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Chronicles of K2 with Jon Lawrie and Martin Zhor: Part 1
9.1k Plays11 months ago
In our second episode of Voices of the Mountains, Steve and coach Martin Zhor, speak with one of their athletes, Jon Lawrie, who recently summited K2 without supplemental oxygen. Jon chronicles his experience on the mountain, from the trek to base camp, to the jeep ride back to a warm bed. Steve and Jon relate over the odd experience of life above 8000 meters and a tragedy Jon witnessed on the mountain. The discussion shows a glimpse of the difficulty of this type of climb and the precarious nature of humanity on the ledges of a mountain known for death. This is the first of a two-part episode around Jon’s experience training for and ultimately summiting K2 without supplemental oxygen.
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Transcript
Introduction to Uphill Athlete Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the uphill athlete podcast, where our mission is to elevate and inspire all mountain athletes through education and celebration. My name is Steve House, and I will be your host today.
Meet the Guests: John Laurie and Martin Zor
00:00:12
Speaker
Joining me today is John Laurie, who is just back from climbing K2, and Martin Zor, my fellow uphill athlete coach and our resident normal barrack hypoxic training expert.
00:00:37
Speaker
So John, Martin, it's really great to have you both here.
John Laurie's K2 Experience Begins
00:00:43
Speaker
John, why don't you start us off by just sort of walking us through your summit day on K2 a couple months back. Yeah, thanks, Steve. And thanks very much for the opportunity to join this podcast. So look, I've sort of been back now for a month and it's
00:01:04
Speaker
feels quite surreal to be back, but expedition was just a six-week expedition and really sort of probably got really sort of kicked off in terms of the actual climbing in the second week of July and then with a summit
00:01:34
Speaker
uh, summit right towards the end of the month. Paint the picture for me, like the day that you left base camp heading up for the summit attempt, like what was in your mind? What was, what was going on with the weather? What was going on with, with your whole expedition? Really like take, take us there. What does it look like? What did you feel like? What were your thoughts? What were your emotions? Yeah. So,
00:01:59
Speaker
We didn't have the best, most clear weather window ahead of us. We could see in about four days, there was one or possibly two days, but we knew that the preceding four days were going to be quite challenging from a weather point of view. We were effectively leaving base camp in a, you know, socked in conditions. And I,
00:02:29
Speaker
It was certainly not the inviting mountain that would have probably really given us a lot of the energy to really go for it. So you were feeling more like, just kind of like, oh, we're going to go give it a try, but it doesn't look too good. And you weren't really that sort of pumped, or is that what I'm saying? I felt very strong.
00:02:59
Speaker
acclimatizing well to the altitude and the mountain. I was, you know, I was feeling like I, up until that point, I was very excited about the possibility of climbing without oxygen and climbing K2 in general. But potentially trying to be very careful not to allow myself to get too excited and, and my expectations get too, you know, sort of get away from me to the point where
00:03:29
Speaker
you know, it would have been a summit, would have been the only only positive outcome that would have made, you know, that would have left me satisfied. So it was almost like I was just trying to open myself up to the possibility that we may just be denied due to weather. You know, just trying to, to keep focused, though, on obviously not letting anything silly happen in terms of, you know, a
00:03:57
Speaker
rolled ankle or a little silly slip or anything like that in those sort of first couple of days heading up.
Strategy and Conditions on K2
00:04:06
Speaker
So, so look, I think, you know, we did the, we did base camp to camp one on a single day. And then we went from camp on the next day, we went from camp one to what we call Japanese camp three, which was sort of
00:04:24
Speaker
probably a third of the way between camp two and camp three. And that, you know, and through that whole period that, you know, the weather was, was, was quite, was quite challenging. You know, we were having quite a lot of, you know, there was, there was a lot of snow. Um, the, there was a lot of snow even just sort of falling off. I mean, people were familiar with K2 would know that the route, you know, the Abruzzi spur route is, is, is more or less just straight up a,
00:04:53
Speaker
sort of the intersection of a rock ridge and a snow ramp. And you're effectively vulnerable to both rockfall and sort of chunks of snow and ice. And we were probably fortunate in this year that there was not a great deal of rockfall hazard. And that was due to the sort of the additional snow that had fallen.
