Kyrgyzstan Climbing - So Close to the Summit!

After spending a night cold enough to freeze our water bottles solid, even inside out tents, we got up around 4AM to pack up, eat a quick breakfast, and start our first summit attempt.  Of course, it's dark at that time, so we all had our headlamps on.  The reasons for starting so early include the fact that the glacier is less likely to swallow you when the temperature is lowest, and that bad weather usually arrives in the afternoon.  So, the idea is to get up and back down before bad weather arrives.  This means the team is obliged to maintain a fast pace, with few stops.

As far as the guide's pre-trip research indicated, no one had climbed this mountain before, which meant there was no established route.  The guides conferred on a route by looking at satellite photos, and then looking at the mountain itself once we arrived at advanced base camp.  This photo shows advanced base camp (see tents at lower right) and our route from there to the glacier.  We would have to go around the vertical edge of that big white glacier, by climbing up beside a steep and icy waterfall, to reach the peak.  Once at the glacier, we took a sharp right passing off the right side of the photo, out of view from below.

The first several hundred vertical feet of climbing were on that terrible scree terrain; loose rocks of all sizes.  At one point, Syco grabbed onto a three-foot tall rock to pull himself up, but the rock rolled loose.  He fell, landing flat on his back, which scared the crap out of us.  Luckily, his backpack broke his fall, and the huge rock fell beside him, instead of on him. We were all relieved to see him back on his feet in no time, as if nothing happened.

This mishap reminded us of the story Dave had told the night before about a recent trip he led in Mongolia, where a woman on the climb suffered a compound fracture in her leg while high up the mountain, in a region where no helicopter rescue was available.  They had to splint her leg, give her antibiotics and pain killers, and physically carry her down the mountain.  Dave and Misha had told us there was little chance of a helicopter rescue here either, so the idea that something like that could happen on our trip was in all our minds. 

After an hour or so of hiking, a little bit of dawn light started to filter into the sky.

Here we are approaching one of the more difficult passages of the climb, just at the icy waterfall.  Misha is preparing the rope so we can do a bit of rock climbing alongside the waterfall to get over this vertical rocky section.  Misha is out front, holding a rope, scouting the way up.

This was pretty daunting.  Being roped together meant no one could take a step up until the person behind was ready.  The worst point was where there was no good grip for our feet or our hands. All we could do was scoot up using the friction of body on rock, praying we wouldn't slide backward down the rock face.  Falling, even when roped in, is no fun: think broken nose, broken teeth, etc.

An hour later, we'd put on crampons and hiked a good ways up the glacier. There's an art to hiking on a glacier while roped together.  First of all, never step on the rope. Second, match your pace to the person in front of you, so there is little slack. The less slack there is, the shorter their fall into a hidden crevasse would be.  Third, don't jerk the rope too taught behind you.  Fourth, each footfall must be as close as possible to the same as the person in front of you, since stepping anywhere else may break through the surface to a hidden crevasse.

Here we are arriving at a brief resting point on the ridge.  Those are Misha's hands, reeling in the rope as each person arrives on this rocky outcrop where we stopped to decide where to go next.  That's my brother John, head down, trudging up the incline.

This spot afforded a spectacular view into the next valley.

A panoramic view of the same valley.  This is a truly remote place, where very few humans, if any, ever go.  Yes, there are still a few places like that left on our planet.  It makes me sick to think most of you are looking at this on a mobile phone screen.  If so, at least do me a favor and turn your phone sideways!

At this point, I was pretty exhausted, with the climbing, and the pace of the climbing, but the group was all in favor of continuing to the peak.  After a brief break, where we all tried to have some water and a snack, we returned to the wide open glacier, heading toward the peak.  The hiking became steeper and steeper as we approached the peak, with nothing but wide open white glacier in all directions.  I was just behind Misha, who was leading.  As we moved up,  he slowed down, searching with his ice axe for anything solid to use as an anchor.  Finally, he stopped and looked around.  He turned back to talk to Dave, saying it wasn't safe to continue without any anchor points, as there was a danger the seven of us could set off an avalanche.  Dave agreed with Misha, and we were all content to defer to their expert judgment.  At the end of the trip, we learned that one of Misha's best friends, an elite mountain climbing guide had died in an avalanche about a month before, in bad weather on Lenin Peak.

Knowing we'd reached our high point for the day, we all paused and looked around.  Here's what the peak looked like from where I was.  We estimated we were between one and two hundred feet from the top.  So close!

The tracks we made are visible as a line across the glacier leading up to the point where we've stopped.

This view shows the entire valley, all the way back to our base camp; all the way back to where we saw our shepherd on horseback in my second article on this trip.  In the middle of the river bed, way down there, you can even see the giant boulder we hiked past in another photo from my first article on this trip.  The boulder looks like a big black speck in the river bed about one sixth of the way up from the edge of the glacier.

In this photo (taken by Syco), you can see how photography is a bit of a challenge in this situation.  My pack is resting against my leg. The camera had to be packed away any time we were on the move.  I could only take photos when the whole group was stopping for a time.  It took time to take off the pack, get out the camera, take a few photos, then pack it away again.

