Island Peak Summit Day
Khumbu Warriors on Island Peak Summit
I will come back in subsequent posts to fill in the blanks around my pre- and post-summit days in Nepal, but I thought I’d cut to the chase as to what Island Peak summit day was all about. By Wednesday November 13th we had got ourselves from Kathmandu at approx. 1300m to Island Peak High Camp at approx. 5500m over the course of 10 days or so. Alarms were set for 02:30 am to get ourselves ready - a noodle soup and hot tea breakfast kick started us - though it was difficult to eat at that hour and altitude. By 03:00am we were all packed and ready to go - we were anticipating a summit climb of a max of 4 hours and we should be down and back to our guesthouse no later than 17:00.
Island Peak (Imja Tse) stands at 6189m tall and is located in Sagarmatha National Park. It is reasonably close to Mount Everest and is really an extension of Lhotse, the 4th highest mountain in the world. It was made famous in 1953 by the British Expedition to Everest (Hillary & Norgay), who used it as part of their acclimatization and training for Mount Everest. It is in a stunning location surrounded by glaciers, glacial lakes and the world’s highest mountains.
The climb from High Camp starts by climbing through some gullies, often with the aid of fixed ropes, and steeper rocky terrain - but it is in the dark with headlights on! After about 2 hours or so of this rocky scrambling you reach what is known as ‘crampon point’ - which is of course where harnesses and crampons are now put on for the more challenging part of the climb. Once beyond crampon point we started to make our way, like a single line of waddling penguins, across the glacier. It became apparent that there had been significant shifts in the topology of the glacier since the previous year, and there were now some immediate sections that we needed to ascend using fixed lines and our jumars. My early jumar technique was pretty loose, but I eventually got into the rhythm. However, it was clear even at this stage that this was going to be a more difficult climb than anticipated. The traffic on the route was busy, which resulted in further delays as queueing to get up and down was required.
Moving on, there was a significant rock section that needed to be climbed - again, this was not present in previous years and once ascended the last section of the famous ice headwall needed to be navigated. It took one to one-hour-thirty minutes to get to the top from here, but everybody made it and by 09:00 we had all made the summit. In hindsight I was so exhausted I am not sure I really appreciated the achievement - there are many photos and videos of me on the summit but I looked pretty grey! Indeed in one short interview section I was talking total gibberish!
The last stretch to the summit
Of course, summitting is only 50% of the journey, and after some photos and videos we slowly began our descent. Progress down was very slow owing to traffic and the tiredness of the team - legs were sore, hydration was poor and fatigue was setting in. There were a lot more breaks on the decent and although the team stayed more or less together till crampon point, after that the team splintered based on remaining energy and strength. By the time we all got back to High Camp it was approx. 15:00. Much later than originally envisaged.
Having to wait on the descent
Once we packed up, it was a 90 minute or so steep hike back down to base camp where soup and tea was the order of the day. By now it was about 18:00 and everybody was exhausted .. indeed, I was so tired and dehydrated I found it difficult to consume anything - liquid or solid food. We now learned that we had a 5 to 6 hour hike to get us back to our teahouse in Dingboche. However, nobody complained and the team just got on with it. We finally arrived at our teahouse just before midnight, absolutely exhausted, with most of the team too tired or able to consume any fuel. All in all it had been a 21 hour trek, but we had done it, summitted Island Peak. However, this was only the beginning of my story!
