For a moment I stop my deeply exhausted breathing, because after four long sleepless nights and unimaginably strenuous days, its unbroken rhythm and pounding in my ears is deafening, almost suffocating. I try to remember my telephone number and count backwards from a thousand, but I cannot. My brain is numb, as if poisoned, living on carefully rationed oxygen compressed into the half-empty four-kilogram cylinder I carry on my aching shoulders. Tiny frozen particles dance between me and the almost menacingly large moon, which today is a few kilometres closer to me than usual. The cold beam of my headlamp catches on the white blossoms that have grown on my eyelashes in the few seconds since I peeled my ski goggles away from my skin. My body feels as if it has no arms or legs, and when I take another deep breath my fingertips hurt sharply; I am still alive, I realise, although I am in an environment that allows only a few to live. I plant my ice axe and decide to risk chilling my fingers as I take off my oversized gloves and try to catch the first light from the east with the camera, then turn it towards myself and record a moment that will probably never happen again. It is half past four in the morning, China time, 16 May 2017; as the eighteenth Slovenian, the tenth still alive, I am standing on the highest point in the world and I am too tired to grasp what I have been given. I tuck a photograph of my family, which has faded for seven long weeks in the pocket of my high-altitude suit, into a little pyramid of stacked stones, and put a tiny pebble in my pocket, the one I promised Rebeka and Karin.
On 2 April, in short sleeves and after unavoidable bureaucratic complications at Venice Airport because my luggage was too heavy, I said goodbye for two months to my wife Melita and our two daughters. It is difficult to leave something you love, care for and live for, but life usually offers no other way; I am always accompanied by the warm, almost homelike thought of meeting again, which, I hope at least, will be as beautiful as the farewell is difficult. Sometimes it seems as though our whole lives are spent returning home, which is the most beautiful thing of all, but to do that we also have to leave.
The flight via Istanbul and Delhi to Kathmandu was calm, my thoughts torn between saying goodbye to my family and anticipating the meeting with people I had never met before and who, among other things, would shape my mood over the following weeks. The cultural shock at the first sight of Kathmandu is indescribable. A melting pot of cultures, faiths, nations, illnesses and street dirt boils with vibration and timelessness at thirty degrees. Through the window of a half-destroyed, underinflated van sent to the airport by Makalu Adventures, I breathed in the thick dust rising everywhere above the city, mixed with the scent of vivid red flowers tied into a garland that a toothless and obviously sleep-deprived driver had placed around my neck at the airport. Eastern hospitality awaited me in a small hotel in old Kathmandu, in the district they call Thamal. An excessive number of attendants who spend all day competing for tips is normal here. The distances between those who are poor by choice and religious conviction, or poor because of the system, and on the other side wealthy owners, politicians, officials, drug dealers... have been unbridgeable for a thousand years and probably will remain so for another thousand; the European or “more advanced” way of thinking is pure utopia. I refused the ubiquitous “welcome drink” because I did not want to poison myself with bacterial exotica on the very first day, something that no longer offends the hosts because they have become used to soft people from another world. I soon met the expedition leader, a 170 cm tall, 65-kilogram “iron man” who at forty-seven diligently grinds his incisors while clenching them during inhuman training sessions he carries out in Dubai, although he is a typical Englishman who simply became tired of bad weather. Martin and Mark soon arrived sweating, and Tony only towards evening: the whole team, all with similar experiences of getting to Nepal and with a single wish: “let’s go to Everest”. The boss assigned Martin as my roommate, a tall American, the youngest member of the team, for whom T-shirts simply never seemed large enough and whose haircut betrayed a military past. The poor man also found the bed too small, which was obviously not the only disturbance, because he diligently filled his vocabulary with the repeated “fuck” and every imaginable syntactic variation on the theme. Mark and Tony were paired together. The former is an experienced adventurer who, by the day of this newly chosen adventure, had already run across Alaska several times, crossed Greenland and also walked across the Sahara; very tidy, excessively thin and, at least at first glance, a very sensible and responsible Briton. The latter owns a funeral home, a somewhat less pumped-up forty-eight-year-old with previous high-altitude experience on Himalayan peaks, very wealthy and pleasant but with poor hygienic habits, because in his view there is no point changing clothes or showering on expeditions like this since, after all, nobody is watching you, which struck me as a perfectly understandable occupational deformation.
After two days of adapting to the new environment, culinary excursions around the capital and shopping in the best-stocked stores I had ever experienced, we set off to acclimatise in the Nepalese part of the Himalayas, to the village of Manang, the starting point for tours in the Annapurna region. To put it mildly, the journey was epic, and no one on the team had expected it. For two full days, more than forty-eight hours, we suffered in Indian-made off-road vehicles with no perceptible suspension or ventilation and countless breakdowns, in order to cover 120 kilometres of gravel road. The roads are interrupted by landslides, fallen trees, dead goats and yaks, and waterfalls tens of metres high, which were the only things that washed our vehicles and soaked piles of equipment on the open roof racks, which were additionally filled by stranded local travellers who simply jumped onto the car while it was moving and made use of the Nepalese version of GoOpti. Chafed backsides and aching spines, vomit-stained seats and lungs full of tetanus-laden road dust were a minor negative detail compared with the experience, unforgettable views of our first eight-thousanders, locals trapped in the Stone Age and primordial food cooked on thousand-year-old hearths. Manang hosted us for ten unforgettable spring days. Each day we climbed a little higher, finally to just under six thousand metres, below Pisang, opposite Annapurna II, above the broad valley that is part of Annapurna National Park and where my new expensive trekking trousers were stolen. We learned the basics of Buddhism, got over our first intestinal infections, listened to unbelievable stories from locals that they have probably been telling for a century—who could blame them, since for eight long winter months they are cut off from the world by the snowbound impassable road and are surely among the loneliest people on the planet. Apart from the short summer mountaineering season, their company consists of domestic animals, which often spend the winter in the same rooms as their owners. Nobody looked forward to the drive back to Kathmandu, during which, incidentally, we also lost the rear right wheel and then waited ten hours for a “new” vehicle.
