Mera Peak
Let us count our blessings – I mean those thousands of peaks, climbed and unclimbed, of every size, shape and order of difficulty, where each of us may find our own Mt Everest. HW Tilman, Mount Everest 1938.
On 5 November 2010 I returned to Kathmandu after an eventful expedition to the mountain which would be my personal Everest - Mera Peak. It was undertaken with eleven other climbers from the UK, USA, Canada and Denmark, together with British expedition leader Alan Ward. We were supported by five climbing sherpas and a team of nearly 30 porters, cooking staff and camping crew.
Mera Peak is designated by the Nepal Mountaineering Association as the highest of the country’s so-called “trekking peaks” – summits that require a climbing permit, but one obtained more easily than is usual for peaks like Everest and others of over 7000m. At 6,476m/21,246ft it offers the chance both to break through the 6,000m/20,000ft barrier and to admire a mountain panaroma often described as the best in the Himalaya.
The expedition did indeed involve a great deal of trekking, over high passes, into and up the remote Hinku Valley, before the mountain was even seen. However the journey involved far more than a trek. It culminated in a demanding climb – involving ice-axes, plastic boots, crampons, harnesses, karabiners, ice-screws and other technical equipment – and it proved to be an epic mountaineering experience.
I was fortunate to find myself part of a superb group of climbing companions who had all distinguished themselves in their different walks of life. They included two world-class physicists with long careers at the forefront of scientific research in the US in various aspects of national security; the director of a US institute for regenerative medicine, likewise at the cutting edge of research in his field; a leading US transplant surgeon; a former US secret service agent who had served as chief security advisor to the President; a businessman from California who had grown and sold a software company; two IT consultants; a Canadian lawyer now working on the management side of a global law firm; an engineer working on one of the UK’s top construction projects; and a social worker from Scotland, who was probably the most experienced climber among us – at any rate, she had gone higher than the rest of us, having scaled Aconcagua in the Andes, and would do much to keep up the spirits of others when the going got tough. Most of the group had some familiarity with high level trekking, and a few had experience of technical climbing.
Our expedition leader Alan Ward was very experienced in this work and quickly established a lighter touch that helped the whole group bond very quickly. A qualified trainer in mountain first aid, his medical skills would be put to more use than he could ever have expected.
After the adventurous flight into the short, steeply sloping airfield at Lukla – by reputation one of the most dangerous in the world – we had a warning of things to come when Nurbu, our sirdar (head sherpa), was delayed in joining us because he had to return to Thuli Kharka, the last camp in a Mera Peak expedition he had just finished, to retrieve the body of a porter who had tragically died of acute mountain sickness (AMS).
As things turned out, at different stages of our expedition five of our group would be evacuated in four helicopter rescue flights: two fell victim to AMS, two to knee injuries, and one to pneumonia. We also witnessed a helicopter evacuation of three climbers from another group, all with symptoms of AMS. This is to say nothing of other helicopters we saw flying around, all quite plainly on rescue missions; or of treatment which Alan gave to porters with issues including colds, headaches and snow blindness.
Of the seven in our group who weren’t airlifted from the mountain, three battled bravely at various points through nausea, colds, and throbbing headaches, whilst a fourth needed regular treatment for a leg wound sustained in a minor fall of the kind that can so easily happen. I was fortunate to be one of only three to complete the trip without any medical setbacks.
The weather was unusually poor for the post-monsoon season. Abnormal rainfall in the first few days gave way to clear blue skies until we reached Khare (Camp 8), eleven days into the expedition, when the weather showed signs of starting again to close in. We pressed on to Base Camp, and on 31 October to High Camp, at just below 19,000ft, with the aim of setting out at 3am on 1 November in the final push for the summit. Then, in late afternoon, just as we were pitching camp, the storm blew up.
We weren’t happy with the site chosen by the camping crew – a couple of other groups had already taken the only level ground on the few rocky surfaces not covered in snow. In the remaining territory it was hard to stand up without slipping on the icy slopes, let alone see how one could lie down without rolling off the mountain. There were also loose rocks sticking precariously out of an outcrop directly above us. Alan rightly decided that we should move onto a snowfield higher up, which though close to a crevasse was at least flatter and safe from rockfall.
To allow access to the tents I and a couple of other climbers spent time stamping a path in the snow, but as hail and driving snow started falling more heavily we proved to be chasing our tails. Then one of the tents nearly blew away while the sherpas were struggling to put it up.
Wind gusts were growing steadily in strength, and normal tent pegs weren’t up to the gathering gale. I was sharing a tent with Rob, the climber from Canada. To prevent it from blowing away we buried our ice-axes and trekking poles deep in the snow as anchors for the guy-ropes. As we did so we knew there was little chance of retrieving them at 3am. Hopes of reaching the summit were abandoned as our altimeters showed atmospheric pressure continuing to drop, and as it became obvious that heavy snowfall would make the going underfoot far too heavy to continue.