00:05:21
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Which had somehow, in some ways, had made it safer from the point of view of Rockfall, but had made it far more dangerous in terms of avalanche. And so you would find that you're constantly either watching slides to your right or dodging, or at least fearful of
00:05:44
Speaker
chunks of snow coming down and hitting you. And these are chunks of snow from other climbers, like coming off of their crampons and the trail breaking, the actions of trail breakers and that kind of thing. Typically, yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, everyone's been trying to be very vigilant and careful by that point. There's only so much you can do. Yeah, exactly. And so you go from Japanese camp three and you go from there up to your high camp.
00:06:11
Speaker
That's right. So then we went from Japanese camp three to a lower, what we called a lower camp four. So again, we were the only group to sort of make, you know, elect to use a camp that's, you know, not different, not so, not yet a bit different. And so that was about 200 meters, vertically above camp three, where everybody else staged their summit push from, from camp three.
00:06:38
Speaker
So we were a little bit, you know, that probably gave us about two hours less climbing to do on the, on the summit day. Yeah. And so take me to the summit day now, like you, what time, what was, you know, how much time did you have before from arriving at that camp till, you know, sort of the alarm went off and it was time to start brewing up and getting ready to go. So we had got in on the 25th of July with
00:07:08
Speaker
an intention to, sorry, on the 25th, 25th of July. Yep. Um, and with an intention potentially to go for the 26th, um, that was potentially meant that was supposed to be the best summit window. It turned out not to be turned out not to be summitable at all. So we ended up spending a whole full day sitting at that lower camp for, which,
00:07:35
Speaker
Personally, I was a bit nervous about because being without oxygen by now, everybody else is on oxygen around me. I was a bit worried that, as you know, you know, you're not really sleeping more than about 10, 15 minutes at a time. And so all that extra time spent at, you know, that extra 24 hours really spent up at whatever 7,650 meters is really depleting your energy level. So I was a bit nervous about that. I don't think in
00:08:04
Speaker
reflection that I didn't really experience anything noticeable. Yeah. One day it was okay, but you can't spend like, your time is limited that you can spend at 7,600 plus and feel okay to do anything other than just go down. So that makes tons of sense. Yeah. So then the next,
00:08:32
Speaker
the night of the 26th, um, I set off at 10 PM. Um, and, and when you say you set off, like what, tell me you're just by yourself. Like are the, the fixed ropes are, are set to where, who are you, who's around you? What does that look like? So, um, I was with a Sherpa, um, who was with my expedition and he had been assigned to climb with me, um, for the summit push.
00:09:02
Speaker
So we set off, there would have been at that point, there was probably 30 people or so would have been ahead of us. Um, and, but I could only see a few of them. Um, some people were quite a fair way ahead of us. Um, was it clear cloudy, windy? It was a clear, fairly clear at that point on the mountain. Um, and,
00:09:31
Speaker
it was not windy at all. So that was really what we were looking, that was what we were waiting for with the weather forecast. And it was, in fact, it was quite relatively speaking, it was quite warm. It was about minus 17 Celsius, which was, which was great for me with the non oxygen factor. As you know, I was a bit, I'd had a previous experience on Everest where even in big down mitts and
00:10:01
Speaker
liner gloves and everything, I'd still got a sort of, I would say, a minor level of frost injury. So I was a bit nervous about now being without oxygen and what that might have meant for my ability just to keep my fingers warm, but minus 17 degrees was certainly a lot warmer than the night I climbed Summit at Everest.
