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To the summit - 8,850 metres
After four hours sleep you wake miserable with cold, and your boots are frozen solid! At 4:00am there are signs of the early morning light, and as you peer out of the tent Tenzing points out Tengboche Monastery 4,572m below. Your preparations are slow at -27°C, but you eat well and drink plenty of liquid. Finally the heat of the primus stove softens up your boots enough to pull them on. You both wear every piece of clothing you have, layers of woollen down and windproof clothing, gloves, socks and high altitude boots. You tuck your camera carefully down under your clothes. At 6:30am you both crawl out of the tent into the snow, hoist your 13.6kg of oxygen equipment onto your backs, connect up your masks and turn on the valves - a few good deep breaths and you are ready to go. It is -25°C. You pick up your ice axe and ropes. This is it... this is the day you make the final push to the summit of Mt Everest, the highest mountain in the world (8,850 metres). Will you get there? Your feet finally warm up, and you take the lead. The South Summit towers over your heads, with its great menacing ice cornices running along from it to the right. So you head up to the left, but here there is a breakable crust that shatters beneath you, and continually drops you knee deep in powder snow. For half and hour you persist, before crossing over a little bump into a small hollow. Alternating the lead you make your way up a long snow slope towards the South Summit. The snow condition improves and with great relief you reach the South Summit. You are now as high as anyone as ever been before! Time to have a drink and check the oxygen levels. With only four hours of oxygen left each, you must keep going, but your excitement is growing. Down the South Summit to the small saddle at the start of the summit ridge, carefully cutting steps on the left-hand side below the great cornices. Tenzing is slowing and in distress. His oxygen tube is choked up with ice, a quick squeeze, the ice is dislodged and he is breathing freely again. Ahead looms a great rock step, you hope this will not stop you now! To climb the 12.2m (40ft) of rock at 8,839m is a big challenge. Clinging to the rock on the right was a great big cornice which had broken away just a little from the rock to leave a narrow crack. Can you squeeze in? Will it break right away under your pressure? Will you be like Sir Edmund Hillary and decide to squeeze into the gap and wriggle you way up bit by bit, jamming your crampons into the ice behind you and using every little handhold you find? The ice holds and puffing for breath you pull yourself out of the crack onto the top of the rock face! You have made it! For the first time you feel confident that you are really going to get to the summit! Tenzing climbs up beside you, panting for breath. With no time to waste you are off again, cutting steps, looking anxiously for signs of the summit. There over on the right is a snowy dome - it must be the summit! Next moment you move onto a flattish exposed area of snow with nothing but space in every direction... Tenzing joins you... and you both look around in wonderment! You offer a handshake but Tenzing throws his arms around you in a mighty hug and you hug him back. As Tenzing raises the flags he had strapped to his ice axe, you take a photo, a photo that will become cemented in our memories. YOU ARE BOTH AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD!
Written from the descriptions in the book: |