After two days of rest we left Kathmandu for Lhasa, crossing the Himalayas and seeing Everest for the first time, although from far away, in the sunshine, decorated with a few cumulus clouds and its characteristic wind plume, because in April powerful air currents still race across it and make an ascent impossible. The passengers took off their headphones, conversations stopped, and the aircraft tilted to the right as everyone crowded to the side facing the Goddess Mother of the Earth, “Chomolungma”. The landscape below us quickly changed from green and relatively well populated to barren, covered only by sparse grass, cut by fast rivers and uninhabited. We were, after all, about to land in Tibet, on the roof of the world.
Lhasa, the two-million-strong capital, did not surprise us with altitude sickness, as it does most tourists, because we were already well acclimatised, but with its cleanliness, military order, excellent wide and smooth roads, constant video surveillance and the magnificent night-time appearance of the old city. We had two nights and three days, which was quite enough to visit the Potala, the palace of the exiled Dalai Lama, to try local food, which surprisingly left us without digestive problems but with scorched oral mucosa, to inspect thousands of shops selling original Chinese counterfeits of the world’s most expensive brands, and to enjoy old Lhasa, filled with the mysterious scents of prayer incense and the murmuring sounds of prayers thousands of years old.
A long journey to base camp awaited us, along a well-asphalted road, the world-famous Friendship Highway connecting Lhasa and Kathmandu, first conceived as far back as the age of the Silk Roads, when this part of the world was crucial to trade between the most developed parts of the world: China on one side, and India and the Middle East on the other; when the most expensive horses in the world came from western Tibet and the most expensive camels from the Gobi could walk for thirty days without water and food across the unimaginable obstacles of the Himalayas and Karakoram; when silk was a currency and the world was not yet as corrupted as it is today, when wars and the fates of nations are shaped by imaginary high numbers on banking terminals in America and Switzerland. As I looked at the completely new railway running alongside this road and reaching passes above five thousand metres, into which several tens of billions of US dollars—Chinese dollars, of course—had been invested, I had the feeling that the last fifty years were merely a brief, sad communist period in the several-thousand-year history of China, a history that teaches us that China will rise again and reclaim its former brilliant reputation as the first and most developed.
On the way we spent the night in Shigatse, the second-largest city in Tibet, and later in the much smaller and more neglected Tingri. After four days we reached base camp, although I arrived somewhat behind the group because I had to return from the highest pass, at 5,200 metres, to Tingri, where there is a hospital for altitude sickness. We had been in a traffic accident a little above five thousand metres. The driver fainted from lack of oxygen and drove off the road, fortunately in the right direction. I volunteered to accompany him back for hospital care and therefore reached base camp twelve hours later, but in exchange I got a ride in a military vehicle and the respect of the military personnel, who, out of sheer boredom, happily drove me onward to base camp in an emergency Mercedes illuminated with flashing lights.
The sounds of zippers on tents and sleeping bags, coughing caused by the dry air, the smell of the first coffee and the sun that suddenly warmed the inside of the tent: “This is it.” For everyone on the team, the first morning at base camp soothingly cured the night-time thoughts of homesickness, and then came: “Oh my God, fuck me, Thomas, wake up Thomas…”, the words of my roommate Martin as, with his eyes half closed, he first turned towards the beautifully illuminated face of our objective. The first Puja, or prayer with the Sherpas, surprised us with its calmness and mystery immediately after the first breakfast. They blessed our equipment; without that, the Sherpas refuse to cooperate. Into the cold wind, during the prayer of the Lama who had been brought from Lhasa solely for the event, we threw grains of rice and, only a step away from Nirvana, for a moment transported ourselves to the summit where demons live, demons who listened to our request to let us come close.
Already on the first day we began with easier acclimatisation climbs on neighbouring six-thousand-metre peaks, across dry, rocky pathless terrain, icy in places, accompanied by fearless pheasant-like birds and mountain goats resembling our mouflon. From almost every point we could see Everest, usually clear, sometimes a little cloudy, in morning or evening light, a little more or a little less snow-covered, and we built a relationship with the highest mountain, with the strongest desire that an individual’s exploratory spirit can carry: to reach the summit soon. In expectation and with the team united in its wishes, in private or shared tents, without telephones, internet connections, radio, food from home, people from home, everyday domestic problems, haste or impatience, the days passed, until the day came when we set out for the first time in the direction of Everest, towards the so-called ABC, or Advanced Base Camp, via the intermediate or “yak-shit” camp, where fortunately we slept only once. We walked carrying only our personal equipment; everything else was carried by yaks, small long-haired and incredibly hardy cattle. A caravan of three hundred and fifty animals and several dozen climbers, Sherpas, porters, cooks, guides, companions, film crews... moved for two days across a glacier full of sharp ice pinnacles, hidden crevasses and streams. Magnificent views of neighbouring peaks and glacial lakes were further enlivened by extremely fast-changing weather, which could turn from snowfall into a warm sunny day within ten minutes and back again.
ABC, at a respectable 6,400 metres above sea level, caused the first signs of altitude sickness in many. Breathing like that of an eighty-year-old in intensive care, vomiting, diarrhoea, headaches, despondency, loss of appetite, frostbite, pain... when unbearable, they turn people back down to lower ground. There are no more curious visitors here, those who occasionally flood base camp and photograph mountaineers as if they were the ninth wonder of the world; you cannot get here without good prior acclimatisation and strong will. This is the world we had been waiting for, the world that quietly frightened each of us and gave rise to the most frequent question: am I capable of it or not...