Summit Push Preparations
00:10:26
Speaker
So yeah, we basically just onto the fixed lines,
00:10:29
Speaker
they had been fixed up to camp for the day prior and then the rope fixing team was now above camp for fixing ropes to the summit and in effect there was a rope fixing team and then behind them were a line of climbers and they were all strung out over you know several hours. From there really we you know we
00:10:57
Speaker
moved, the two of us moved up to Camp 4. I was trying to be very conscious of my effort level and trying to, you know, very aware that this was probably going to be a 20-hour affair from camp back to camp again. So appreciating that I needed to be very conservative with that energy. But
00:11:22
Speaker
got up to Camp 4 at Camp 4, the actual Camp 4, which as I said was not being used this year. The terrain sort of flattens out and then it becomes quite gradual up towards the bottleneck. And at that point, I really was feeling very good. I was trying to be very vigilant with getting in sugar and sort of small
00:11:47
Speaker
carbohydrate type snacks and sips of water here and there, which was a huge lesson learned from my previous experience on Everest. What tasted good? What tasted what went down? I was using these like shot block kind of things. I find the bars in the cold just
00:12:13
Speaker
are too much work to be able to warm them up or to soften them up to be able to chew them, digest them. And then I find gels just get too messy. So the shop blocks for me are sort of halfway between. They're tight. You can use them, you know, you can, you can use your gloves and they're still got, they're still very rich in carbohydrates. So, and, you know, just found a flavor of those and was able to buy little, little, little bags that,
00:12:44
Speaker
I could sort of just tear open one every hour or so. Yeah, that's good that you're able to get some calories in. No, that's often one of the big challenges of people to skip behind on their nutrition on a day like that. So that's a, that's a good lesson right there. Like just how you were able to keep that up. And how were you drinking? Were you, you said you were able to get frequencies of water. How was that? Was that with thermos or?
00:13:08
Speaker
So I had two half liter now jeans, which I had in my sort of breast pocket inside my down suits. So the down suits have a, you know, they've all, all seem to have a nice little pocket on the inside that fits a half liter now jean. And the advantage of that, of course, being that your, your body's keeping it from freezing. And then it's, it's, it's accessible without having to take your pack off. Because as soon as
00:13:38
Speaker
As soon as you have to start taking your pack off and taking your gloves off, you're a lot less likely to drink. Absolutely. Whereas when I just knew that I just could stop, unzip my down suit, a few inches, pull out this bottle and have a sip and be back moving again within a minute, that really incentivized me, let's say,
00:14:08
Speaker
to drink probably more rather than less, which helped. And the question on the pacing, how did that work for you with regards to the pacing that you needed as someone who was climbing without supplemental oxygen versus climbers around you were all using bottled oxygen? Was there a conflict there? Because my experience with climbing without supplemental oxygen is,
00:14:34
Speaker
you're more start and stop. You've got to catch your breath. Or was this not a factor yet at this altitude and at this incline? Cause you were still kind of down in the balcony where it's not so steep or how did that work out? Yeah, right. So I was probably, we were so strung out at that early stage of the night that I wasn't really surrounded by people, but I could see that people on oxygen were typically going
00:15:01
Speaker
about the same speed as me or a little bit faster. There was a couple of people who passed me, but I would say that I wasn't a lot slower and I didn't feel like I needed to go any slower at that altitude. That all changed once we got above the traverse and in the last couple of hours. But certainly at this point in the first, say, three, four hours of the summit night, I felt like I was moving
00:15:31
Speaker
with a fairly low perceived exertion and still keeping pretty good pace with the people around me. I had told myself, I'd prepared myself to not let the ego get in the way and let people go and don't be concerned with other people's pace. And I did do that, but I was probably a bit pleasantly surprised that my pace wasn't as slow as relative to people on oxygen.
00:16:00
Speaker
Um, as I, as I might've expected it would. Interesting. So then what, you know, your, your walk us through the next step, the bottleneck is obviously often talked about when people talk about the summoning K2 from the Abruzzi.
