Yesterday we went through the ice fall.  Last night I had a terrible night.  That is about the norm for the first night at C1.  The day is a long hard one and there is quite a jump in altitude so most normal people are feeling it.  Camp 1 is windy, cold and isolated.  As the season progresses and people are more acclimatized many will skip C1 and go straight to C2.  The route from C1 to C2 is relatively easy especially for someone acclimatized.  Most of the night I was experiencing a phenomenon called Cheyne-Stokes breathing.  When you are awake you subconsciously breathe deeper because of the low air pressure.  However when people fall asleep this compensation doesn’t always occur.  You begin a cycle breathing deeply and it gradually becomes more shallow until you wake up gasping.  This can go on all night and you never know if you slept five minutes or five hours before you wake up gasping.  It is very disconcerting.  The worry is that you have something more serious like high altitude pulmonary edema.  It is amazing the things you can worry about in a by yourself in a cold windy tent at almost 20,000 feet.

I think it took us between 5 and 6 hours to get through the ice fall.  The ice fall is an amazing place.  It would be like a giant ice play ground if it were not for the fact that you could get crushed most any time.  That does tend to take away from the fun of it.  It also tends to make you hurry especially through one or two places.  Within the ice fall there are giant seracs.  I think that is French for “good grief”.  I find it interesting that serac, avalanche, crevasse, glacier, etc. are all French words for stuff that can kill you.  A serac is basically a building size ice cube.  When I say building size they can range from a “ranch style” to 20 story building.  They are sitting on a glacier that is moving 3 feet a day so they are not particularly stable.  Many are leaning.  At some point they just fall over and it is pretty spectacular if you are in base camp and out of the way.

This year we have a few ranch houses leaning near the route but thankfully no skyscrapers.  In 2006 we had a giant slab of ice about a 100 yards long actually leaning over the route.  Everyone would take a few deep breaths and run (which at that altitude means going at nursing home speed) to the other side.  Eventually the inevitable happen and three climbers who were all Sherpa carrying loads to higher camps were caught under it.  One, Phinjo Sherpa, was a member of our team.  He was a wonderful man.  He was always quick with a smile and a laugh.  We had been dumped on with snow for the previous few days and I was shocked to learn these guys had even gone up with the slopes loaded like they were.

It was just another example, in my opinion, of people becoming complacent.  The route this year is very straight forward and although there has been some griping that it comes to close to the West Rib where there is some avalanche hazard I think it is much safer than 2006.  There are occasional accidents in the ice fall but prior to 2006 it had been a number of years since there had been an accident directly attributable to the route itself.  Unfortunately 10 years from now people will probably again become complacent.  That has nothing to do with climbing and every thing to do with human nature.

I will spend another day in C1 for additional acclimatization.  Everyone else is moving to C2 because it is a better sheltered and more accommodating camp.  As I tell people “no hurry chicken curry”.  This is not a race.  If you summit no one will ask how many nights you spent in C1.  It is a pretty miserable place though.