Mount Everest
Basecamp Elevation: 5323m (17,464 ft)
After the long trek to basecamp, one of the first rituals of any Mt. Everest climb is the Puja ceremony. Our Puja ceremony was officiated by a Buddhist priest called a Lama in front of an altar built of stone. We made offerings of food and drink, asking the Gods for good fortune and to pass safely through the upper mountain.
From a hole in the alter juniper branches burned continuously as we stacked our climbing gear against the alter to be blessed. Prayer flags flapping their prayers into the wind are strewn out from the alter 100 feet in every direction.
During the ceremony, the Sherpas chant along with the Lama and monks, and everyone throws rice. The ceremony closes with the participants sharing food, and finally with the climbers and Sherpas smearing gray sampa flour on each others faces — a symbol of their hope that they may live to see each other when they are old and gray.
Icefall Elevation: 5933m (19,465 ft)
The icefall is essentially a slow moving river of ice, falling, sometimes violently down the Khumbu Valley. The glacier proper inches down the broad valley of the Western Cwm and, reaching a steep flank, pushes out over the abyss until it collapses under its own weight. Unseen by the human eye flows a second layer of ice, made soft and pliable by the massive pressure from above.
The soft bottom layer flows downward like liquid plastic, while the heavy brittle surface layer tumbles, collapses, splits, and splinters, like old decaying skin. Ice reacts to shifts in temperature, so in the predawn morning when the temperatures were coldest and in late afternoon in the hottest time of day, the icefall came alive, popping and groaning, and exploding with avalanches.
At any moment falling ice could crush a climber, but during these two times of day, it was a good idea to be nowhere near the ice-fall. The trick was to time your movement through the icefall so that you approached the bottom by first light and arrived into Camp One by early afternoon.
Lhotse Face Elevation: 7071m (23,200 ft)
After battling the searing heat of reflected radiation in the Western Cwm. , we reached the second crux of the climb, the Lhotse Face. For 2000 feet the Lhotse Face rose steeply about two thousand feet, consisting of an ice slope of forty-five to seventy degrees.
In the early season, wind scoured the face free of snow, transforming it into hard blue ice. Loose rocks a thousand feet up the face, dislodged by the wind, would rocket down the slick ice and land with a whoomph in the snow below. For eight hours we inched our way up the perilous steeps, as rocks whistled by our heads, like small fierce missiles flattening us against the face.
South Col Elevation: 8144m (26,719 ft)
Camp 4, at 26,000 feet sits on the massive saddle between Everest and Lhotse, the fourth highest mountain in the world. Scoured bare by relentless wind this is the final outpost before the final push to the summit.
Beyond the point, climbers enter the death zone, the altitude at which your body stops trying to acclimatize and you are slowly dying until you can descend. The South Col is a literally a junkyard of debris from fifty years of expeditions, oxygen bottles, candy bar wrappers, even human remains are preserved by the frigid cold and wind.
South Summit Elevation: 8714m (28,590ft)
At 28,500 feet the South Summit marks the homestretch. However, the true summit is still at least two hours away, across the three hundred-foot-long knife-edge ridge, up the fifty-foot vertical Hillary Step, finally traversing up a long slightly broader ridge to the summit.
Summit Elevation: 8848m (29,035 ft)
Climbing the Hillary Step, I felt I was in my element, feeling the rock under my gloves. I stuck the crampon points of my right foot tenuously into a tiny crack and the left points into a cornice of snow, slid my ascender as high as it would go on the rope, and stood up and quickly reached for the next knob of rock.
For forty minutes I fought, not letting my mind reach the place where I was tired and almost there. And then with one step, a step that I had taken thousands of time before, the earth flattened out and I could hear the sound of space in all directions.