Challenges and Emotional Encounters
00:16:17
Speaker
Was there a lot of, did you have a lot of dread about it? Was it looking intimidating and that big Sarak looking scary? Um, people had not been through there yet this year, obviously was going through your mind.
00:16:30
Speaker
So I think I was trying not to, I'd had months and perhaps even years to visualize this moment. And so I think I'd seen enough photos of it that it didn't look any different, let's say, to how I was expecting it. Obviously, it still is intimidating. It's still something you wouldn't, a feature you wouldn't normally climb underneath.
00:17:00
Speaker
um, at least in my own experience. And so I think, you know, like we really just, we really just moved in some ways I could probably say I was, I was actually looking forward to experiencing such a iconic piece of terrain in the, you know, in the world of mountaineering. And, and, and I think I was, I was excited about that. Um, and we, we, you know, we, we started moving up.
00:17:29
Speaker
And it's an interesting one because it sort of goes from very gradual steepness. And it's really just like a concave kind of slope that just slowly ramps up and up and up until you're at a quite steep section when it turns left onto the traverse. And at that point, there were a few sort of, you'd say, slides that were coming down
00:17:57
Speaker
There was some slides that were coming down directly down through the bottleneck. So they were effectively just flowing past your ankles, flowing past your knees. They were a little bit intimidating, but to be honest, they were not the first similar sort of slides on the mountain that we'd experienced in the preceding few weeks. But certainly nothing that would have knocked you off your feet or anything like that.
00:18:27
Speaker
I think when I got sort of probably most of the, you know, I would say well past halfway up the bottleneck, so where the terrain had got quite steep, there was quite a significant slide that came off the sort of rock buttress across to the left. And I'd never experienced any, I'd never seen anything that big, quite that close. And you could even hear people
00:18:57
Speaker
letting out all sorts of screams and just as their reaction to seeing this amount of this volume of snow coming barreling off these cliffs. I would say I was fortunate in that at that point I was already quite high on the bottleneck and it flowed down to my left but it did then I could turn around and I could see that it had flowed down onto the trail where we had sort of been an hour or so before
00:19:27
Speaker
Um, so suspected at that point that some people were, uh, had, you know, had basically been, were up to their knees as knees or waist. And, and I think that was probably what led to a number of people that were behind us to making a decision to turn around. It was certainly would have been very intimidating from where they, they were standing. And then at that point, really, we, we stopped the, the, the line. Um, it's notoriously.
00:19:57
Speaker
a congestion point, I guess perhaps that's why they call it the bottleneck. And I was expecting that we were going to be moving very slowly or stopped for periods of time there. And so wait, just for the audience, it isn't familiar. Can you just, the bottlenecks at what altitude, what does it look like? What is the weather around you? What are you taking in from your senses? Like just paint a visual picture for us of
00:20:27
Speaker
where you are and what you're feeling. Yes, I would like to ask also, was this past sunrise? Or was it still dark? Or could you actually see what's coming at you, the avalanches and stuff? So this was at about, I would say about 2am, 2 or 3am. So no, well before sunrise, but the moonlight and obviously your eyes have adjusted and whatnot. So got
00:20:56
Speaker
had quite a, and we had a clear enough night that you could certainly see the avalanches across to your left, you could see the line of torches, headlights ahead, and you could see the hanging syrac and make out where the route was sort of going to progress across the traverse. As you move up the bottleneck, probably the angle probably, and I'm guessing here, probably
00:21:26
Speaker
reaches 55, maybe 60 degrees. And keeping in mind as well that you're probably at this point at about 8,400 meters, 8,300 meters, and that's just a guess. But that's probably about what I would imagine. And I think it's
00:21:54
Speaker
It's not the first time I've climbed through the night at altitude and I'm quite glad I had had similar experiences before because the nights do feel quite long and all you really want is for the sun to come up and to feel warm again and to feel your mind, your brain to start sending all those chemicals around that make you feel awake and happy and all that sort of thing again because the night can drag on a bit
00:22:23
Speaker
when you're cold and especially at that altitude in such a sort of foreign environment. And then, you know, of course the line stops and there's now a lot of, you know, even more sort of concern kind of creeps in, you know, you're like, why are we stopped? How long are we going to be stopped for? You know, my toes are getting cold.
