C2 to C3, 23,600 feet Summit Push May 20 Sunny and Mild

This morning I begin my push for the summit.  I will move to C3 today and C4 tomorrow.  If the weather is cooperating and I feel good when I get to C4 I’ll leave for the summit that night.

From C2 there is about a 45 to 60 minute gradual hike to the base of the Lhotse face.  It is going to be a hot day on the face and we are slow getting out of C2.  For me this (I have no idea what summit day will be like at this point but ultimately for me at least it wasn’t as hard as this day) will be one of the hardest sections on the mountain.  It is in places a nearly vertical stretch of hard ice that ascends almost 2,000 feet from C2.  There are two ropes that have been fixed to the face.  One is a red rope that is a dynamic rope and the other is a white static rope.  A dynamic rope is a rope that has some spring or give to it.  It is designed to take some of the energy out of a fall by stretching.  A static rope has no give and is much more likely to cause injury if some one falls that is clipped in to it.  The purpose of two ropes was to facilitate up and down traffic.  Everyone was supposed to ascend the static (white) rope which was bigger and better for a group to be using ascenders to pull themselves up on.  Unfortunately (supposedly because some of the anchors were loose on the white rope) everyone was using the red rope to ascend and descend.  This rope was very thin.  I heard someone say 8mm which will not mean much to non-climbers but just made all the climbers think twice about going to Everest.

There are places where the rope goes a couple hundred feet between anchors although it is continuously tied off to the next section. The anchors were mostly ice screws – one per anchor.  In the one place I noticed two ice screws one was just hanging.  No they do not work very well that way.  Now the climbers among my readers really are getting the cold shivers.  Shall I give them nightmares?  The rope was tied off to the single ice screw itself – not a sling or a carabineer to protect the sharp edge of the ice screw attachment.  Finally, at one point I estimated there were almost two dozen people bouncing up and down on the rope.  There wasn’t any point worrying about that.  Unless you want to free climb it was the only way up.  I don’t need to go very far out on a limb here to predict that one day there is going to be an accident with multiple fatalities on the Lhotse face.  If they continue those practices it is inevitable that rope is going to part with 15 or 20 people on it and they are all going down.  One final note on that.  After coming down from the summit I rappelled part of the way down the Lhotse face, one of many other tired climbers taking the conservative approach down.  When I got to the bottom I noticed my rappel device was full of red fuzz – scary.

As I was putting my crampons on at the bottom of the face I heard climbers above yelling warnings at each other.  I looked over in time to watch as an oxygen bottle came rocketing down the face.  I was amazed that rather than flipping and spinning it was shooting straight down like a big orange torpedo.  Fortunately it didn’t look like it came near anybody but it was R rated in three or four languages there for a few minutes.  Fortunately for the droppee, they were out of sight so nobody got their tag number.  In fact the Lhotse Face is so long and steep that your first warning that something is coming down often comes by radio.

An hour or so later I was well up the face when I saw some golf ball pieces of ice coming down.  I ducked down and one of them hit me square in the top of the head.  As I hung there thinking it had smarted more than it should have I realized in all the excitement from “big orange” I had forgot to put on my helmet.  Sums up my life to carry something 12,000 miles and 23,000 feet up and then forget to use it. To top it all off I had jumped out front and was leading the pack instead of letting someone else be water bottle blocker.  My wife will tell you that when driving on two lane roads, especially in bad weather, I always try to find a car going the same speed and just stay behind them.  I would rather be a spectator at a head on collision than a participant.  Whether I’m climbing the Lhotse face or going to Panama City beach it doesn’t bother me a bit if someone else wants to be in front!

We pulled in C3 after about 6 hours.  Camp 3 is a ten foot wide platform chiseled out of the side of the face.  There are fixed lines between the tents and if you go out beyond the tents you need to clip in.  I opened the back vestibule of the tent and we were no more than a foot from the edge – a multi thousand foot drop.  The little yellow points below were the tops of our tents in C2.  After some soup and dinner we were treated to a spectacular sunset.  The clouds had rolled up the Western Cwm blanketing the lower reaches of the mountain.  During the day we had climbed above many of the neighboring peaks that were now just islands surrounded by clouds. Eventually the sun gave way to the cold light from the first stars over Lhotse and tomorrows goal – the South Col.