of where they happen. Most popular routes avoid crossing dangerous areas from an avalanche perspective. Experienced people learn to develop a sense for avalanche probability based on all sorts of factors (objective and situational), in winter and in summer. You want to be with one of them!

Had an interesting discussion last night with a colleague about danger in the mountains. Mountaineering is a highly dangerous activity. There is no mountaineering permit. Most people will try to get a level 1 diving licence before scuba-diving. But if you try scuba diving on your own as a beginner, your body will very quickly make you understand that you need technique and training. In the mountains, nothing stops you from hiring a pair of crampons, getting up the lift to the Aiguille du Midi, and venture alone on glaciers and mountains. When you realise that this is dangerous, it will already be too late: bad weather, night, exhaustion, lost, cold, too steep, return trail barred by a collapsed crevasse...

So besides the fun and self-fulfillment of alpinism, which also deserves its own post, besides the technique and the training, I see mountaineering as continous risk management. On our way back from an ice gully climb last summer, my guide saw 2 people fall off in a bergschrund, so we had to go and organise the rescue, quickly taken over by a specialised rescue squad. One of them was OK-ish, but the rescue doctor had to abseil 20 meters down the crevasse to install the second victim on a special stretcher, which we then had to pull up with brute force so it could be hooked to the helicopter and flown in to the nearest hospital. These guys went on a traverse over steep ice terrain, in light climbing shoes, a couple of meters above a major crevasse (the bergschrund is a crevasse forming between a glacier and a steeper section of a mountain). That day the weather was fine, there were lots of climbers and alpinists around, and little objective danger. But the behaviour of these guys made their situation extremely dangerous. So you're already a whole lot safer when you know what you're doing. Start learning from somebody who knows, ideally a professional high-mountain guide. Then progressively build-up and increase difficulty. Walk before you run, but most importantly scramble before you walk! Do you want to be the one being picked-up by a chopper in the middle of a steep wall? Below picture taken on the Aiguille du Peigne...

Option #5: Baruntse - 7129m

I fear just saying the number: 7129m. Would I seriously be fit enough, fortunate enough, equipped enough, acclimatised enough, having permitting conditions to successfully tick-off a 7000m peak?

Looking around for 6000m peaks, if you get greedy and just for fun look out for a 7, you find the Baruntse. It's located in the same absolutely fantastic area as the other Nepal options I have listed, meaning stunning views on magical mountains like the Everest, the Makalu "etc..."The mountain has three main ridges leading to the top, which means depending from which angle you look at it it might look like 3 different mountins. On the picture above I believe the ascent route goes to the col on the right hand side, and follows the ride to the top.

As my uncle puts it: the Mera Peak is like a Mont Blanc without technical difficulties, but 1700m higher. The Baruntse, besides being another 700m higher than Mera, seems to present a couple of rocky steps, and the slopes toward the summits can get pretty steep. A bit like the North Face of the Tour Ronde, which I climbed (with my guide leading) last October, except it's located 3000m higher in altitude, so you have about half the oxygen! Better prepare the calves for a rough time!

If I knew I could do this, it would be a no-brainer and I would book tomorrow. This is the point: do I have what it takes to conquer the Baruntse? Some websites say it's the next step for someone who climbed a 6000m peak before. I don't think my Kilimanjaro counts... I can train hard enough, I can buy loads of gear if needed, I can pay for an expensive expedition, I can pray for the weather, I might get enough holiday time, the november weather should be stable enough. What could go wrong? At this stage I don't want to focus on the possibilities for this idea to become a disaster.

Would I rather make it to a 6500m peak or reach even higher altitudes but miss the summit on the Baruntse... Big, big question! I must say there is no guarantee either that I would summit a 6500m peak. Maybe I could even make it to one of the 14 summits above 8000m, but the risk of not succeeding and the risk of undergoing big trouble rises with the altitude of the attempted summit. Where is the right limit for me this time around? Will I ever be able to get back to such height in the future to try and raise the game again, or do I have to see this as the one chance to reach the summit of my life, therefore having to make it as high as possible?

+ Once again, it's NEPAL!! I want to go to Nepal!
+ 7129m is a massive achievement. Apart from my alpine guides in Chamonix, there is nobody I know personally who reached such altitude.
+ Some expedition organisers say you can learn what you need to know about climbing during the trip, you just have to be stupidly fit. I wouldn't believe this, but it could mean my limited alpine experience should suffice technically speaking.
+ Expeditions tend to tick off the Mera Peak first, so even if you don't conquer the Baruntse, you have hopefully topped a mountain in Nepal!
+ An introduction to Himalayas style ascent: Base camp, camp 1, camp 2, and acclimatisation trips to the higher camps.
+/- It's a tough thing to haul yourself to 7129m. Even in perfect conditions, the summit day is a big, big ask on your body. The reward is as big as the effort.
- Expeditions require over a month, in the region of 34 days, which I have low chances to get from work



The summit brief from Camp2Camp: http://www.summitpost.org/baruntse/153293

Adventure Peaks expedition: http://www.adventurepeaks.com/expeditions/baruntse.htm

Summit Climb expedition: http://www.summitclimb.com/new/default.asp?vid=663&ltitle=Baruntse