00:22:50
Speaker
I'd experienced colder temperatures, but now it was cold and not moving for an unknown amount of time. And so that certainly leads you to, and there's no one you can talk to. It's not like you can yell ahead. How long are we waiting for or what's going on? Everyone's got masks on. Everyone's focused, is in their little world.
00:23:19
Speaker
And it is a surreal experience. And anyone perhaps who's been to above 8,000 meters on these mountains, you really do feel, although there are people around, you do feel quite alone. You don't have that. You can't see people's faces. You certainly can't look at people in the eye or anything like that. And you do typically feel like, yeah, you do feel quite alone.
00:23:49
Speaker
Um, I think that that's a really good observation, John. And also I think that that's something that I often like to point out when I have these conversations with people is if you haven't been above 8,000 meters yourself, it's really hard to understand what it's actually like. Like it is really, it really is a, I'd say just a strange experience for lack of a better adjective. It's just, you feel like you're on the moon or something, right? Like it's just,
00:24:19
Speaker
You're just in another, like another world, literally. It's really hard to breathe. It's really hard to stay warm. You're probably swinging your arms, swinging your legs. You're probably trying to eat and do something with the time. You're probably looking at your clock. You're looking at the skyline, wondering if it's starting to get light out there in the East yet. You're looking off at the,
00:24:45
Speaker
slope above you, seeing if there's wind picking up, because that can turn you around. There's a lot going on just in terms of your animal instinct of survival. And that's pretty all, at least for me, that's always been pretty all consuming at that kind of altitude. So I think that that's worth pointing out that
00:25:15
Speaker
everybody, like you said, everybody's in their own world and their own world is like, you know, survival. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, another aspect for me was going sort of being the, being the only one, uh, at least around in the area where I was without oxygen, you felt like you were, you couldn't, you couldn't necessarily sort of
00:25:42
Speaker
look at other people and say, well, we're in this together. I felt, I felt like I was sort of potentially could suddenly, you know, I could be experiencing this in a differently to people around me. And, you know, it was almost like there was no one I could sort of say, Oh, well, you know, we're in this, we're in this together. Um, and I think one of the concerns that I definitely had was having not been to that altitude without oxygen before was, you know, was I going to
00:26:10
Speaker
become cerebral, or was I going to suddenly have one of these awful altitude-related illnesses? And would I know if it was going to, would I recognize the signs? Would I see it coming? And so I think probably something that was occupying a lot of my mind, certainly for the second half of the summit night, was I would be trying to
00:26:41
Speaker
list off famous people's names, you know, or, or, or, or play little games in my head, just to try to sort of almost reassure myself that my, my mind was still working and that I was still able to sort of, um, yeah, you're checking in on yourself. A little bit. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and that was quite, quite reassuring because I think I felt I was expecting to feel a lot more,
00:27:08
Speaker
lot more sort of brain fog or that I would have got a lot more sort of sluggish in my thoughts as I climbed. And I was expecting that and I was going to be okay with a level of that. But I was happy that I still felt like I was very aware of what I was doing and very, very capable of thinking certain thoughts and
00:27:38
Speaker
as I said, listing famous people's names that I, that I, you know, might be at a, that I would do at sea level. So that, that helped, that helped me a lot. I, to feel confident that although I couldn't look at somebody else around me and say, Oh, well, he's okay. I'm okay. We're in this together. I could, I could say to myself, Well, I'm still able to do this. I'm still, my mind still feels active and healthy and everything. So I'm going to keep going.
