At midnight, I woke up to take a pee and the sky was clear and beautiful. Our original plan (had we been staying at the "right" place) was to start our trek to a different peak at midnight. When 4AM hit, it was snowing heavily. Had we been off on our originally planned summit attempt, we would have been screwed by the snow. As it was, we just returned to sleep for another couple hours, and eventually the snow cleared and we headed out towards our "backup" peak at 7:06AM.
5 hours later after a challenging and beautiful climbing experience, we reached the summit of the daunting peak. It was a great feeling and even more amazing view. We found a pile of rocks at the top protecting a Gatorade bottle, inside of which held names of previous summiteers. The most recent date was 2008. It was a neat time capsule of sorts.
After spending a good half hour in comfort at the summit (6277 meters), we headed back down to our gear and pushed onwards along a ridge to another (lower) peak and finally I went on my own to a 3rd peak to scope out a possible route for a trek the next day.
So what began as a total screw up day ended up in 3 additional 6000meter "peaks" for me while our original plan would have gotten snowed out and put us in a hairy situation in the middle of the darkness while we tried to traverse a glacier!
Funny how things work out.
That evening, the three of us tried to convince the rest of the team that an even more beautiful and challenging peak was possible the next day (the one I had checked out on my own). Everyone agreed to give it a shot.
The next morning, we took off at 5:25AM towards the lake I had been to a few days prior. When we arrived at the lake, Luke took matters into his own hands and instead of taking the "boring" route along rocks p the left ridge, he said we are going directly up the glacier and then up the snow as far as we can get. This initially caught everyone off guard and we thought he was nuts, but an hour later, we were all roped together traversing a beautiful glacier and loving its awesomeness. After scaling to about 5850 meters in altitude, we had lunch at a grouping of exposed rocks about 5 hours into the day. Feeling optimistic about our summitting chances, 5 of us continued directly up the snow wall towards the peak. It ranged between a 40-50 degree slant all the way up for the next 400 meters. As we continued up, we were all struggling and tired, and eventually we got through the snow to a vein of very loose dangerous rocks that we started climbing up. Some pretty ominous storm clouds were approaching, and we really tried to push it. Luke went ahead and made it to just below the summit before animatedly encouraging the rest of us to hurry the hell up before the weather hit. I was the 2nd one up, and Ana, Piotr, and Lars soon thereafter. We took a few pictures at the summit, but Luke told us we had to get down ASAP. Unlike the previous day, there wasn't much of a chance to enjoy the well-earned achievement. This kind of sucked because it was the toughest peak we had climbed and it would have been nice to get rewarded a little more. Oh well.
Anyways, coming down was just as challenging as getting up. It was super steep and slippery and rocks were flying down when people slipped. Plus the storm was coming. After about 10 minutes of frantic descending, we caught a brief stroke of luck when the storm dissipated. This was bittersweet of course because it meant we could have stayed at the summit longer. Oh well. We eventually fought our way down and ended up back in camp 11 hours after we started our day.
The 2 consecutive days of successful 10 and 11 hour challenging hikes were very ironman-esque in their mental difficulty. When I get to Louisville in 3 weeks, I will not be 100% physically ready for the race, but I do expect to be mentally prepared. This will be an interesting experience, a near opposite to my approach in Florida.
I managed to finish "Meditation and Mantras" while in camp below these massively beautiful Korzok peaks, and finally moved onto my final book, Shantaram. We've got 3 nights left so we'll see how far I can get.
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