The camp is relatively well equipped, much like base camp. The tents had already been pitched for us; here too everyone had their own, something that may seem unimportant to an observer, but a little privacy and a touch of comfort are very welcome up there. The communal tent was large, as was the kitchen tent. We missed the Nepalese cook from base camp, a retired monk who was always surprising us with new Indian and Nepalese flavours. Every morning the surroundings were freshly white, but by eleven the persistent wind had swept the camp clean again.
After a few days came the ascent to the North Col, or Camp I. It was the experience we had waited for so long: for the first time above seven thousand metres, for the first time in high-altitude clothing, for the first time so close to the dark pyramid that almost touches nine kilometres and that for local people represents a ladder to heaven, or Kaf, a concept shared by many religions on the planet. Beautiful weather accompanied us. I reached the objective extremely quickly, first among my companions. After four and a half hours of climbing across the treacherous glacier, I breathed the thinnest air I had ever breathed and earned the respect of the two senior Sherpas, who from that day looked at me quite differently and gave me the title “super fit doc”. The favour of the Sherpas is of great importance in this environment, as became clear later when the first of them, named Prba, reached the summit for the thirteenth time together with me and gave me psychological support through his presence and experience.
The next three weeks were devoted to so-called rotations. After each ascent, which was a little higher and longer, and during which we slept progressively higher, we descended back to base camp. In total we walked more than one hundred kilometres, whose lowest point was higher than Mont Blanc. By the final ascent we had accumulated a good 20 vertical kilometres and improved our blood counts to an incredible 175 to 180 units of haemoglobin, pushing our bodies to the extreme limits of endurance. Even so, within the close-knit group we had no complications in the form of altitude sickness and were not forced to start taking Diamox or dexamethasone prematurely. Everything suggested that we were an exceptionally strong and homogeneous group.
On 12 May, rather different weather forecasts belonging to two wealthy expedition companies, the Russian Seven Summits and the Swiss Garry Kogel, predicted the first weather window for 16 May. According to our schedule, that was the first day intended for the final ascent towards the summit, with another fourteen days in reserve in case the weather proved too capricious. We were at ABC when Martin came puffing up to my tent: “Tomas, boss is calling us…” The decision had been made: we were going for the summit. It was impossible to hide our excitement. Equipment that had already been checked a thousand times, cylinders, regulators, food, spare batteries, lights, cameras, telephones, thermos flasks, ice axes, crampons... everything rattled through the tents with that familiar melody of action, expectation and tension: we’re going, we’re going, we’re going...
The first day to the North Col. Because of the weight of the equipment I climbed the slowest; besides, I was saving myself for the end, because apparently it would be brutal up there above 8,300 metres, a place I had until then visited only in my thoughts. I reached Camp I at around six in the evening and began the standard procedures for preserving life: melting snow, cooking soup, eating without any particular enthusiasm, passing urine into a measuring bottle, and even doing a number two is a necessity, which sounds simple but is not. During the night on the North Col I took off my boots for the last time to let my feet breathe; there is no point changing underwear anyway.
A wonderfully cold morning drove away the sleepless night; light and sunshine always awaken fresh hope and the will to sip the thin oxygen that at night fades away for many. That is how our friend Frank, an Australian who, despite the magnificence of his country and the grandeur of the coral reef, sought adventure here on this cold mountain as a guide, fell asleep forever. Let him remain here, we decided; we would carry his karma towards the summit as well. At nine in the morning we began climbing towards Camp II, the objective of the second day at an altitude of 7,900 metres. I decided not to start using supplementary oxygen yet, although I nevertheless carried one cylinder higher even though two more were waiting for me there, the ones delivered by the Sherpas ten days earlier. I took almost ten hours for a little more than eight hundred vertical metres and, frankly, with all that weight on my back it was not easy. The fixed ropes made the work considerably easier, and they also kept me safe from powerful gusts of wind that at times tried to peel me off the icy surface.
Camp II means twice the trouble of Camp I, at least that was what flashed through my mind as I squeezed into a tent barely clinging to uneven and completely unsuitable ground. The evening views towards Cho Oyu, our 8,300-metre-high neighbour, and the ever-closer summit were divine and warmed the soul, which came in useful because melting water was considerably harder here than lower down. A night that was far too long awaited us: the trembling of the tent, pain throughout a body that cannot rest on sharp rocks, difficult conversations in which every word is interrupted by a heavy sigh. I began taking a preventive dose of dexamethasone: now or never; tomorrow evening we go for the summit.
The morning of 15 May was slightly cloudy; only the eight-thousanders pierced through the creamy blanket, while above us there was a clarity almost black in colour, and one could almost say I saw stars in daylight. The death zone awaited us, the world above eight thousand metres; I prepared my oxygen regulator and cylinder. I knew that I had to complete the task as quickly as possible, without hesitation and with a plan prepared in advance, including a backup plan if everything did not go well, because nobody is capable of rational decision-making at this altitude. The slope towards Camp III is inclined at about fifty degrees, mostly rocky and icy in places. On the north side there is progressively less snow with altitude, because nothing can withstand the hurricane-force winds. The four hundred vertical metres to Camp III took a great deal of strength from me, mainly because the wind almost completely died away and it became quite hot inside the down suit. I allowed myself two litres of oxygen per minute, at which rate the cylinder lasts for eight hours of walking. My thoughts became increasingly dull, emotional outbursts that would have been normal with the views offered down in the valley became ever rarer; the brain slowly begins to die.
