Summit
Day
High Camp (19,025 feet)
16th October
At long last it was 4 am, our designated
waking time for the very early assault on Mera's central summit.
In contrast with yesterday, I was in a very negative state
of mind. I mumbled to Nicky that I wanted to give up my place to Ringji because
he was desperate to summit, but just didn't have the proper equipment. I could
give him my plastic boots ... But I was saying all these things from the depths
of my sleeping bag, having made no attempt to stir from it.
When I did get up, my Thermarest refused to roll up properly
because there was too much air in it. Irony of ironies! Now I realised that
the valve had simply been frozen last night, nothing else.
Andy then announced that he had been outside and that
the weather was not conducive to an attempt at this time. We would postpone
everything for two hours. It took an age for those two hours to elapse.
At length he made another announcement. The weather had
significantly worsened. Only the fittest and fastest would make an attempt,
being Nicky, Lee and Scott. Andy would accompany them. Ringji would lead Paul,
Chris and I back down to Khare. The summit party would briefly stop at High
Camp on the way down for tea and soup then go back down to Khare, to where the
kitchen party would follow shortly afterwards.
The first thing that we (the descending party) found was
that Ringji could not see. He had kept his sunglasses in his pocket all yesterday
when passing through the snowfields because the weather had been dull, and was
now temporarily snow-blind. We would have to lead him down, instead of the reverse.
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Chris and Paul preparing to descend from High Camp.
(Despite appearances, the descent begins by going left, over the little
ridge)
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Lots of snow had fallen since yesterday, burying
the marker sticks, so how were we going to find the zigzag track back
down?
This was Paul's finest hour. Underfoot, on
the path felt a bit firmer underfoot than off the path,
so as long as we started going in the right direction, we had a fair chance.
Paul's intuition was excellent.
Of course we had difficulty finding where some of
the zigs ended and the zags began, but we had a remarkably trouble-free
descent, which I enjoyed until we got to the glacier.
I found coming down its steep snowslope quite gruelling
and I again felt quite clumsy (in the plastic boots).
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When we got below the snowline on the last third of the
journey, I felt myself running out of energy again after such a rough night.
Chris acted as my minder for the last section.
It felt as if the descent had taken forever, but in fact
it was only twenty minutes past ten when we arrived back in camp and everybody
shook hands with us as if we had been returning polar explorers.
Halfway down, near the Mera La I stopped for a pee. There
was no cover, with open snowslopes for miles.The polite thing to do was to stand
a little off the trail ... but wait, damn, I had put on my trousers back to
front this morning. An easy mistake at altitude, but one with consequences.
One of the others turned around to see me with bare bum and trousers around
my knees and pointed this out to the others, who roared with laughter.
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Waiting for the summit team to return
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I was glad that I had a tent to go to at Khare.
Of course I had no sleeping bag or Thermarest (these were in the kitbag).
I then found a use for the 'Survival Bag' that I had been carrying around
in my rucksack.
Allied with both Colin's and my down jackets, this
rather grandly named giant-sized plastic bag became a makeshift sleeping
bag.
There wasn't long to wait however until the summit
party also arrived; they had battled on for an hour or hour and a half,
almost certainly getting above 20,000 feet, when whiteout conditions forced
them to turn around.
We found out later that none of the seven expeditions
that attempted to summit today had succeeded.
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Well, if we can't summit Mera, then we will at least scale
the enormous apple pies which none of us had been able to finish in Rum Doodle!
We relaxed for the rest of the day and awarded ourselves a lie in tomorrow (bed
tea at 6 30 not 6 am!), when we would descend to Tagnak.
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