At 1.00am there is porridge for breakfast, then it is time to get ready. The tent village comes alive.
We rope up into teams: Jangbo leads Deborah and me; our second leader for the day leads John and Peter; Passang leads Nicki.
We set off with many other groups. We see (or rather hear) the Norwegian group and wish each other luck.
Its hard to capture the ascent with a photo. Me move up in a little pool of light from our head torches. Ahead are more lights from other groups which don’t move because we are all moving at the same speed.
We shuffle up as much as walk. One foot goes in front of the other, breath in and out for each step. It is painfully slow.
All thoughts of nasal breathing are long gone theory now. I’m breathing hard through my mouth. It is hard for the body to get enough oxygen. It feels like the legs are getting priority and heart, head, everything else is just suffering.
There are three hours of this when, joy, the sun starts coming up and there is something to see.
A quick snap of our group at the same time.
I wish I could have taken more photos but it was too cold. Every instance of taking hands out of mittens for water, snacks, whatever is a risk they won’t warm up again.
The next hour or more is the summit assault. Gradually the distinctive cone of Mera Central looms above. The final approach is a dramatic knife edge snow street. There is a safety line to clip onto.
Mind over matter gets us to the top. John says this is the hardest thing he had ever done, and he has run marathons.
The views are stunning. This looking back towards the valley we walked days ago.
This is looking towards the 8000m peaks of the Nepal Tibetan border.
This is the route of our approach .
John and Peter look happy to be here.
Bit of a crowd gathers as Jangbo describes what we can see.
All our five summit attempters are successful. Deborah, Nicki, John, Peter and I all made it.
Well, they say that descending is when accidents happen. I took a tumble off the summit descent. I tripped over the safety line would you believe. We were roped up so Deborah and Jangbo followed me down. We were all clipped into the safety line so didn’t go far. Deborah lost a water bottle and I lost a pole – off it went into the abyss. Bit of added excitement!
The descent was long and hard. With all energy used to get to the summit there wasn’t much left for going down. With only a two hour stop at high camp, we walked all the way back to Khare.
That’s the summit up there, taken from base camp, a nice retrospective.