At this altitude just putting one foot in front of the other was hard enough – wading through snow 2-3 feet deep was going to be impossible, quite apart from the hazards of route-finding and avalanche. Survival was now the priority – we heard later that these were the worst conditions at High Camp which any of the sherpas had ever experienced.
That night Rob was a great camping partner, reassuring me that my wild panting was the result of overheating caused by wearing too many clothes in my sleeping bag, rated as it was to -26C. He also turned a blind eye to my contortions inside the tent as I struggled four times with my pee-bottle, trying to avoid going outside, or showering us with ice-crystals by hitting the roof of the tent with my head, or, of course, spilling it!
Apart from the threat to our tents, as they were lashed through the night by high winds and machine-gunned by driving hail, there was the concern that any attempt to descend in low visibility would be highly dangerous, especially as fresh snow had surely obliterated all signs of the route through the many crevasses on the way back down the glacier. But the option of remaining where we were, until the weather improved, was problematic. At least two of our group were throwing up the medicine taken for serious headaches, and their symptoms of AMS called for an urgent descent. Others were clearly anxious and impatient to get off the mountain.
I spent a good part of the night mentally rehearsing the crevasse rescue techniques taught on the alpine skills course I’d attended some months earlier in Chamonix – some of them were quite complicated, involving a combination of rope, prussic cords and karabiners used as pulleys. It seemed likely that few of us apart from Alan – Westerners or sherpas – had had this training, and so I readied myself to be one of the first to go down. At daybreak visibility was no more than around 20-30 metres, but everyone was keen to go. I harnessed up with all my kit at the ready, and asked if the snow anchors we had planned to use at the summit could go down with the leading team.
Then, as the sun rose, miraculously the storm died away. The wind stopped suddenly as if a door had been shut. The clouds retreated into the valleys far below, and what little breath we inhaled at that height was literally snatched away by the sight we’d all come to see: right in front of us, and shining against a clear blue sky, was Mera’s famed panorama of the world’s highest mountains – a whole range of white peaks paying court as Everest, with its black rockfaces glistening in the sun, and its signature snow plume streaming from its windy summit, presided majestically over all at its feet.
Wow!
The sherpas assured us that the view was just as good as the one from the top, which I could well believe – it was hard to imagine how it could possibly be better. Hurriedly we took what photos we could while they urged us to rope up – they were keen to get down before the bad weather they were expecting returned. We then enjoyed the most glorious descent to Mera La, the pass above Base Camp. This was hard work in the heavy snow – sometimes we sank in up to our thighs – but as often as not our stumbles were due at least in part to the distraction of the enthralling view in front of us.
As we made our way down, groups assembled on the pass below us who had spent the night at Base Camp. Some of their tents had been wrecked in the storm, and as they, like us, recognised that their summit chances had gone they beat a retreat through the crevasses between Mera La and the snout of the glacier. We were then able to unrope and follow in their footsteps with relative ease, though care was still needed not to snag our crampons in the narrow snow tracks and stumble off the path, with crevasses waiting on both sides to gobble us up.
Climbing down from the glacier we could see that huge quantities of snow had been dumped far and wide in the valleys below – the snowline had been taken down over 1000m. The descent through boulder fields to Khare was slow and hazardous in the icy conditions, and when we got down to the tiny village we gathered that the night had been hard there too – not surprising, when at 16,000ft it is still higher than the top of Mt Blanc. Looking back up, we could see fast-moving clouds signaling more high winds and bad weather: for at least the next day or so, summit attempts were either ruled out or would serve little purpose. Early the next morning, from a tiny landing zone on a ridge above the little village, two of our number were helicoptered out from amid a propwash of swirling snow.
The rest of us, talking among ourselves, seemed to agree that we were less disappointed than we might have thought. At any rate, the pain of disappointment, one might say, proved to be a great teacher - for it was quickly soothed by the realisation that we had, in effect, had the best of both worlds: a view as good as the one from the top, and the experience of surviving adversity powerful enough to force us back.
The trek back to Lukla took four long days, involving a climb back out of the Hinku Valley via the Zatrwa La, a pass at 4,700m/15,400ft. On the way up, we (or rather, our crew) pitched our last camp at Thuli Kharka, where the unfortunate porter had died on the previous expedition. The long, steep and icy descent to Lukla from the other side of the pass made us wonder how anyone had made their way down here bearing a stretcher, but eventually we arrived, just before nightfall.