00:28:05
Speaker
Yeah. And I can, you know, also add to that from my own experiences, like being above 8,000 meters with another person. And even without all of this, you know, not being on a fixed line or, you know, not having masks and so on, you're still not talking to one another. Like talking takes breath and it's just like, that's far too precious. So there's more like hands, signals and looks are the way you,
00:28:31
Speaker
And those only work with people you know really intimately well. So I can, I can understand how you must be really isolated up there. So to bring us back to the spot, you know, then time where your, your stop, you've been stopped for now, I don't know, a half hour, 45 minutes. Um, and you know, your, how long were you stopped before you started moving again? And what happened next? So I think, I think it was about 90 minutes. Oh wow. One and a half hours. That's a big time.
00:29:01
Speaker
which felt I mean, it felt like 12 hours, it felt much, much longer than that. And I was, as I said, felt quite concerned that my toes were were were very cold. And I was doing a lot of stomping of my feet and and and kicking of my feet to try to keep that blood there. I luckily had sized up my boots quite probably bigger than they needed to be, which I probably paid the price on lower on the mountain with sort of
00:29:31
Speaker
the agility on crampons. But at that point when we were stationary and I was getting very cold toes, I was really able to clench my toes and keep clenching them and releasing them and clenching them and releasing them. And I could pull them almost completely underneath themselves. And that range of motion that I could get with my toes, I think was really helpful.
00:29:59
Speaker
And as I said, I was grateful that I was probably a size or two above what I would have preferred lower on the mountain. But anyway, once we got going, I think at that point we were just starting to see a bit of light. And that was off to our right side.
00:30:23
Speaker
then moved up onto the traverse and it was at that point that I saw the fallen climber of Muhammad and I think there's obviously a lot of confusion.
Ethical Dilemmas and Decisions
00:30:41
Speaker
We're aware that there were bodies up high on K2 but I don't think anyone was expecting there was going to be a body in this position and we
00:30:53
Speaker
kept, you know, everyone was climbing. Unfortunately, that involved stepping over Muhammad. When I got to him, he was, I mean, he, there was, there was somebody there with him. He had his, his parker hood, his down hood had been pulled over his face and cinched around his neck, sort of in the way that you would for a
00:31:22
Speaker
you know, a deceased person sort of as a, as a respectful measure so that passing people don't see, don't see his face. And, and so, you know, like, like everybody else, we, you know, we, we carried on climbing and moved right the way through the traverse. I didn't know anything about what, you know, whether or not
00:31:50
Speaker
this Mohammed had been there for like an hour or had been there for a year at this point. I'm guessing you just, it was kind of a surprise and it was just sort of unclear. Well, there was a person with him when I got there and they were, I didn't know, that person certainly was, I can't even really recall what that person was doing, but
00:32:20
Speaker
they were sort of squatting next to him. And so it was apparent that this was an accident that had happened this night. Or actually, to be honest, it wasn't really apparent that there was an accident or he just, you know, suffered from some sort of health issue or what it was. But certainly the fact that he was, you know, he was lying
00:32:47
Speaker
motionless on the on the on the snow and had had his you know somebody had obviously put his whoever had been involved with the rescue or had been involved with as a first responder had had taken the step of of pulling his his Parker jacket over his face which you know is the for you know there was two other deceased bodies on the mountain this year and and and they were from previous years and both of them had sort of similar
00:33:16
Speaker
measures taken just to preserve a bit of the integrity for the climber. And this is now on the traverse or it's past the traverse? So that was on the traverse. That was probably 10, 20 meters into the traverse itself. So yeah, so that was certainly a very heavy
00:33:45
Speaker
moment. It's one of those unfortunate things you don't know how you're going to react. I guess everybody's aware on high on Everest and these mountains there are dead people and people who died during the season that you're on and I don't think
00:34:13
Speaker
I've never, I did, I did see some, you know, had similar sort of experiences on, on Everest and, and, you know, I was quite emotionally shaken, I would say, at that moment then and, and again, on this occasion as well. It's, it's, it's certainly something I don't think you can, you can quite prepare yourself for.
