Yet another sleepless night; today because of the excitement and nervousness for the summit attempt that I had been training for since last 6 months. I got out of my tent at 8am and had some tea. We were going to have a small Pooja ceremony to bless our climbing equipment’s, ourselves and to get permission from the mountain God’s for a successful climb and more importantly, a safe return.
We had prepared a delicious offering for the Pooja ceremony and decorated it with some chocolates and dry fruits. We kept all our equipment’s under the prayer flags and chanted a few mantras and prayed for a safe climb and enjoyed the delicious offering we had made.
The plan for the day was to get as much as sleep during the day time and leave for the summit push at 10pm. The reason why we climb at night in the Himalayas is because the weather is usually clear and calmer during the night and more importantly, the snow is hard so it’s easier to get grip with crampons and requires less effort to walk on hard snow than on loose. Everyone was in their tents the whole day, trying to get as much sleep as possible. I slept like a baby after the Pooja which was very much needed after a sleepless night. We only got out for lunch and a very early dinner. I had some good sleep after the dinner for a few hours.
My alarm rung; it was 9:30pm. Time to get ready for the push! Now getting ready is a big task. It gets very cold up on the mountain so layering up is important. We wear around 5 layers of clothes; staring with thermal, dry fit, fleece, down jacket etc. It took me 20 minutes to get completely geared up. We took some packed food and were ready to go. I closed my eyes, prayed to the mountain God’s and started with the trek. No one spoke a word during the climb. Our eyes were only on our next step that we could see in the head torch’s light. We made our way through the frustrating moraines to the crampon point where we had dumped the entire load on the previous day.
We put on our climbing boots, crampons and harness here. It was such a difficult task at that altitude in the night. It took us 30 minutes to get geared up here. One big mistake we did here was to wear crampons. The actual snow point was quite far but it looked very close. It took us 1 hour to reach the snow point and walking with the spikes in your shoes on loose rock is a very tiring and a frustrating task. There were some moments when I was frustrated at the point of giving up but then we reached the snow line and the pain eased. When we hit the snow line we roped up in a group of 4 people in one rope and 3 in the other. As we started moving up from here, one of our team mate’s crampons broke off into two pieces. Despite all our efforts, we could not fix the crampon. It was over for him. There was no way he could climb up with only one crampon. He headed down and it was really disheartening to see your friend loose his chance for the summit. Maybe it wasn’t his time. We started heading up. The ice was really hard and stable and that made it really easy for us to climb. We had found a comfortable pace in our rope and kept climbing, step after step, minute after minute and hour after hour.
At around 5:30 we found a rock high up on the mountain and took a break. The sun rays were coming out down from the horizon and it was beautiful. We were craving for some sunlight.
I had an energy bar and was ready to head up. We could see a ridge high up in our path. That became the next goal. Throughout the night I had been giving myself small goals. That’s how I got through the night. These are all mind tricks and they work wonders up there. Everyone in my rope, including myself were very tired now and the speed had dropped considerably. I started giving a goal of walking 20 steps at a time and then taking a break. When we reached 20 steps I used to pull the rope and make them walk 30 steps.
When we reached the ridge and there was another ridge up in the distance that looked like the summit. In the excitement that this is the final slope, we all got energized and the speed increased. When we reached the ridge, we realized that there was another one behind. This went on for 3 to 4 times and it got really frustrating but then we looked around us and the view used to take our breaths away, well not as much as the climb did.
We finally reached the ridge from where the actual summit was visible. ‘We are there’ I mumbled.
Slowly step by step, we headed up the slope until there was no more land to climb. We had reached the summit. It was 7:05am. I got on my knees and started crying like a little baby. I hugged my team mates. I had a good look at the view around and took a few pictures and videos. Surprisingly we had network coverage on our phone. I called home and told my mom I was sitting on the summit and he started to cry on the phone. It was a priceless moment. We spent around 20 minutes on the top and then started to head down. Reaching the top was only half the journey. We had to get down safely.
The journey back was very very tiring and something that tested our patience. We were able to see the camp from the summit itself but it didn’t appear to be getting any closer. All I wanted was to sleep in my warm sleeping bag.
We reached base camp at around 12 in the noon and I crashed in my tent and woke up next day. I had given all I had in me for the summit and now it was time to take a step back, relax and celebrate.
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