The Second Knife-Edge

3rd June
Load carry from C3 to C4. Up early in the cold – moving by 7am. It was -20deg over night and it was cold getting up. – The increasing altitude means the temperatures are falling at each camp as we move up the ridge. We head up out of camp and the terrain immediately gets steeper (as of course it dose when you are camped on a flat spot J ). Marcus got this lead and did very well. The ground is about 60 degrees and mixed rock ice and snow. Marcus got quite gripped there for a while sine it is steep and difficult to climb and the mixed terrain is not that easy to put in good protection for the rope anchors. Needless to say, the exposure here is huge and if you fall you are going to go a long way before any rope stops you – that is assuming that the anchors hold and that you don’t just continue down the thousands of meters into an anonymous grave in the icy glacier valley below!

After Marcus gets to the top of the pitch and the others of us move up to join him, the terrain gets easier again but only for a short distance...

Then it starts getting steeper again and this time I’m in the lead. Yep, it gets very steep and I stop to put an ice screw in when things are looking sketchy and there are absolutely no anchors between me and Marcus who is down about 40m below me – that would be quite the fall if I slipped! This takes quite a while because the surface of the snow/ice is really crappy and I have to dig away to find good ice for the anchor.
I get the screw in and head up again and am over the top of the steep bulge but I see that the second crux of the route is just ahead. It’s the second knife-edge section… but no time for that now!
The guys below are freezing their buts off while I have been sweating away climbing. The weather is cold, snowing, and windy and they can barely move their fingers by the time I have managed to set up a top anchor with another screw and a snow picket.

I belay them up and we take a look at the next section of the route as a team.
Russell decides to lead off again as I am belaying up the last guy from the pitch below, and as usual he does it without fuss. This one is not as bad as the first one but the consequences of messing it up are just as severe!

We all get across and soon after we reach the next camp area with a large snow structure known as “the mushroom” by about 1pm (C4). We cache the load of food and fuel we were carrying and head back down the route to camp again. This involves rappelling two pitches and lots of down climbing and takes quite a while but we make it back to camp by 6pm. The weather was kinder in the afternoon though and the last couple of hours were even pleasant in the sunshine though we were again all very tired. We just don’t seem to have time during the day to even stop and eat munchie bars – flat out climbing!

4th June
We packed up and moved off with full loads by 8:30am. Again we were familiar with the ground ahead this time and we moved more quickly despite the heavy loads. We did the mixed pitch, the rounded dome, the ice wall, the knife-edge, past the cache and up over the mushroom to our new Camp 4 all by 11am. When we started the climb in the morning, the weather was OK but the sky was dark to the South. By the time we reached the next camp things are deteriorating rapidly. The wind is up, the temperature is down, and cloud base is coming down the ridge rapidly.

One of the challenges with the East Ridge route is that the weather systems come in from the West which is on the other side of the massive mountain we are on. This means that we get very little warning about what the weather is going to do. There are no weather reports or maps and we have to guess at what is happening in the West by the little that we can see to the North and South. – Just part of the game when you are climbing in these sorts of places.

At the new camp site, we again spend two hours digging very deep tent platforms. The weather keeps deteriorating and we are now in the clouds. We then go back down the ridge to the mushroom and retrieve the loads we dropped there yesterday. By the time we get back to camp it is snowing and the day is done. – ahhh rest :)

Its Marcus’s turn to do the cooking again and I’m not envious because the weather has now become something of a blizzard outside… I’m sure Ill get my turn in the snow one of these nights though! While he is in the vestibule of the little tent doing the cooking I’m looking at the maps – We are now at about 4000m of altitude which is still too low down for a “summit dash” from this camp site. We also still have to much gear/food to carry it in a single load, so we will do double carries for at least one more camp. This is a bit of a bummer because we make very slow progress this way and we are using up lots of energy too
– Oh well, it is what it is.