At two in the afternoon, together with the boss, I reached Camp III at 8,300 metres; the others were far behind. The little man of steel showed his true strength, and it became clear to me what experience, choosing the right moment and prudence mean. The boss is the boss, for a reason. He ordered us to rest until nine in the evening and then make the night ascent to the summit. Two hours after us Martin and Mark arrived as well. The first was visibly exhausted, not military at all, gasping for air with a rabbit-like breathing rate, and in the pauses between breaths he tried, one word at a time, to explain that he needed an additional oxygen cylinder. Mark, as calm as usual, collapsed in front of the tent with a British, slightly flushed “hello” and, with a frozen smile, let us know that everything would be all right.
Prba slowly approached the tent, no longer bouncing along in his usual Sherpa-like way and no longer so dominantly unshort of breath, and told me the shocking news that the “boss” had received a sad order from the English office: the weather window would not last until the middle of the next day and, because hurricane-force winds were forecast, we had to return to the valley. What might have passed for a not-bad joke was ruined by the very serious, almost tearful look of a man who had probably never cried in his life. We were beside ourselves and held what was already an all-too-rare breath of heavenly air. Even today I do not know how I dared to contradict the boss and simply croaked that I was going to the summit and the others could do as they wished. As usual when I have a major problem, this time too I turned to my wife Melita, who throughout the ascent had been sitting at the computer at home, carefully tracking our movements made visible by modern technology, as well as the weather, that capricious variable that always shapes the fate of people on this mountain. She understood our predicament immediately and, despite the time difference, called an American specialist in Everest weather forecasting who, by the grace of God and of course in exchange for a substantial fee, produced a forecast predicting the arrival of the winds about eight hours later than the English forecast. I reported the news and my consequent firm decision that, regardless of legal or any other consequences, I would set out for the summit, to the boss, whom I quietly knew respected my will and also trusted me. I switched off the radio and cut the umbilical cord: “now I am alone”. My slow thoughts gradually arranged themselves; the robotic behaviour that each of us had rehearsed in our minds for seven weeks acquired its true meaning. The protocol began: packing, melting snow, checking oxygen regulators, weighing cylinders, hydrating, urinating, positioning the solar panels and giving the camera and phone batteries their final charge, swallowing tablets and finally checking once more the photograph of my family that had been crumpled for weeks in the safest pocket of my high-altitude suit; I would leave it on the summit. I recorded one final video and with it said goodbye to my family. Only a light breeze from the west, carrying the scent of home, gently shook our final shelter. I could feel the setting sun on the narrow strips of my face not covered by goggles or the oxygen mask. Martin and Mark also decided to join me despite the boss’s objections. At nine in the evening my companions, who had sensed my obsession and determination, my trust in Melita’s weather information and the karma that connected us, knew that I was ready. We did not speak much, until the extremely taciturn Mark made his decision: “Let’s see where demons live…” Soon, already in complete darkness, we reached the First Step, a ten-metre, fairly vertical wall with a fixed rope running across it. I opened the oxygen regulator fully. Working with the arms and straining the whole body consumes considerably more oxygen than merely walking uphill. My companions remained somewhat behind. I followed a narrow ridge which, in the strong moonlight, looked like a narrow path; everything else was black darkness. I switched off my headlamp; perhaps it could work without it. For a few moments my eyes adjusted away from the dazzling narrow beam that had shown me the position of the fixed ropes. Above me opened a sandbox of the brightest stars, the galaxy clearly visible, as if I were genuinely walking towards the sky. I held my breath and learned what silence is. I no longer remember every step and every view; hypoxia probably erases some data, but the Second Step, or the so-called Chinese ladder, cannot be forgotten. Across three consecutive rocky, ice-covered and fairly steep sections runs a tangle of stiffened ropes from almost every expedition so far, which the wind—the only thing that performs a cleaning service on the mountain—apparently cannot tear loose and blow across the vastness of the Himalayas. Crampons and backpack catching on things, along with painful numb fingers, drive many people to a nervous breakdown at an altitude of 8,650 metres and make them turn back. Almost a hundred years ago, one of the greatest also broke here, the man commemorated by a plaque at the entrance to base camp, Mr Mallory, about whom it is still not known with certainty whether he was the first to touch the feet of the gods. His body, polished by the winds, together with the remains of equipment incomparably simpler than what we have today, lies a few dozen metres lower. Apparently, on the way back he wanted to avoid the difficulty of the Second Step, but it did not work out. He is kept company by those who have tried to imitate him ever since, following his footsteps along Everest’s North Ridge, which is somewhat less popular, technically more difficult and, above all, exposes the climber to altitude above 8,000 metres for longer than the Nepalese side, and which we rightly call the Death Zone. Reflective strips on the clothing of the dead on the ridge or just below it throw back the frightened light of headlamps several times and remind the climber that nothing is eternal, except the desire to reach the summit. More than three hundred petrified, frozen climbers whisper stories familiar to us up here, at the highest point on the planet, stories of an unstoppable and overpowering desire that clouds the mind. After a few hours I emptied my first cylinder, probably left it under a rock on the ridge forever, and opened a fresh one at four litres per minute. The Third Step is easier than the first two, but it does not leave you without memories. I was approaching the goal, a little after four in the morning China time; it was still dark, and I was stronger than I had dared hope on the evening before the highest morning of my life. I looked back and in the distance on the ridge saw the headlamps of Mark and the boss, who had joined us after all and risked losing his contract with the parent company because he had ignored the order from the office. Far in the distance, much lower, there was also the light of a panting Martin, by my exhausted sense of distance a century away. Strangely, I was almost without emotion; the brain up here is incapable of processing such demanding functions, only facts: that I had made it, after seven long weeks of solitude, sleepless nights, food soaked in curry, tearful memories of home and warm feet, without the comfort of a shower and a toilet you can sit on, without a soft mattress, the warmth of my wife’s body, without her funny remarks, without the embraces of my daughters. I removed the mask and tried the last metres without assistance, and it worked; only my thoughts became even more uniquely strange, as if I could catch them with my hands around my head, as if I were no longer what I am—perhaps that is true, for I am looking at the highest point on the planet, marked by a tiny red flag.
