PHYSICAL TRAINING

My upcoming winter climb on Ama Dablam is at the forefront of my mind! Much of my time (outside of work) is spent either training, or thinking of training, for this climb.

My physical training consists primarily of running. I am not a swimmer, and cycling is not that practical working as I do in India and Nepal.

Running, especially uphills, mimics the physical action one does repeatedly while climbing and is therefore a great way to train for mountaineering. Running not
only strengthens your oxygen delivery system – your heart and lungs – but it also strengthens your legs.

I have found that it is important to vary my running schedule, to avoid boredom and burn-out. Distance and intensity are really the two factors that need monitoring. In terms of distance, this varies from day to day. Sometimes I will run for 30 minutes, sometimes for 90 minutes. I try and run six days a week. In terms of intensity, I generally run at about 85% of my maximum heart rate, and often this gets up to 90%. This sort of intensity makes the physical and mental stress of mountaineering much more familiar. Much of my running is done on the hills surrounding Darjeeling and Kathmandu, which is useful because it replicates the mountaineering experience.

Aside from running, I am truly fortunate in that I trek in the Himalayas a few times each year as part of my work with Where There Be Dragons. In the last year I have trekked in the Everest and Annapurna regions of Nepal, Zanskar in Ladakh,  Kangchenjunga in Sikkim and various short treks in Tibet. 

A big part of mountaineering is staying calm and focussed in stressful situations. I have found that leading groups of students through the Himalayas and encountering and having to deal with the whole range of physical and emotional issues which occur has certainly helped me better prepare for my own expeditions.

CLIMBING

Liberty Ridge, Mt Rainier

This spring climbing season I will be traveling to the United States to climb Mt Rainier, which at 4392m is the highest glaciated peak in the lower 48 states in North America.

There are many different routes on Rainier, to suit every level of experience and ambition. I will be climbing two different routes on Mt Rainier with International Mountain Guides (IMG), one of the few companies permitted to guide Rainier. The first climb will be on the Kautz Route, which is a more technically difficult and arduous ascent than the standard routes on Rainier. While Kautz will be a great climb in itself, I have chosen this route as a training climb for my primary climbing objective for spring, Liberty Ridge.

Liberty Ridge is a technically difficult and physically demanding route to the summit of Mt Rainier. I will be climbing Liberty Ridge over 6 days and will be in a maximum team size of 5 - 3 climbers and 2 guides. The route is a steep, exposed and challenging multi-day ascent of a ridge dividing the impressive Willis and Liberty Walls on the north face of Mt Rainier. Technical challenges start early - just getting to the base of Liberty Ridge requires some savvy route finding through the heavily crevassed Carbon Glacier. We will be using at least two camps for the ascent. The high camp, Thumb Rock at about 3200m, is perched on the exposed crest of the ridge, about half way up the route. Summit day involves sustained climbing on steep snow and ice slopes. The ridge ends just below the summit, with a long trudge finally leading to the true summit, Columbia Crest. Aside from the technical challenges and the infamous weather on this mountain, an additional difficulty is that on summit day all personal and group equipment must be carried up and over the mountain, as we descend down the easier Emmons Glacier route. Considering all of this, it is not surprising that Liberty Ridge has been officially listed as one of the ‘Fifty Classic Climbs in North America’.

Liberty Ridge is going to be a serious, big climb and will be perfect training for Ama Dablam later in the year.

This was not my first choice for this spring, however. I had been confirmed for a climb on the West Rib of Denali with a company based in Alaska for several months. I had been training hard for Denali and mentally preparing myself for the conditions that I would encounter. Unfortunately, however, no other climbers joined their scheduled climb on the Rib, and I was notified just last week that the expedition had been cancelled. Rather than take up the possibility of a climb on the West Buttress route, I decided instead to continue my focus on climbing more technical routes. While the West Buttress would have still been a challenging climb, this is more because of environmental, rather than technical challenges. While not as high as Denali’s West Rib, Liberty Ridge, from what I have read, may turn out to be just as challenging!

New Zealand

During the recent southern hemisphere summer I went to New Zealand to train for a few weeks in the beautiful mountains of the Southern Alps. It was my first trip to New Zealand and it didn't disappoint.

My first destination was Mt Cook village where I had arranged to do an intensive 10-day Technical Mountaineering Course (TMC) with Alpine Guides. I arrived a few days early to warm up for this course with a couple of days of rock climbing at the local crag, Sebastapol bluffs.

While I have plenty of experience with rugged mountain travel and I have been to high altitudes many times, I realised that my technical skills needed developing if I were to move towards my goal of climbing Ama Dablam and many of the other great mountains of the world. It was for this reason that I decided to do the TMC.

The mountains in New Zealand are bigger, wilder and more remote than most people realise and the weather, in the middle of summer, was surprisingly vicious. After a twenty minute flight onto the glacier in a 4-seater Cessna, our group of six students and two guides got right into it and we were kept fairly busy for the next eight or nine days. The TMC covered the fundamentals of modern and safe mountaineering: roped glacier travel, individual and team crevasse rescue, snow and ice anchors, snow and ice climbing, route finding, alpine rock climbing and abseiling. While I had used ice axes and crampons before on my Himalayan trekking-peak climbs, I had never learnt the art of hauling myself or my climbing partner out of a crevasse - one of the essential skills I practiced during the course.

My plan was to climb Mt Aspiring (3033m) after the TMC, to practice and consolidate what I had learnt in the previous ten days. I had decided to climb the SW ridge, a far more technical prospect than the standard NW ridge. Knowing it would be difficult to organise independently in the short time I had left in NZ, I arranged the climb with the help of Alpine Guides.