On the flight out of Lukla, early the next morning, we were joined by an Australian climber who had reached the summit the day before us: he had seen nothing from the top, very little during the descent, and felt that he got down with only a few hours to spare. And when we got back to Kathmandu we heard that a very experienced sherpa, who had summited Everest 19 times, had died in the same storm when he was hit by an avalanche on the nearby mountain of Barunche.
Before taking on these eight climbs I had known very well that no one ever conquers a mountain. It is the mountain, not you, which decides whether and when you may reach its summit. And I’d said on my website that for me the real prize of the mountains is not so much the joy of reaching their tops, and not so much a sense of achievement, as a sense of something else …
“A night on a cold mountain, counting tense hours before a push to new heights, can be a searching examination of why you are there. For some people the lasting reward is detachment – a vantage point, outside the goldfish bowl of our daily lives, where they can be seen from a new perspective.”
To that I would now add that the same applies, with still greater force, when the dawn challenge for which you must prepare yourself is not an ascent to new heights, but an attempt in low visibility to regain the place from which you came – and from which, Heaven forbid, you may now be cut off. In the event the challenge may never materialise, but the prospect of it, through a stormy night in a small tent at 19,000ft, can be a revealing experience.
All this time I had in my rucksack a piece of paper given to me by a fellow traveller I’d met on the Annapurna trail I trekked with Cindy before starting out on the Mera Peak expedition. After a long career in several branches of industry he was now semi-retired, a business management consultant and lay preacher, who spoke with all the objectivity of one who no longer has any axe to grind, if indeed he had ever had one. We walked many miles, discussing the core values and articles of faith which distinguish a great enterprise from one which is merely good; and how even a great one declines if these things are forgotten, and pre-occupation with immediate gains takes hold as the common denominator. When it was time to say goodbye he handed me a handwritten note of various reading material he thought I’d find relevant to the things we’d discussed. He’d obviously gone to some trouble, so I gratefully put the note with my valuables, and it went with me all the way up into that storm and down again. Among the readings he’d listed were extracts from the Old Testament, from the Book of Ecclesiastes, recording thoughts of King Solomon. Among them was his view, after a long and fabulously accomplished life, that in the end all achievement, all individual success, is just vanity – is meaningless, and just a chasing after the wind.
This was quite some food for thought as I lay awake in my tent while the storm howled down from Mera Peak. After Mt Kenya it was the second mountain in succession to deny me access to its summit – on both occasions through snow storms. Mountains do indeed have more important lessons to teach than the simple joy of reaching their tops.
We were humbled not just by the mountain itself but by every comparison between our efforts and those of the sherpas and porters. At High Camp one of the porters fell ill, and the task of getting him down resulted in most of our mattresses and some of the cooking equipment being left behind. The next day we continued down from Khare to Khote, trekking in one long day the same distance we’d taken two days to complete on the way up. In the meantime Sherpa Ngima and two porters returned to High Camp, by-passing Base Camp on the way up, and Khare on the way down. Not only did they reach Khote in one day compared with the four we needed to cover the same ground; they even overtook us and set up camp before we arrived. Most of us were between half-marathon and marathon fit, and all of us found this extraordinary feat quite hard to believe.
Mera Peak gave the chance not just to appreciate these remarkable people of Nepal – real men of the mountains, with smiles, laughter and song to put most affluent Westerners to shame – but also to make friends with an exceptionally fine group of climbers. It was a great privilege not only bonding with them collectively, as we shared the same experience and found common humour in facing its challenges, but also talking to them individually, and gaining insight into the reasons why they, like me, were making this journey. As it was put afterwards by a fellow climber older and wiser than me, if ever a journey counted for more than its destination, this was it.
In the end, partly by design and partly by accident, the several weeks I spent camping on mountains in Africa and Asia amounted to a kind of personal forty days and forty nights. Sustained only by things people can carry, detached from usual comforts and news media, and at times less safe than I dare say a responsible parent should have been, it was perhaps natural – indeed, really the point of the exercise - to glimpse things from a different angle.
It’s a viewpoint that won’t appeal to everyone, and if people see no reason for change then hats off to them for being content with their lot. But there will be others who feel that there must be more to life than what they know, and among them will be those weighed down by seemingly relentless pressure to achieve. They are not alone if ever they wonder how much of it is in the mind, and how much of our time is spent just chasing after the wind; nor are they unique if an answer comes to them when they remember unsung heroes, less fortunate than most of us, who spend much of theirs helping others less fortunate still. In an age when these pressures bear on our children ever earlier in life, may they hopefully find that if what counts with them is not so much what they take as what they give, and not so much what others applaud as what they alone know, then their world’s the better place they’ll deserve.
Click on the pictures below for a selection of photos taken during the upper sections of the climb – many thanks to Alan Ward for several of the pictures. Movie footage, as well as photos from other parts of the expedition, will be shown at the RGS next March!