You can read more about this Everest expedition at https://www.adventurepeaks.com/trip-report-everest-2017/
On 2 April, in short sleeves and after unavoidable bureaucratic complications at Venice Airport because my luggage was too heavy, I said goodbye for two months to my wife Melita and our two daughters. It is difficult to leave something you love, care for and live for, but life usually offers no other way; I am always accompanied by the warm, almost homelike thought of meeting again, which, I hope at least, will be as beautiful as the farewell is difficult. Sometimes it seems as though our whole lives are spent returning home, which is the most beautiful thing of all, but to do that we also have to leave.
The flight via Istanbul and Delhi to Kathmandu was calm, my thoughts torn between saying goodbye to my family and anticipating the meeting with people I had never met before and who, among other things, would shape my mood over the following weeks. The cultural shock at the first sight of Kathmandu is indescribable. A melting pot of cultures, faiths, nations, illnesses and street dirt boils with vibration and timelessness at thirty degrees. Through the window of a half-destroyed, underinflated van sent to the airport by Makalu Adventures, I breathed in the thick dust rising everywhere above the city, mixed with the scent of vivid red flowers tied into a garland that a toothless and obviously sleep-deprived driver had placed around my neck at the airport. Eastern hospitality awaited me in a small hotel in old Kathmandu, in the district they call Thamal. An excessive number of attendants who spend all day competing for tips is normal here. The distances between those who are poor by choice and religious conviction, or poor because of the system, and on the other side wealthy owners, politicians, officials, drug dealers... have been unbridgeable for a thousand years and probably will remain so for another thousand; the European or “more advanced” way of thinking is pure utopia. I refused the ubiquitous “welcome drink” because I did not want to poison myself with bacterial exotica on the very first day, something that no longer offends the hosts because they have become used to soft people from another world. I soon met the expedition leader, a 170 cm tall, 65-kilogram “iron man” who at forty-seven diligently grinds his incisors while clenching them during inhuman training sessions he carries out in Dubai, although he is a typical Englishman who simply became tired of bad weather. Martin and Mark soon arrived sweating, and Tony only towards evening: the whole team, all with similar experiences of getting to Nepal and with a single wish: “let’s go to Everest”. The boss assigned Martin as my roommate, a tall American, the youngest member of the team, for whom T-shirts simply never seemed large enough and whose haircut betrayed a military past. The poor man also found the bed too small, which was obviously not the only disturbance, because he diligently filled his vocabulary with the repeated “fuck” and every imaginable syntactic variation on the theme. Mark and Tony were paired together. The former is an experienced adventurer who, by the day of this newly chosen adventure, had already run across Alaska several times, crossed Greenland and also walked across the Sahara; very tidy, excessively thin and, at least at first glance, a very sensible and responsible Briton. The latter owns a funeral home, a somewhat less pumped-up forty-eight-year-old with previous high-altitude experience on Himalayan peaks, very wealthy and pleasant but with poor hygienic habits, because in his view there is no point changing clothes or showering on expeditions like this since, after all, nobody is watching you, which struck me as a perfectly understandable occupational deformation.
After two days of adapting to the new environment, culinary excursions around the capital and shopping in the best-stocked stores I had ever experienced, we set off to acclimatise in the Nepalese part of the Himalayas, to the village of Manang, the starting point for tours in the Annapurna region. To put it mildly, the journey was epic, and no one on the team had expected it. For two full days, more than forty-eight hours, we suffered in Indian-made off-road vehicles with no perceptible suspension or ventilation and countless breakdowns, in order to cover 120 kilometres of gravel road. The roads are interrupted by landslides, fallen trees, dead goats and yaks, and waterfalls tens of metres high, which were the only things that washed our vehicles and soaked piles of equipment on the open roof racks, which were additionally filled by stranded local travellers who simply jumped onto the car while it was moving and made use of the Nepalese version of GoOpti. Chafed backsides and aching spines, vomit-stained seats and lungs full of tetanus-laden road dust were a minor negative detail compared with the experience, unforgettable views of our first eight-thousanders, locals trapped in the Stone Age and primordial food cooked on thousand-year-old hearths. Manang hosted us for ten unforgettable spring days. Each day we climbed a little higher, finally to just under six thousand metres, below Pisang, opposite Annapurna II, above the broad valley that is part of Annapurna National Park and where my new expensive trekking trousers were stolen. We learned the basics of Buddhism, got over our first intestinal infections, listened to unbelievable stories from locals that they have probably been telling for a century—who could blame them, since for eight long winter months they are cut off from the world by the snowbound impassable road and are surely among the loneliest people on the planet. Apart from the short summer mountaineering season, their company consists of domestic animals, which often spend the winter in the same rooms as their owners. Nobody looked forward to the drive back to Kathmandu, during which, incidentally, we also lost the rear right wheel and then waited ten hours for a “new” vehicle.
