It's been a puzzle: intellectual in nature but eventually solved
by brute force. Finding a route up the South Side of Makalu is proving
to be a
great alpine adventure. There is little information and even the
"experts" are
uncertain as to how to get to the bottom of the face.
Stopping by their base camp, we met with the British team.
This is their third expedition on the SE Ridge of Makalu. They said it
has been
attempted 19 times by teams from the US,
UK, Korea, Japan and various international
groups. Of all those attempts, the SE Ridge has never been climbed from
top to
bottom (and only rarely via all sorts of variations). The Brits keep
returning,
hoping to complete this challenge in its purest form.
"You're going to the South Face," they asked. "How are you
going to get there?"
"Well we have a friend that followed a glacier along its
base, all the way up to your South Col."
They've been placing their Camp 3 on that col on past expeditions and it seemed
more logical that they, too, would climb directly up the glacier, saving days
of dangerous traversing over smaller peaks to reach this same point.
"We tried to find a way to get onto that glacier. Sent three
teams up there to have a look in 2004. We figured it was too dangerous. That's
why we chose to climb the whole of the SE Ridge."
That answer worried me. Elsewhere in the Himalaya,
global warming was causing the glaciers to recede, often making the mountains a
lot harder to climb. A route done in the 70's or 80's could be a death trap
now.
"We saw pictures from the 1995 ascent of the SE Ridge. That
team had to climb through some scary crevasses just to get to the South Col," they further informed us. Clearly the Brits,
with all this local knowledge thought our plan was impossible (or at least fool
hardy).
The glacier did look like a jumbled mess from the British
Base Camp. The lower tongue tumbled over a cliff band. The mid section was
tossed into towers of ice (which we call seracs). And even from a mile away we
could see deep, wide crevasses stretching horizontally across the glacier.
Finding a way through the maze would be a challenge. (OK you Greek mythology
buffs, not as tough as the whole Minotaur maze, but like in that story we had
to bring at least a ball of string and a few other tricks, to find our way out,
alive.)
Marty and I, with the help of two local porters and Ram (our
sirdar) shouldered our packs and set about finding an entrance to the maze. We
followed a beautiful moraine crest, which lead to grassy slopes and finally
around an emerald lake to the tongue of the glacier. And there, in plain site
was a kind of naturally formed, but rickety stair case, built of ice. It magically
led us on top of the glacier. We dumped our loads, scraped a tent site and
declared the spot as our Advanced Base Camp (17,720 feet/5400 meters). 2 hours
above BC and we already entered the maze.
A few days later, Marty and I climbed back to ABC. That
afternoon we strapped on our crampons, stuffed our packs full of bamboo wands,
our pockets full of orange survey tape and headed into the maze. It took us two
days of exploring to reach our next camp at 6200 meters (20,345 feet). We
didn't trail a ball of twine behind us, but the strategically placed bamboo
poles, with neatly tied flags of survey tape, serve the same purpose.
Literally we were in a maze, with the ice walls towering
twenty to fifty feet above us, with crevasses slicing every which way beneath
our feet. And in this maze, a simple snow storm would get you horribly lost, if
you didn't have your bamboo flags to follow.
What was the scariest bit? About mid way, a crevasse bisects
the glacier. It is too wide to jump and hundreds of feet deep. We walked left
and right, looking for a constriction and the best we could come up with is a
sliver of a bridge, twenty-five feet across, spanning the crevasse on a
diagonal.
At first glance my stomach was upset.
That damned bridge has seen better days. It's collapsed onto itself in two
places. The once perfect arch bridge was now three co-dependent pieces, held up
in a state of mid-collapse. Would it hold our weight?
It has now, four times. But will it be weaker in a few
months, as the warmth sets the glacier on its annual slide.
What happened a few days later though, made walking across
that crevasse seem safe.
Leaving our temporary camp at 20,345 feet, we headed out
into the last shadows of dawn. Marty and I climbed, with packs laden with
ropes, to the base of our unclimbed route. Every step higher taught us more
about the line we wanted to pioneer. Makalu is
bare of snow this year. What little is left, is so old it's now ice. Our
crampons scratched the surface, making it tricky to climb the ever steepening
glacial slopes. Where the moving glacier ends, it rips away from the mountain
itself leaving a large crack, called a bergschrund. Our trick for the day was
to find a way across the bergschrund and onto the icy slopes above. We knew we
had to fix ropes, maybe even 1000 feet of rope up these slopes, just to get to
our next camp site.
Marty traversed left, looking for a place to climb over the
bergschrund. I took out the camera to film him. As I looked through the view
finder I heard a buzzing sound. Instinctively I yelled ROCK!
Rocks have a mortar like sound. Let loose thousands of feet
over head, they whistle as they spin through the air. If the rock is flat, it
might vibrate differently than a round rock, but either way the high pitched
whistle is a distinctive sound. Your first impulse is to spot the source of the
sound, judge the trajectory and dive left or right to safety.
I couldn't tell which way to dive, and as I searched the sky, two rocks, the
size of milk cartons, sliced through the air. The only thing that saved me was
the upper lip of the bergschrund, which was shooting the rocks out over our
heads.
The volley of rocks was just beginning and I yelled "Rock" again
to Marty. This time it sliced through the air just above him. In my fear, my
imagination went wild. I could feel the impact, knowing the feeling would be
brief as a rock that size would explode your whole brain on impact.
We scrambled, on our cramponed toes across the icy slopes to
safety.
We didn't even need to talk about it. Continuing up our
proposed new route on the South Face of Makalu, in these conditions, was
suicide.
We've got the pictures a future generation of mountaineers will need when
conditions improve. It is a great line, one which should offer great technical
climbing in a gorgeous, rarely visited place.
So what did we do next? We went climbing. We think we found
the second best option available to us. And in a few days time, we'll let you
know what an effort of brute force teaches us about overcoming that challenge.
Right now, we are back in base camp, fattening up and
waiting on the right weather forecast before we head back into the unknown.
