Day 6 – Acclimatising on Pokalde
Tuesday, 8 April 2014 – Dingboche, Nepal
There are a few niggling illnesses at breakfast this morning. Ian has the Khumbu cough, the dry high-altitude rasp that he seems to suffer from on every expedition. He apologises for keeping me awake all night, but I wore my earplugs and hardly noticed. Kevin has a stomach problem and Dia is also feeling ill. She doesn’t emerge for breakfast.
Phil produces the medical kit and hands out throat lozenges, ciprofloxacin and aspirin.
‘Dia wants to know if you have any Viagra,’ I say.
Louis laughs louder than anyone else, though it seems to me a nervous sort of laugh.
It’s supposed to be a rest day today, but after breakfast I set off up the hill behind our lodge for a modest hike that lasts longer than I anticipate.
The main trail to Lobuche slants across the hillside to a mini pass bedecked with Buddhist prayer flags and stupas. The sky is completely clear, and the sheer faces of Ama Dablam and Kangtega stare down at me across the valley. Both mountains look intimidating, but at the pass two equally impressive peaks appear to the west. They are Taboche Peak and Cholatse, a fiendish pair of snow-capped needles whose summits look severe. Sheer cliffs guard the lower sections of Cholatse. It looks to be the hardest peak I have seen in the Khumbu.
None of these peaks would be my cup of tea to climb, but they are indescribably beautiful, and it is a privilege to look at them from below.
Taboche Peak rises above Dingboche
It’s a pleasant morning for an acclimatisation walk. I turn right and follow dozens of other people up a ridge. Some are trekkers, but most, like us, are climbers heading for Everest and Lhotse. When I arrived yesterday morning I had no idea so many people were staying in Dingboche.
The trail is steep and dusty. I plod up grassy slopes beside the path to avoid inhaling the clouds of dust kicked up by so many hikers. After an hour I have ascended 300m and overtaken the largest of the trekking groups. I find myself alone on the slope with only a few isolated figures above me.
Two of these are Ian and Caroline, a nurse from New Zealand with whom I climbed in Alaska last year. At the time I had no inkling she had ambitions to climb Everest. I was surprised when Phil contacted me a few months later asking for a reference.
‘Hey, Horrell,’ it read (Phil’s prose is very similar to his speech). ‘I got an email from this Kiwi chick asking if she can sign on to my Everest expedition. So I Googled her name to get her climbing experience, and discovered you climbed Denali with her.’
I must have talked about Altitude Junkies while we were on Denali. I was tempted to ask Phil for a commission for referring a client to him, but I knew what his response would be (the second word would have been ‘off’). Instead, I gave him an honest assessment of Caroline’s climbing skills. It must have been OK, because here she was.
I catch up with Caroline and Ian a short while later. Ian has pulled his buff over his face to avoid the dust. He has decided to descend, but Caroline is keen to continue.
I see Louis on the trail behind me. I head for a rocky sub-peak a short distance above us, and reach it by way of a gentle scramble over rocks. We meet Margaret and Edita on the summit.
After a great acclimatisation hike, it’s eleven o’clock and we’ve climbed 700m to an altitude of 5,050m. None of us had any intention of climbing high when we set off. Edita doesn’t even have any water, and only came up here looking for 3G. She didn’t find it, but has no regrets, for the view is incredible.
Everest and Lhotse hide behind the mountain we are climbing, which turns out to be a trekking peak called Pokalde, but the giant black pyramid of Makalu has appeared in the distance to the east. Far beneath Makalu, tiny Island Peak is camouflaged against higher slopes behind it.
To the right of Makalu a series of fluted peaks and faces continue to the whaleback ridge of Baruntse and the less prominent Kali Himal. Ama Dablam, Kangtega, Taboche and Cholatse have remained visible all along, but up the valley to the north two more peaks have appeared. The steep snow ridge of Lobuche rises in the foreground, and the snow plateau of Cho Oyu stretches out behind it.
We stay on top for forty-five minutes, taking many photos and videos. I’m the only person who knows the names of all the peaks, so Margaret asks me to video the panorama for her with commentary in what she calls my ‘beautiful British accent’ (I have a slightly stupid Yorkshire accent, but she’s Australian, so I can see her point).
The rest of the team are standing in front of me. I describe the mountains as Margaret asked, but I ruin her footage by making a series of inappropriate jokes as I pan the camera past each of them.
It takes just forty-five minutes to run down the dusty slopes back to Dingboche. Halfway down we meet Phil on his way up. He says he was concerned that Edita might discover an internet connection and end up missing lunch, so he came up to find her.
The sky has remained clear throughout the morning. It’s been a perfect acclimatisation hike to a grandstand seat above this shining mountain amphitheatre, and I feel blessed.
At dinner I sit next to Margaret. This is her fifth Everest expedition in as many years (Lhotse counts in my book). She climbed on the south side in 2010 and 2011, reaching the summit at the second attempt. Then she joined us on the north side in 2012 but turned around at the Third Step. Last year she tried again from the north side and was successful.
That’s four expeditions and two summits, from both sides. Not bad for a grandmother. I ask her to compare north and south.
‘The trek to Base Camp on the south side is very beautiful,’ she says, ‘and then you climb through the Khumbu Icefall. On the north side I didn’t enjoy the drive to Base Camp. Nyalam and Tingri are not very nice places to stay, and the walk up from Base Camp to ABC is a bit boring. But above ABC the north side is beautiful.’
I ask her about the difficulties on summit day.
‘On the north side you leave camp and begin climbing straight away through rocks, and it’s hard. The only place you can relax is on the ridge between the Second and Third Steps. Everywhere else is very exposed. On the south side you begin by crossing the South Col. Then it is steep, but it is wide. Above the Balcony all the way to the South Summit the ridge is very wide. There are two ropes, but if you want to overtake people you can unclip very easily and get past. You cannot do that on the north side.
‘Between the South Summit and the Hillary Step it is very exposed, but this section is short. On the north side you have the triangular face above the Third Step, which is much longer. It seems to go on for ever. The Second Step is much harder than the Hillary Step.
‘On the south side you have a lot of ascent – nearly 1,000m from the South Col. But when I got back to Base Camp last year, I told Phil the north side is much harder than the south.’
It’s a good summary, and makes me feel better about my eighteen-hour summit day on the north side, which I only just survived. One thing’s for sure, though: whatever anyone says, neither side is easy.