We had some unfinished business with this mountain. It had beaten us once, but we weren’t about to give it up on it. This time round, we were going to take a different route, starting almost immediately up from base camp, and we left around…Read More

We had some unfinished business with this mountain. It had beaten us once, but we weren’t about to give it up on it. This time round, we were going to take a different route, starting almost immediately up from base camp, and we left around lunchtime with the intention of getting to the snowline before dark.

The first few hundred metres before the snow were pretty gruelling. It was just one long slog up scree. I really need some distraction from the effort, but I didn’t have the lung capacity to maintain a conversation. Instead, I counted footsteps, which is perhaps the worst possible thing you could do, but still, I persisted with it until at least two thousand.

As planned, we stopped for the night just shy of the snow, creating a platform out of rocks which turned out to be surprisingly comfortable. We enjoyed a typically early night, followed by a less pleasant ‘alpine start’ somewhere around 4am. It’s bad enough getting up at that time, but when you know the only thing to greet you is ice-cold air and an uphill struggle, I’m sure I wasn’t alone in thinking it might be nicer to stay in bed.

The snowline turned out to be a little higher than we thought, and we stopped for a rest after an hour or so of scrambling on rock. Taking our packs off and enjoying the sweeping panorama our new vantage afforded us, Thom and I set about the painstaking task of melting snow.

At this height on a mountain, snow is the only source of water, and thus a stove is the only way you can get to it. We filled up a pan with huge chunks of snow and watched as they slowly melted away into icy pools and, finally, drinkable water. After failing at a team effort, Thom took over both the pouring of the water and the holding of the bottle. I grimaced, and Thom cursed as we watched half of our hard-fought water dribble into the snow. Another fifteen minutes or so later, still itching to get moving again, another pan was ready, and Thom set about filling the rest of the bottle. Thom’s accuracy improved this time, but unfortunately, his grip didn’t. The bottle tumbled down the mountain, joining the mattress and stuff-sack from our last attempt.

"Mate, you have really gotta stop dropping things!"

Now we were in the snow. Crampons on, ice axes in hand, and a rope strung between the three of us, we plodded onwards and upwards through thigh-deep snow. The sky was blue, and the snow was white, but it wasn’t enough to distract me from the continual effort involved in the climb. After some time, we approached a cornice (a large chunk of overhanging snow and ice) that we hadn’t seen from below. Thom attempted to dig his way through, but the snow just kept tumbling down, making progress impossible.

We were walking along a ridge that was almost overhanging on our right, so we decided to hop off it and try to climb round the cornice. The ‘hop’ was only about 4 or 5 feet, but when you’re wearing a big rucksack and crampons, tied to two other people and trying to land on ice, it seems like a bigger deal than normal. Thom led the way again, climbing out and round the protrusion, with me positioned beneath him. As he hacked away at the ice above, he was perpetually showering me with ice until he let out a very short ‘Woh!’ and slipped. A mini-avalanche of icicles covered me, and Thom watched in dismay as the cap fluttered down the mountain like so many other of his belongings.

Clearly this was not the way forward. It was too late in the day, the sun was warming up the snow, and we would have to wait until it refroze overnight if we wanted to get anywhere. At this point, Thom was still above me, and Ben was 20 yards to my left, waiting back by the cornice. Thom climbed down to me and then, due to the resultant cat’s cradle of ropes, I had to down-climb some ice and come back up beside Ben. The climbing was essentially over for the day, and I got lazy. My crampon popped out of the ice, and my axes didn’t hold. I flew down the steep ice so fast, it took my breath away. As I dangled on the end of a taught rope in a state of shock, I thanked my lucky stars (and Ben) for the ice screw that had been dug into the snow only moments before and was now holding my full weight.

Wandering back down the mountain in search of flatter ground, we soon realised the foreshortening effect of looking straight down a snow slope had gotten the better of us, and the gradient wasn’t easing off at all. With that, we stopped, dumped our sacks, and started digging out a ledge for the tent.

Known as Gorky to his friends, Maksima Gor’Kogo is a 6,050m (~20,000-foot) peak that has only seen three successful summit attempts and which was conveniently located within spitting distance of our base camp. We were going to climb it. Our bags packed, we set off along the…Read More

Known as Gorky to his friends, Maksima Gor’Kogo is a 6,050m (~20,000-foot) peak that has only seen three successful summit attempts and which was conveniently located within spitting distance of our base camp.