00:34:37
Speaker
Yeah, I understand. I think since you brought it up and since it's part of the story, I think it is something that again is for people who have not been at these altitudes. It's really hard to understand because as you say, you don't even know how you're going to react
00:35:04
Speaker
when you're at home and then, you know, when you get there, the whole scenario is so different and you're so just like barely kind of alive yourself that there's not, um,
00:35:18
Speaker
you know, it's bound to surprise you what your reactions are. And also I think that the other thing is people tend to judge these situations from the perspective of being at home in your living room and like, oh yeah, I would, I don't know, do something or whatever. And, you know, that's nice to think about, but I honestly think that that's more about the people making those judgments and statements and them comforting themselves that they're somehow
00:35:45
Speaker
good and and a judgment against and it comes off as a judgment against other people but I would also say like you just you just don't know and like you know there is there is so little you can do for someone there like it's it's you know and you didn't even know if this it when does it happen and
00:36:12
Speaker
Yeah, it's just a difference. It's just a different world up there. Yeah, look, I'm entirely confident that if anybody had got to Muhammad and had felt that there was any chance of saving him, i.e. moving him would have been...
00:36:39
Speaker
Yeah, you would have done so. You would have been able to move, you know, you've been able to move him across to the bottleneck and start lowering down the bottleneck. People would have done it. People, there was, there was numerous, very strong people, Sherpas, people on oxygen. There was people, uh, that, that, that were around that assess the situation and, and unfortunately it was, it was an incredibly precarious position too.
00:37:08
Speaker
uh, that he was in and a bit of a pulley system would have had to have been set up to be even able to move him across to the bottleneck. Um, so yeah, I mean, there's unfortunately not a lot more I can, I can add other than, than, uh, yeah. And it definitely, uh, uh, as a part of this story, right? Like of this season and, you know,
00:37:32
Speaker
we could talk about this at length. I guess, you know, I just wanted to include it as it did happen and sort of, I don't want to pass judgment, but I do want to just sort of caution people about making judgments when they're at low altitude about what one may or may not be able to do when they're above 8,000 meters and presented with, you know, very, um,
00:37:58
Speaker
very difficult information. It's very difficult to interpret and understand. Maybe I didn't plan on going here, but I've had experiences where, one particular experience where we were sort of called upon on Makalu to try to rescue someone who had gone to the summit of Makalu and come back down to high camp. And we got there and like,
00:38:25
Speaker
We couldn't tell if they were alive or not. Like it sounds funny, right? But like we really could not tell like you couldn't, you know, you know, this is something that would never happen at home. And we're just like, well, you know, we, they weren't responding. We could, you know, it's, it's super, super cold. Uh, you can't like take a pulse. You can't like detect any respiration. Like you're trying to figure this out. Like you're yelling at them like, and this was, this person was in a tent.
00:38:54
Speaker
uh, right? Like at a camp and there was a bunch of people there and none of us knew what to do because we couldn't actually tell. Like eventually we determined the person was not, was deceased. And we, we, you know, we went on with our, our, our, we went back down actually. And that person, as far as I know, remained so there to this day, but you know, yeah, it's just, it's so hard. These are such hard situations.
00:39:22
Speaker
So I can only imagine how emotionally that would affect you, especially on the way up to the summit on your summit day. And, you know, so it's the line starts moving, you pass Mohammed and his friend, this person that's with him, everyone else is moving along, you go up there.
Final Stretch to the Summit
00:39:44
Speaker
What is the summit day like? How do you feel specifically like in terms of once you get back in the rhythm of the climbing?