I wanted to have two rest days after the TMC in Wanaka (a small town about 3 hours south of Mt Cook village) before beginning the climb on Aspiring. However on the day that I finished the TMC, I was informed that the satellite imagery showed very unsettled weather blowing over the Aspiring area in a few days time and so I should consider beginning the climb that afternoon! I resisted the idea and made my way down to Wanaka with the plan of meeting the guide that afternoon.

After some discussion we decided to book the chopper for early the next morning. I was happy with this as it would give me the day to relax and eat up, and hopefully still climb Aspiring before the weather turned foul.

By 6am the next morning I was in a helicopter on my way up to the glacier and I got my first view of Mt Aspiring out of the window. The feeling of anticipation was enormous. Studying the SW ridge it was hard to believe that I would soon be climbing up that exposed and steep ridge, hopefully to the summit.

We landed at Bevan Col, just off the glacier, stashed our gear under some rocks, put on our crampons, roped up and started our way over the glacier. Conditions were ideal - blue skies, no wind and firm underfoot. Perfect, I thought. We made great time and reached the base of the SW ridge by about 8am and after crossing the small bergschrund we accessed the ridge proper.

The plan was to summit by about 2pm, descend down the easier NW ridge and return to our bivvy site by about 7pm, where food and sleeping bags awaited us. It seemed very realistic when we set off. However the ascent took us much longer than anticipated – largely because the late season meant a lot of rock was exposed and this meant more gear had to be placed which slowed us down considerably. The winds also picked up throughout the day, and with the wind came the clouds. The route steepens as you go higher, and it is very exposed - most of it is a 'no-fall' zone.

By the time we reached the short vertical rock section just below the summit, the winds were howling and wild, angry looking clouds had reduced visibility down to 10-20 metres. Within the space of an hour or two, the climb had become much more of an adventure than anticipated.

The wind was strong on the summit ridge - and with the drop down the south face looking very unappealing - we stopped for just a quick handshake on the summit. Far from a sense of elation at reaching the summit after climbing this ‘classic’ ridge, I was more focussed on the job ahead – getting down safely in the strong winds and poor visibility. I was also aware that daylight was fast disappearing – at least some of the descent was going to be in the dark.

The NW ridge is a fairly straightforward descent and despite the late hour and the strong winds, we made good time and by about 8pm I allowed a small feeling of satisfaction to enter my mind – within an hour or two we would be done, I thought.  

                                                                                                                          
But it didn't turn out that way. The storm that the satellite imagery showed arriving on Sunday had decided to arrive on Saturday instead – the skies hadn’t opened up yet, but the increasingly strong winds and stormy conditions made the three abseil pitches off the final 100m of the NW ridge more of a challenge than I was wanting, especially as it was now 10pm.

After down-climbing for one hour, we were finally back onto the glacier, but visibility was virtually zero and it was nearing 11pm. Now the task was to make our way through the maze of crevasses across the glacier to our bivvy site. By this time I had been up since 4am, climbing since 7am and we were both extremely tired. To confound matters, my guide had left her head torch at an earlier break, so we had to share mine.

The next few hours were some of the most exhausting of my life. We gave up on the idea of finding our bivvy site, electing instead to head for a mountain hut that was somewhere out there in the darkness, at the base of the NW ridge. While it was only a matter of one or two kilometres away, between us and the safety of the hut was a series of crevasses perpendicular to our direction of travel. Hour after hour, we would carefully make our way across the glacier and then suddenly we would see the outline of a huge crevasse right in front of us.  Much too wide to jump over, we were forced to turn around and continue our search for a way through this maze. This happened again, and again and again. We had just one head torch between the two of us, nothing but some nuts and chocolate left in our packs, our bodies were tired and the warmth of our sleeping bags far away, and we knew that a full-blown storm was rapidly approaching. Several times we knelt down in the snow - shouting to hear eachother over the relentless winds - to discuss our strategy. I am glad, looking back on it now, that we kept on going.

Finally, at about 2am, feeling physically exhausted, we stumbled across some foot prints. Our spirits lifted. We followed those for a couple of hours and finally, at 3.30am, they took us to Colin Todd Hut. Visibility was so poor at this stage that we had almost run into the hut by the time we knew it was there! 21 hours after beginning the climb, it was finally over. To be honest, I only felt a mild sense of relief as I was simply too tired to feel much at that point.

Fortunately there was food inside the hut and I also found a very basic sleeping bag, which was quite timely considering we were stuck inside the hut for another two full days as the anticipated storm made even going outside to the toilet a major adventure. On the third day the weather cleared for long enough to allow us to cross the glacier, with the problem now being that all the crevasses were hidden from the snow and all the drift. Fortunately we were roped up, as we both fell waist deep into crevasses a few times.

By the time we got to our bivvy site it was snowing hard and it took some effort digging our gear out from underneath three days of snow. Moods weren’t exactly high at this stage, as it is well known that descending from Bevan Col down the rocky slabs in good weather is awkward, in the current conditions it was doubtful whether it should even be attempted. About half an hour from our bivvy site the weather started to clear and so we decided to give the helicopter pilot a ring on our satellite phone. After about ten failed attempts we finally got through and explained our position and the weather situation. In a moment of real elation, the pilot agreed to come and pick us up and about 30 minutes later the chopper appeared through the swirling clouds. Our huge smiles told the story as we boarded the chopper.

It is interesting to reflect that the Mt Aspiring climb took 21 hours and I spent less than one minute on the summit. And yet I learnt so much from the experience and about more than just climbing. That is why I say that going into the mountains is more than just about the mountains.