After two days of rest we left Kathmandu for Lhasa, crossing the Himalayas and seeing Everest for the first time, although from far away, in the sunshine, decorated with a few cumulus clouds and its characteristic wind plume, because in April powerful air currents still race across it and make an ascent impossible. The passengers took off their headphones, conversations stopped, and the aircraft tilted to the right as everyone crowded to the side facing the Goddess Mother of the Earth, “Chomolungma”. The landscape below us quickly changed from green and relatively well populated to barren, covered only by sparse grass, cut by fast rivers and uninhabited. We were, after all, about to land in Tibet, on the roof of the world.
Lhasa, the two-million-strong capital, did not surprise us with altitude sickness, as it does most tourists, because we were already well acclimatised, but with its cleanliness, military order, excellent wide and smooth roads, constant video surveillance and the magnificent night-time appearance of the old city. We had two nights and three days, which was quite enough to visit the Potala, the palace of the exiled Dalai Lama, to try local food, which surprisingly left us without digestive problems but with scorched oral mucosa, to inspect thousands of shops selling original Chinese counterfeits of the world’s most expensive brands, and to enjoy old Lhasa, filled with the mysterious scents of prayer incense and the murmuring sounds of prayers thousands of years old.
A long journey to base camp awaited us, along a well-asphalted road, the world-famous Friendship Highway connecting Lhasa and Kathmandu, first conceived as far back as the age of the Silk Roads, when this part of the world was crucial to trade between the most developed parts of the world: China on one side, and India and the Middle East on the other; when the most expensive horses in the world came from western Tibet and the most expensive camels from the Gobi could walk for thirty days without water and food across the unimaginable obstacles of the Himalayas and Karakoram; when silk was a currency and the world was not yet as corrupted as it is today, when wars and the fates of nations are shaped by imaginary high numbers on banking terminals in America and Switzerland. As I looked at the completely new railway running alongside this road and reaching passes above five thousand metres, into which several tens of billions of US dollars—Chinese dollars, of course—had been invested, I had the feeling that the last fifty years were merely a brief, sad communist period in the several-thousand-year history of China, a history that teaches us that China will rise again and reclaim its former brilliant reputation as the first and most developed.
On the way we spent the night in Shigatse, the second-largest city in Tibet, and later in the much smaller and more neglected Tingri. After four days we reached base camp, although I arrived somewhat behind the group because I had to return from the highest pass, at 5,200 metres, to Tingri, where there is a hospital for altitude sickness. We had been in a traffic accident a little above five thousand metres. The driver fainted from lack of oxygen and drove off the road, fortunately in the right direction. I volunteered to accompany him back for hospital care and therefore reached base camp twelve hours later, but in exchange I got a ride in a military vehicle and the respect of the military personnel, who, out of sheer boredom, happily drove me onward to base camp in an emergency Mercedes illuminated with flashing lights.
The sounds of zippers on tents and sleeping bags, coughing caused by the dry air, the smell of the first coffee and the sun that suddenly warmed the inside of the tent: “This is it.” For everyone on the team, the first morning at base camp soothingly cured the night-time thoughts of homesickness, and then came: “Oh my God, fuck me, Thomas, wake up Thomas…”, the words of my roommate Martin as, with his eyes half closed, he first turned towards the beautifully illuminated face of our objective. The first Puja, or prayer with the Sherpas, surprised us with its calmness and mystery immediately after the first breakfast. They blessed our equipment; without that, the Sherpas refuse to cooperate. Into the cold wind, during the prayer of the Lama who had been brought from Lhasa solely for the event, we threw grains of rice and, only a step away from Nirvana, for a moment transported ourselves to the summit where demons live, demons who listened to our request to let us come close.
Already on the first day we began with easier acclimatisation climbs on neighbouring six-thousand-metre peaks, across dry, rocky pathless terrain, icy in places, accompanied by fearless pheasant-like birds and mountain goats resembling our mouflon. From almost every point we could see Everest, usually clear, sometimes a little cloudy, in morning or evening light, a little more or a little less snow-covered, and we built a relationship with the highest mountain, with the strongest desire that an individual’s exploratory spirit can carry: to reach the summit soon. In expectation and with the team united in its wishes, in private or shared tents, without telephones, internet connections, radio, food from home, people from home, everyday domestic problems, haste or impatience, the days passed, until the day came when we set out for the first time in the direction of Everest, towards the so-called ABC, or Advanced Base Camp, via the intermediate or “yak-shit” camp, where fortunately we slept only once. We walked carrying only our personal equipment; everything else was carried by yaks, small long-haired and incredibly hardy cattle. A caravan of three hundred and fifty animals and several dozen climbers, Sherpas, porters, cooks, guides, companions, film crews... moved for two days across a glacier full of sharp ice pinnacles, hidden crevasses and streams. Magnificent views of neighbouring peaks and glacial lakes were further enlivened by extremely fast-changing weather, which could turn from snowfall into a warm sunny day within ten minutes and back again.
ABC, at a respectable 6,400 metres above sea level, caused the first signs of altitude sickness in many. Breathing like that of an eighty-year-old in intensive care, vomiting, diarrhoea, headaches, despondency, loss of appetite, frostbite, pain... when unbearable, they turn people back down to lower ground. There are no more curious visitors here, those who occasionally flood base camp and photograph mountaineers as if they were the ninth wonder of the world; you cannot get here without good prior acclimatisation and strong will. This is the world we had been waiting for, the world that quietly frightened each of us and gave rise to the most frequent question: am I capable of it or not...
The camp is relatively well equipped, much like base camp. The tents had already been pitched for us; here too everyone had their own, something that may seem unimportant to an observer, but a little privacy and a touch of comfort are very welcome up there. The communal tent was large, as was the kitchen tent. We missed the Nepalese cook from base camp, a retired monk who was always surprising us with new Indian and Nepalese flavours. Every morning the surroundings were freshly white, but by eleven the persistent wind had swept the camp clean again.
