South-2-The-Pole

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Fri 1 Dec '06 – High Camp 3700 mts - Summit Day!

Woke up after just a few hours sleep / rest.

Happy Birthday Mom. I miss you since you left us & I’m dedicating this day to you. I promise to give it as much as I can but to also stay within my personal safety boundary.

I really don’t feel good & I’ve never been as anxious or concerned about a summit day as I am right now. Usually I’m up early, have breakfast, get geared up & am mad keen to get going. But not today & that bothers me.

As we set off conditions are as near perfect as you can expect on Vinson. Windy at the camp but it will be just a light breeze when we get up out of the col. Yes it’s cold, about -15c, with blue, relatively cloudless skies. The only concern is the ominous & threatening looking clouds building up off to the North West.
Ian reminds us that this could be a 12 – 15 hr day, checks that we’re all up to this & also reminds us that it’s all of us or none of us. We’re all in full battle dress & I have on me 3 pairs of gloves, balaclava, hat, goggles, 3 layers under my Buffalo suit, down jacket & trousers. In my rucksack along with spare hats, gloves are my down jacket & trousers. With ice axe in hand along with 1 walking pole, off we go. Jon hasn’t been feeling well & has a dose of the trots since he got up & reckoning that he’ll be stopping to use his wag-bag on a regular basis. So after only 40 mins he decides to pull out & luckily he’s in sight of camp so we only have to watch him get down & then continue.
The other teams on the summit attempt today are all within sight with 2 of them just behind us. The pace set is good & I settle into it nice & steady. Lungs working hard but not overdoing it. The trick is to go at the pace of your lungs & not your legs & certainly not your head!

So what do you think about for the next maybe 9 hrs as you plod along, slowly placing one foot in front of the other. Well, people have different techniques for this & it’s not usually a problem until the going gets very tough. When you’re plodding along you just concentrate on getting your breathing action working the right way & when it gets tough, you need to have something to take your mind off the discomfort. I try various techniques to maintain my concentration & these are some of them.

- Firstly I look for a marker not too far away & try to calculate how long it will take to get to it. Say 20 mins, then I work on the next 20 min section & so on.
- Then I work on height gain & only concentrate on the next say 200 mts of height gain. This works well on steep ground
- Counting from 1 – 100, again & again.
- Counting down from 100 – 1. Not as easy as it seems & requires a lot of concentration. I rarely get to 1 before the pain takes over!
- Listening to the ‘Scrunch-Scrunch’ of your footsteps as your heavy boots compact down the loose powdery snow underfoot.
- Listening to the metallic ‘Clank-Clank’ of your karabiners & other climbing gear jangling on your harness.
- Concentrating on putting your footsteps in exactly the same footprint as the person ahead of you on the rope. This works well because you then get into the same pace & unless they’ve got a gammy leg which swings all over he place, leaving you end up walking like Quasimodo !

In the end none of these work for very long & you end up just gritting your teeth, hyper-ventilating, suffering & reminding yourself why you’re here & that you are on holidays after all!

Onwards & upwards we go, the effort is beginning to tell on him & it starts to bite. No time to look around & take photos or in truth no interest in making the effort. Just let me get on with this, just keep grinding out the steps, one by one. It’s going to take about 150,000 steps to do this & how many have I done already?
I don’t f****** well know, do I! I lost concentration after the 3rd round of 1 – 100 for heaven’s sake! Just leave me alone! Genuinely, I’m not in good shape. I try to put it out of my mind & just focus on being positive but I’ve got a headache pounding through my brain, my mouth is constantly as dry as sandpaper because I can’t breath through my nose & I’ve got the usual nauseous feeling that comes in at 4000+ mt. Negativity is beginning to creep in & I’m conscious of not allowing myself to get dangerously close to the position I was in on the big carry up on Weds. It’s not worth that to me. I’m here for the full Antarctic experience & whilst summiting is important, I’m not going to become obsessed about it. Yes, of course I want to summit but I’ve also want to get back down to High Camp under my own steam & not be assisted down. But I’ve got to push these negative thoughts & doubts out of my mind, be positive & get back on track. I can do this, I know I can. I’ve pushed myself to new limits before & I can do it again, I know I can. Get going!
Onward & upwards. I’ve no damm watch or altimeter to refer to so I have to estimate our progress which doesn’t suit how my mind needs to work. I need hard facts & figures not guesstimates. But I’m managing.