We were going to climb it.

Our bags packed, we set off along the path to the steep scree slope a bit further along. There is little doubt that we were carrying too much stuff. I’m not sure that we could have cut down much more, but I think we should have taken a different approach to the climb. Sleeping bag, tent, bivvy bag (I’ll come back to that), stove, meals, snacks, down jackets, waterproofs, first-aid kits, crampons, ice axes, ropes, climbing hardware. The list goes on. We had already had a lengthy debate about whether or not to carry bivvy bags. I argued that to go up an unknown six-thousand-metre mountain without one was crazy, but they argued that it wasn’t necessary, given that we were taking the tent. In the end, I took Thom’s (since it was lighter than mine), and they didn’t take any.

The going was good. It was steep, and it was hard work, but we were whiling away the hours chatting aimlessly about children’s TV shows. Base camp was at 4,000m, and the summit was at 6,000m, so that meant two vertical kilometres of climbing. We had planned to push on until dark, pitch, sleep, get up, and summit.

The scree slowly turned to snow, and the route became a bit more hard work. The shallow snow turned to deep snow, and the route became even harder. Walking uphill is hard at the best of times, but doing it with a bristling 70-litre backpack through knee-deep snow at four is just a pain in the ass. And now the altitude was getting to me.

Ben and Thom had been popping pills for the last week or so to help them adjust to the thin air. I didn’t want to take them unless I felt I needed them. Apparently, I needed them now, but ‘now’ was a little too late.

Every footstep was a gargantuan effort. It felt like I’d just finished a marathon, and my body had been drained of all energy. I know climbing mountains is tough going, but this wasn’t normal. The other two kept pulling away from me, and I didn’t have the willpower to pick up the pace. Plus, it was starting to get dark, and there was no sign of any flat ground on which to pitch the tent–-we were climbing a steep snow slope, and there was no let-up.

The others stopped up ahead and waited for me as I stumbled up the slope like a drunkard giving his friend a piggyback. Thom lowered his ice axe to help pull me up, but I didn’t have the strength to hold it. There was no chance of getting a ledge flat enough for the tent, so the decision was made to dig ‘bucket seats’. Basically, we scraped out as much snow as we could before hitting rock (about a foot or two in this case) and sat down.

Arranged as carefully as we could on this tiny ledge, a 3,000-foot drop in all directions, we set about assembling ourselves for a rough night. Thom was trying to get the stove going, but there were more fumes coming from him than the cooker.

"This f****** stove is sh**!"

No one had a sense of humour right now, and there was certainly nothing funny about our only heat source not working. He tried the ridiculously fiddly procedure of unclogging the fuel pipe, but it wasn’t happening.

"For f***’s sake!"

He gave up on the stove and started to inflate his mattress. Ben and I exchanged a look of fear. We thought Thom was going to explode. He was watching as his bed for the night slid quickly but silently back down miles of snow we had spent the day climbing. Down the mountain and all the way back to base camp.

He erupted in laughter, and we joined him. Things had gone from bad to worse and weren’t getting any better. It was laugh or cry, and we chose the former.

We got into our sleeping bags, desperately trying not to knock anything else down the death slide (Ben lost a stuff-sack) and, more importantly, not to fall of ourselves. The shiny nylon lining of the sleeping bags made us potentially brilliant toboggans.

It was dark now, and in the safety of our sleeping bags, with the addition of a seat belt (two ice axes dug into the snow and a rope around the front of us, lest we should roll over in the middle of the night), we settled down to sleep. Immediately, snow started to blow down from above me and fill the back of my sleeping bag. I zipped up my bivvy bag with a mixture of emotions: excitement, because whilst we were in a pretty precarious position, and this was what mountaineering was all about; fear, because we sat on a 30º snow slope where one bad dream would see me plummeting 3000 feet onto the rocks below; and guilt, because I was the only with a bivvy bag. And Thom had paid for it.