After a few days came the ascent to the North Col, or Camp I. It was the experience we had waited for so long: for the first time above seven thousand metres, for the first time in high-altitude clothing, for the first time so close to the dark pyramid that almost touches nine kilometres and that for local people represents a ladder to heaven, or Kaf, a concept shared by many religions on the planet. Beautiful weather accompanied us. I reached the objective extremely quickly, first among my companions. After four and a half hours of climbing across the treacherous glacier, I breathed the thinnest air I had ever breathed and earned the respect of the two senior Sherpas, who from that day looked at me quite differently and gave me the title “super fit doc”. The favour of the Sherpas is of great importance in this environment, as became clear later when the first of them, named Prba, reached the summit for the thirteenth time together with me and gave me psychological support through his presence and experience.
The next three weeks were devoted to so-called rotations. After each ascent, which was a little higher and longer, and during which we slept progressively higher, we descended back to base camp. In total we walked more than one hundred kilometres, whose lowest point was higher than Mont Blanc. By the final ascent we had accumulated a good 20 vertical kilometres and improved our blood counts to an incredible 175 to 180 units of haemoglobin, pushing our bodies to the extreme limits of endurance. Even so, within the close-knit group we had no complications in the form of altitude sickness and were not forced to start taking Diamox or dexamethasone prematurely. Everything suggested that we were an exceptionally strong and homogeneous group.
On 12 May, rather different weather forecasts belonging to two wealthy expedition companies, the Russian Seven Summits and the Swiss Garry Kogel, predicted the first weather window for 16 May. According to our schedule, that was the first day intended for the final ascent towards the summit, with another fourteen days in reserve in case the weather proved too capricious. We were at ABC when Martin came puffing up to my tent: “Tomas, boss is calling us…” The decision had been made: we were going for the summit. It was impossible to hide our excitement. Equipment that had already been checked a thousand times, cylinders, regulators, food, spare batteries, lights, cameras, telephones, thermos flasks, ice axes, crampons... everything rattled through the tents with that familiar melody of action, expectation and tension: we’re going, we’re going, we’re going...
The first day to the North Col. Because of the weight of the equipment I climbed the slowest; besides, I was saving myself for the end, because apparently it would be brutal up there above 8,300 metres, a place I had until then visited only in my thoughts. I reached Camp I at around six in the evening and began the standard procedures for preserving life: melting snow, cooking soup, eating without any particular enthusiasm, passing urine into a measuring bottle, and even doing a number two is a necessity, which sounds simple but is not. During the night on the North Col I took off my boots for the last time to let my feet breathe; there is no point changing underwear anyway.
A wonderfully cold morning drove away the sleepless night; light and sunshine always awaken fresh hope and the will to sip the thin oxygen that at night fades away for many. That is how our friend Frank, an Australian who, despite the magnificence of his country and the grandeur of the coral reef, sought adventure here on this cold mountain as a guide, fell asleep forever. Let him remain here, we decided; we would carry his karma towards the summit as well. At nine in the morning we began climbing towards Camp II, the objective of the second day at an altitude of 7,900 metres. I decided not to start using supplementary oxygen yet, although I nevertheless carried one cylinder higher even though two more were waiting for me there, the ones delivered by the Sherpas ten days earlier. I took almost ten hours for a little more than eight hundred vertical metres and, frankly, with all that weight on my back it was not easy. The fixed ropes made the work considerably easier, and they also kept me safe from powerful gusts of wind that at times tried to peel me off the icy surface.
Camp II means twice the trouble of Camp I, at least that was what flashed through my mind as I squeezed into a tent barely clinging to uneven and completely unsuitable ground. The evening views towards Cho Oyu, our 8,300-metre-high neighbour, and the ever-closer summit were divine and warmed the soul, which came in useful because melting water was considerably harder here than lower down. A night that was far too long awaited us: the trembling of the tent, pain throughout a body that cannot rest on sharp rocks, difficult conversations in which every word is interrupted by a heavy sigh. I began taking a preventive dose of dexamethasone: now or never; tomorrow evening we go for the summit.
The morning of 15 May was slightly cloudy; only the eight-thousanders pierced through the creamy blanket, while above us there was a clarity almost black in colour, and one could almost say I saw stars in daylight. The death zone awaited us, the world above eight thousand metres; I prepared my oxygen regulator and cylinder. I knew that I had to complete the task as quickly as possible, without hesitation and with a plan prepared in advance, including a backup plan if everything did not go well, because nobody is capable of rational decision-making at this altitude. The slope towards Camp III is inclined at about fifty degrees, mostly rocky and icy in places. On the north side there is progressively less snow with altitude, because nothing can withstand the hurricane-force winds. The four hundred vertical metres to Camp III took a great deal of strength from me, mainly because the wind almost completely died away and it became quite hot inside the down suit. I allowed myself two litres of oxygen per minute, at which rate the cylinder lasts for eight hours of walking. My thoughts became increasingly dull, emotional outbursts that would have been normal with the views offered down in the valley became ever rarer; the brain slowly begins to die.
At two in the afternoon, together with the boss, I reached Camp III at 8,300 metres; the others were far behind. The little man of steel showed his true strength, and it became clear to me what experience, choosing the right moment and prudence mean. The boss is the boss, for a reason. He ordered us to rest until nine in the evening and then make the night ascent to the summit. Two hours after us Martin and Mark arrived as well. The first was visibly exhausted, not military at all, gasping for air with a rabbit-like breathing rate, and in the pauses between breaths he tried, one word at a time, to explain that he needed an additional oxygen cylinder. Mark, as calm as usual, collapsed in front of the tent with a British, slightly flushed “hello” and, with a frozen smile, let us know that everything would be all right.