We’re now maybe 5 hrs into this & although I’m feeling a lot worse than I’ve ever done on a summit day, I know I can continue on for 3-4 hrs at least & maybe longer. But I’m conscious that that is now not going to be enough to summit, descend & stay out of my danger zone. I’m now thinking of the rest of the team & their ambitions to summit & in particular Fredrik. At this point if I have to go back, we all have to go back. But maybe I shouldn’t be concerned about them & maybe sod them, I’ve got to look after & think about myself. What would one of them do in a similar position? So I battle on, trying very hard to be positive & to believe that I can do this without going over the limit into that ‘bad place’ again.

As we push on I notice that about 30 mins ahead of us just on a crest there is one of the IMG teams & they appear to have stopped. Then I notice another team, the second IMG one apparently descending or waiting for them. As we approach them I realise what’s happening & this is my final undoing! No, don’t let this be the case, please! Don’t give me any opportunity to descend. I don’t want to, I want to continue on no matter it takes. When we reach them we find out that one of guys on one of the teams is ill & needs to return to camp. Ordinarily this would mean the full team descending but since they have 2 small teams with 2 guides they can let 1 guide take the client down & the rest can continue, whilst still within the guide-client ratio considering we’re on predominately crevice free terrain.

Instantly I realise that I have an opportunity to descend with them & allow the rest of my team to continue & thereby not affect their summit chances. I’ve still got a few hours left in the tank & I’m reluctant to voice my thoughts to Ian because I want to continue. But If I don’t & then end up in 3 hrs time turning the team around, I won’t feel too good & it may not be appreciated by the others. But what would they do in a similar situation?
In the end I discuss it with Ian & I tell him how I’m feeling & my concerns. We’ve done maybe 6 hrs (4450 mts approx), & I tell him I’m good for maybe 4 hrs more (within my safety limit) but the summit & decent is going to take up to 7-9 hrs more & I tell Ian I can’t give him that much more without the real risk of needing assistance down. I discuss this with the Ian, Fredrik & Richard & tell them that there is a real risk that I will compromise their summit ambitions & that having considered the situation, I am going to take the opportunity to descend with IMG & allow them to continue. I feel I’ve done the honourable thing in sacrificing the by now slim chance I had left of summiting to give them a better chance. All 3 of them understood what I was doing, Fredrik thanked me for being honest & doing this & Ian thanked me for not being selfish. It was, I can tell you, with a heavy heart & some real regrets that I then roped with Roger from IMG & began the lonely decent back to High Camp. Roger incidentally was on the 5th of his 7 Summit Series & was bitterly disappointed to have to descend. But we must always remember that it is the mountain & all of the conditions that prevail & not us mere mortals that decide if the mountain is to be summited on any given day. You can never conquer any mountain, you can only summit it & the mountain decides when.

On the route down I cursed the IMG teams for stopping & for one of them to be descending, for I really wanted to go on for as long as I could. But a decision was taken & now when I look back on it, I’m content with the way it turned out. It simply wasn’t to be my day to summit.

Back at camp I got some food to eat, settled once again into my sleeping bag for some rest & awaited the safe return of the 3 remaining team members. As it turned out they were not as long as I though they would be. They continued on for another couple of hours as the weather started to close in & at about 4650 mts, just below the summit ridge they decided to descend. The summit ridge is about 700 linear mts with about 250 mts of vertical ascent but is over mixed ground, is a rocky scramble & takes about 2 hrs to complete, plus another hour or so to get back down from. In the deteriorating weather & very strong winds Ian & many of the other teams decided that it was too risky. Visibility on the summit was probably zero at this stage which didn’t help the cause either. One of the IMG guides was continuing to the summit & agreed to take Fredrik on his rope so that he could complete his 7 Summit quest. Ian & Richard returned back to camp after a total of 9.5 hrs out. Fredrik having summited returned after 13.5 hrs & some of the IMG team were apparently in a bad way after their long but successful day.
So, in the end, had I continued I wouldn’t have summited anyway & at least I feel good about giving the other 3 in our team every possible chance.
We all had a quick boil-in-the-bag dinner, hot drinks & then bed with the ever present & by now increasingly violent winds battering the tents which of course didn’t help trying to get to sleep.

At 4.00am awakened by the storm winds, Ian & I dressed to go outside to strengthen the protective walls & this I can tell you took a big effort to do at that hour & in the bitter wind, with temperatures somewhere around -20 or -25c. Little did we know what was to hit us within the next 24 hrs as we crept back into still warm bags & snuggled down to a sleep of sorts.