By the grace of God or whoever you’ve been asking to watch over you for the other two months you’ve been climbing, the sun rises. You see how far you’ve come, and how far you’ve still got to go.
At a spot known as The Balcony, at 8,400m, you stop for a break. The first rest, after about 6hrs of climbing.
Here we change oxygen bottles.
At this point, a couple of strong teams turned around and abandoned their summit bid. This was a major blow for us. As the first team of the year to make a summit bid from the South, we had to break trail in the snow and fix ropes all the way. Without their manpower, we knew it would be harder. They thought it would be impossible or too risky.
We decided to switch things up a little. Most climbers have a climbing sherpa on a 1:1 basis on summit day, carrying spare oxygen and generally helping. We knew our sherpas would need all of their energy if any of us were going to get to the top, so we relieved them of the burden of our spare bottles. Oxygen bottles are heavy, and we had 2 or 3 each.
From the Balcony, the ground stays quite steep, until you reach the South Summit.
From here you can see the final piece of ridge line between you and the true summit.
It’s pretty bloody intimidating, more so because as the first team, there was virgin snow in front of us, no tracked out path.
The last real difficulty is the Hillary Step, named after the first ascenionists. Its about 40ft of steep rock, but beyond that the ridge is relatively straightforward and it’s only about 20 minutes until you hit the summit.
One of the problems was that due to the fresh snow, there was a cobweb of old ropes from previous years, constantly snagging crampons.
Luckily, at 3:15pm, after about 16hrs of climbing, 54 days since leaving home, 3 years on the Seven Summits and 6 years of training, we were, literally, on top of the world.
It was even my 20th birthday, but we spent no more than 5 minutes there.
The emotion is a mixture of elation, exhaustion, and an over riding desire to get as far down the mountain as quickly as possible.
You’re very much on borrowed time at 8,850m, and with a finite amount of oxygen, we were really pushing our limits after such a late summit.
We made rapid progress back to Camp 4, abseiling the steep sections and wrapping a hand around ropes when it was shallower.
(Spot the tents at C4...)
At almost 7pm, we were back in the tent, completely drained, physically and emotionally. I rang home on the sat phone, and went to bed. It was a terrible night’s sleep, but I knew that if could just keep it together for another 48hrs, I’d be back a Base Camp. All went well, and 7 days after stepping off the summit, I was back home in England.
Thanks for reading. I hope it was an interesting snapshot in to the last 24hrs of a climb to the top of Everest.
Please do check out our other trip reports:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trip-...win-otter.html
and
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trip-...ay-safari.html
My wife and I now live in the UK and run a luxury expedition company:
http://www.monixadventures.com