After this, we turned back and headed down the mountain.  It was then that Dave, at the lead of his rope, was checking for crevasses with his ice axe, and dropped into one suddenly.  Fortunately, everyone was doing just as they should, the rope was taught between team members, and Alan and Rhys immediately fell back and dug in with their crampons and ice axes, securing Dave at the edge of the crevasse.  He'd only sank in up to his chest, catching his crampons on the far side of the crevasse.  He was able to leverage himself back out of it.  You can imagine how frustrating it was that my camera was packed away at this point!

A short while later, we arrived back at the icy waterfall we'd climbed on the way up.  Misha spent a few minutes deciding the best way to descend.  Here's Rhys rappelling down the icy waterfall we'd passed on the way up.

The view of the valley from up here, at this time of day, was beautiful.

This article is the third in a series about a truly adventurous mountain climbing trip my brother and I took to a remote part of southeastern Kyrgyzstan, near the Chinese border.

Click here to see the first article, which as all about getting to base camp. 

Click here to see the second article, about setting up advanced base camp, and training on the glacier.

Kyrgyzstan First Ascent - Training Day

After setting up base camp the previous afternoon, we packed up and headed out early in the morning to look for a good site for the first advanced base camp, and to do some alpine mountain climbing training.  We walked along the riverbed in some places.

[Note: I love making the photos huge, but I know this causes issues on some people's laptops.  To make them fit on your screen, you can press Control-Minus once or more times to shrink it.  Also, you can click on any image and it will pop up in a viewer sized for your screen.]

It took a few hours of hiking to get up to a good site for advanced base camp.   Millions of years of glacial motion has ground solid mountain rock into gigantic moraines of gravel, hundreds of feet high.  Moraines are no fun to hike on, because rocks are rolling and sliding under your feet with every step.  This photo was taken from the area where two glacial valleys join together. 

The aquamarine color of the pond is typical of glacial runoff water all over the world.  Water running off of a glacier contains stone dust created by all these rocks rubbing together.  The dust is so fine that much of it stays suspended in the water, rather than sinking to the bottom.  I've seen glacial water this same color in Canada, Norway, Argentina, and other places too.  

Here we are just after setting up our tents at advanced base camp.  This is where we'd launch the first summit attempts from.  For those of you who aren't sure, I'm the one on the left.  That's my brother John on the right, the one responsible for getting me into this crazy adventure.

After we set up our tents, we hiked up onto the glacier and did some training with crampons, ropes and ice axes.  Here's the team, all roped-up and ready to go.  That's Misha, our local guide on the left.  Then Dave, our guide from Secret Compass, John, Rhys from Sydney, Syco (pronounced seeko) from the Netherlands, and Alan from the UK.  We just found out Misha is going to be a member of a team attempting a rare ascent of K2 in winter.  So, yeah, Misha is a world-class mountaineer.  I'm actually worried for him on that trip.  That's extremely dangerous, even for elite climbers.  Here's a link to the climb.  Misha is a nickname for Mikhail.  His full name is Mikhail Danichkin.  

Misha set up a route to practice using our ice axes and crampons.  When I saw what he was doing, I was asking myself if it was OK to opt out of the exercise.  Of course it wasn't.  After climbing down one side of this glacier runoff stream, we had to jump down from one side to the thin ledge of ice on the other side.   Here's John mid-jump.  That's Misha watching over him.  

Once on the other side, we had to climb up and across the nearly vertical ice wall.  Here's John using nothing but his toe spikes to climb the wall.    

In this close-up, you can see the bottom spikes of his crampons are touching nothing.  

This is hard on the calf muscles, not to mention scary!  You have the sensation that the grip these two small spikes jutting out in front of your toes might break the ice any second.  Each time you take a step, you must always have two other points of support: ice axe in one hand, and the toes of your other crampon.  The most precarious points along a traversal are at the ice screws that secure the safety line to the ice wall.  At that point, you have to unhook one of your two carabiners from around the rope, then re-attach it to the rope on the other side of the ice screw.  Then you have to do the same with your second carabiner, so there is no time when you're not secured by at least one carabiner during the crossover. The whole time you're moving the carabiners across, you're supported by nothing but toe spikes dug into the ice.  

It was a great relief when we got to the top.  The relief was short-lived though, because Misha made us do it all over again for more practice.  Happily, having learned a lot from the first time across, the second time was considerably less nerve-wracking.  After this, we did training on crevasse rescue.  That was truly fascinating, as we learned how to use knots and carabiners to create leverage that allows a smaller person to pull a larger person up out of the crevasse.  

During this time on the glacier, the clouds came and went. Sometimes, it was all gray looking up the valley from where we were standing.  I couldn't get enough of staring at this peak, even if I was supposed to be concentrating on the training.  

There were glacial runoff streams all around us, like the we were training on in the photos above.  While we were in the middle of crevasse rescue training, I took a few minutes to run over and catch this one, taking advantage of a brief period of full sunlight. 

Other times, the sun broke through and brought the mountain tops into sharp relief.  You can actually see the advanced base camp here if you're looking at this on a computer screen, through probably not on a mobile phone.  You can see the green, blue, and red tents on the flat area just this side of the lake. 

Here's Misha over there taking photos later in the evening.  See him?  He's on the ridge, just under the cloud a bit to the left of center.

See the next article for photos from our first climb. 

Click this link to see the first article in this series about getting to base camp.