Prba slowly approached the tent, no longer bouncing along in his usual Sherpa-like way and no longer so dominantly unshort of breath, and told me the shocking news that the “boss” had received a sad order from the English office: the weather window would not last until the middle of the next day and, because hurricane-force winds were forecast, we had to return to the valley. What might have passed for a not-bad joke was ruined by the very serious, almost tearful look of a man who had probably never cried in his life. We were beside ourselves and held what was already an all-too-rare breath of heavenly air. Even today I do not know how I dared to contradict the boss and simply croaked that I was going to the summit and the others could do as they wished. As usual when I have a major problem, this time too I turned to my wife Melita, who throughout the ascent had been sitting at the computer at home, carefully tracking our movements made visible by modern technology, as well as the weather, that capricious variable that always shapes the fate of people on this mountain. She understood our predicament immediately and, despite the time difference, called an American specialist in Everest weather forecasting who, by the grace of God and of course in exchange for a substantial fee, produced a forecast predicting the arrival of the winds about eight hours later than the English forecast. I reported the news and my consequent firm decision that, regardless of legal or any other consequences, I would set out for the summit, to the boss, whom I quietly knew respected my will and also trusted me. I switched off the radio and cut the umbilical cord: “now I am alone”. My slow thoughts gradually arranged themselves; the robotic behaviour that each of us had rehearsed in our minds for seven weeks acquired its true meaning. The protocol began: packing, melting snow, checking oxygen regulators, weighing cylinders, hydrating, urinating, positioning the solar panels and giving the camera and phone batteries their final charge, swallowing tablets and finally checking once more the photograph of my family that had been crumpled for weeks in the safest pocket of my high-altitude suit; I would leave it on the summit. I recorded one final video and with it said goodbye to my family. Only a light breeze from the west, carrying the scent of home, gently shook our final shelter. I could feel the setting sun on the narrow strips of my face not covered by goggles or the oxygen mask. Martin and Mark also decided to join me despite the boss’s objections. At nine in the evening my companions, who had sensed my obsession and determination, my trust in Melita’s weather information and the karma that connected us, knew that I was ready. We did not speak much, until the extremely taciturn Mark made his decision: “Let’s see where demons live…” Soon, already in complete darkness, we reached the First Step, a ten-metre, fairly vertical wall with a fixed rope running across it. I opened the oxygen regulator fully. Working with the arms and straining the whole body consumes considerably more oxygen than merely walking uphill. My companions remained somewhat behind. I followed a narrow ridge which, in the strong moonlight, looked like a narrow path; everything else was black darkness. I switched off my headlamp; perhaps it could work without it. For a few moments my eyes adjusted away from the dazzling narrow beam that had shown me the position of the fixed ropes. Above me opened a sandbox of the brightest stars, the galaxy clearly visible, as if I were genuinely walking towards the sky. I held my breath and learned what silence is. I no longer remember every step and every view; hypoxia probably erases some data, but the Second Step, or the so-called Chinese ladder, cannot be forgotten. Across three consecutive rocky, ice-covered and fairly steep sections runs a tangle of stiffened ropes from almost every expedition so far, which the wind—the only thing that performs a cleaning service on the mountain—apparently cannot tear loose and blow across the vastness of the Himalayas. Crampons and backpack catching on things, along with painful numb fingers, drive many people to a nervous breakdown at an altitude of 8,650 metres and make them turn back. Almost a hundred years ago, one of the greatest also broke here, the man commemorated by a plaque at the entrance to base camp, Mr Mallory, about whom it is still not known with certainty whether he was the first to touch the feet of the gods. His body, polished by the winds, together with the remains of equipment incomparably simpler than what we have today, lies a few dozen metres lower. Apparently, on the way back he wanted to avoid the difficulty of the Second Step, but it did not work out. He is kept company by those who have tried to imitate him ever since, following his footsteps along Everest’s North Ridge, which is somewhat less popular, technically more difficult and, above all, exposes the climber to altitude above 8,000 metres for longer than the Nepalese side, and which we rightly call the Death Zone. Reflective strips on the clothing of the dead on the ridge or just below it throw back the frightened light of headlamps several times and remind the climber that nothing is eternal, except the desire to reach the summit. More than three hundred petrified, frozen climbers whisper stories familiar to us up here, at the highest point on the planet, stories of an unstoppable and overpowering desire that clouds the mind. After a few hours I emptied my first cylinder, probably left it under a rock on the ridge forever, and opened a fresh one at four litres per minute. The Third Step is easier than the first two, but it does not leave you without memories. I was approaching the goal, a little after four in the morning China time; it was still dark, and I was stronger than I had dared hope on the evening before the highest morning of my life. I looked back and in the distance on the ridge saw the headlamps of Mark and the boss, who had joined us after all and risked losing his contract with the parent company because he had ignored the order from the office. Far in the distance, much lower, there was also the light of a panting Martin, by my exhausted sense of distance a century away. Strangely, I was almost without emotion; the brain up here is incapable of processing such demanding functions, only facts: that I had made it, after seven long weeks of solitude, sleepless nights, food soaked in curry, tearful memories of home and warm feet, without the comfort of a shower and a toilet you can sit on, without a soft mattress, the warmth of my wife’s body, without her funny remarks, without the embraces of my daughters. I removed the mask and tried the last metres without assistance, and it worked; only my thoughts became even more uniquely strange, as if I could catch them with my hands around my head, as if I were no longer what I am—perhaps that is true, for I am looking at the highest point on the planet, marked by a tiny red flag.
You can read more about this Everest expedition at https://www.adventurepeaks.com/trip-report-everest-2017/