On the bus across Kyrgyzstan some weeks earlier, Ben’s expedition guidebook chapter on photography had given the advice, ‘the best photos are taken when you least want to take them.’ That morning, the absolutely last thing on my mind was to whip out my camera and get a snap-shop of the moment. I was tired, cold, and scared, on 5x2-foot platform of snow, at 5,000 metres in the middle of nowhere. I wanted to be back at base camp with a hot meal, not stuck in a snow-filled bivvy bag a vertical kilometre from any other human life. But I heeded the book’s advice, and I’m glad I did. That picture says everything about the moment: the emotionless faces of my companions, the way they’re huddled together and into their sleeping bags; the steep angle of the slope, showing our precarious position; and the moody sky in the background. The mountain range stretching behind us puts the picture in perspective, and the huge glacier sweeping along the valley floor beneath us shows just how high up we are.

The night on the death slide was one to remember.

(Excerpt from about 4 weeks into our trip. Having finished our climbing, we are several days into our trek back down the valley). Our state of mild starvation has led us to devise a number of optimistic schemes to get food from the huts we passed…Read More

(Excerpt from about 4 weeks into our trip. Having finished our climbing, we are several days into our trek back down the valley).

Our state of mild starvation has led us to devise a number of optimistic schemes to get food from the huts we passed the first time we came through the valley. To our luck, the Kyrgyz Cowboy (who saved the day earlier in the trip by ferrying us across the river) was doing the rounds with his son.

We approached him and attempted to communicate the fact that we were suffering from malnutrition and would happily use our Western riches to purchase whatever food he had.

Unfortunately, our grasp of the Kyrgyz language extended to the knowledge of only a single word: "kancha", meaning "how much". After Ben’s attempts to mime the shovelling of food into his mouth, the cowboy signalled to take our rucksacks off. Without further ado, we debagged, and the horseman loaded all our rucksacks onto his horse and motioned for us to follow. We may have failed to put across our dire need for sustenance, but we had successfully enlisted the help of a local horseback rider in the role of porter. Our new friend then also fulfills his familiar position of private taxi, as he once again takes us across the river. The debate of how much to pay our helper is solved quickly when he makes a request for a short length of rope, an item which Thom conveniently has to spare. We make a final attempt to convey our desperation over dwindling food supplies, and this time the message appears to hit home. He signals for us to follow and trots off back to his house.

We arrived at his house (a small metal hut with a large canvas tent attached) and are beckoned into the kitchen/living room/lounge. He comes through with a big pot of tea and two large loaves of quality Kyrgyz bread. It should be pointed out that unlike most references that involve the words "quality" and "Kyrgyz", the reference to "quality bread" infers no sarcasm. Kyrgyz bread is in fact far superior to most baked goods produced by the likes of Kingsmill or Hovis. The sight of this food and drink is almost too much for our ravenous group, so our rapture can only be imagined when our host produces several huge slices of watermelon and his wife follows with three plates of scrambled eggs (curiously, but quite pleasantly, served with sugar on).

This unprecedented hospitality was attained for the princely sum of 200 Som (approximately 3 pounds). Having shown us a number of photos and letters from other passersby, the cowboy then requests that we photograph his family, which we are happy to oblige. Astonishingly, it would appear that his little outpost is on the receiving end of some kind of postal service.

The continuation of our trek was undertaken in a notably more jovial mood following our replenished energy levels, but despite our purchase of rice from the local good samaritan, we felt in need of more. Just over the hill was a small village, as we recalled, and we walked in in search of eggs.

The best method we could think of in which to indicate our desire for eggs was to flap our arms like chickens. This was perhaps not the best form of mimicry with which to greet a complete stranger, but he pointed us in the direction of what turned out to be a restaurant with supplies for sale. How much business a restaurant in such a prime location as this receives remains a mystery, but they gladly provided us with half a dozen eggs and some oil in which to fry them.

Previous discussions of what food we would indulge ourselves in upon our return to the UK were replaced with what food we would be indulging ourselves in that evening, now that our supplies were restocked. Some wild horses were encountered on the pathway later on in the day, shortly before Tim leaving behind the only remaining intact platypus temporarily halted progress. Due to good progress and the ever nearing of our terminus, an early stopping place was sought next to an abandoned hut.

Ben created an elaborate grill on which to cook the evening’s meal from nearby scrap whilst Tim and Thom were to fetch water. The usual ration of Wayfayrer meal was supplemented with bread and a truly delicious serving of egg fried rice.

Our final night out was spent under the stars.