00:39:50
Speaker
What's your body, how are your body responding? What's it like to breathe up there? So yeah, so, so now getting to the end of the traverse, the route kicks right and, and, and, and, and uphill, um, again. Uh, and at that point, because of the amount of weight that, that 90 minutes of waiting at the bottleneck, pretty much the entire group now is, is all in a, almost like a conga line.
00:40:19
Speaker
There was about 100 people, about 80 had turned around for various reasons, around the bottleneck. And there was about 100 of us moving along. And at this point, as I said, when the sun's up now and the sun was actually over the horizon, it really lifts you up.
00:40:48
Speaker
I started to feel, I probably actually hadn't done quite enough homework, I would say, on what the route does above the Serac. I think everyone gets so focused on those sort of iconic features lower on the mountain. And I didn't really know what was to come. I knew there was a snow ramp, but I didn't really know much more than that. And we were moving along, and I was
00:41:18
Speaker
actually quite, I think if we weren't in this sort of line, I probably even without oxygen would have been moving quicker than we were. So to put it another way, the line was moving slower than
00:41:33
Speaker
I feel like my non oxygen, non. Yeah. You're forced to go the pace of the slowest person at that point because everybody's just like in lockstep. There's no way to pass someone because you don't have the power to get out into the deep snow and go around, you know, one person, let alone a hundred. That's right. And there is, um, there was the rope fixing team obviously right at the beginning. So you're at the mercy of the speed of the rope fixing team. But on top of that, there was,
00:42:02
Speaker
at least one feature. I don't know if it's got a name, but it was like a blue eye section where it pitched up a couple of meters. And so everyone was obviously having to tackle that one at a time. And that at that altitude is quite challenging. Sort of front pointing at 8,500 meters or something is certainly quite challenging. Yeah, the sun is warming up the snow and the snow is probably starting to slab up and
00:42:31
Speaker
outline job. Yeah, but we were we were probably, I was feeling quite comfortable with the fact that we were at the right most point that we could have been effectively sort of against the sort of side of the of this Iraq. And we felt like we were out of out of the danger zone, if you like there. And just really tried at that point to
00:42:59
Speaker
really stay focused. Because obviously, we've had this, you know, a few, you know, these things lower down on the summer day, which had, which had really taken a lot of focus. And now I was really trying to bring myself back to recognizing that this is probably still quite a number of hours to the top. And I needed to really try to find a rhythm. I was obviously now starting to get fatigued, been on the go now for
00:43:29
Speaker
sort of, I guess, six or seven hours and really just trying to find a rhythm with my breathing and with my steps that would be sustainable. And then I could, you know, hope to get the next whatever it turned out to be six, seven hours done. And I think really above the
00:43:57
Speaker
where the mountain, where there's a snow ramp and where that sort of reaches a saddle before the final two hours to the peak, to the summit. At that saddle, that's where I was really feeling like I was now in a different, in a very different game to people around me because I would take, you know, I would take two steps. Yeah. That's, that's my experience. It's about one to 10. If you're lucky, if you're moving well,
00:44:25
Speaker
Yeah, I tried to find a system where I wouldn't stop and try to get my breathing down to a comfortable level because if I did that, my progress up the mountain would have been too slow. What I tried to do was to take those two steps, then I would breathe until I could just, and usually there'd be a bit of a delay with my breathing
00:44:53
Speaker
rate coming up. So I'd take the two steps and then I'd stop. And then a few couple of seconds later, suddenly my breathing rate had go right up. And then just when I started to notice it just starting to come down, I would move again. And I just found that it was, you know, it was forever uncomfortable, but it was manageable. And, and, and, and really just just just carried on like that. What was it like, uh,
00:45:21
Speaker
Yeah. Tell me about that. Like, tell me about like those last meters to the, to the summit. I mean, it's K2 is more of a gradual summit. It's pretty roomy up there. Uh, how did that, did you, what, what were you feeling? What were you seeing? So at that point, unfortunately there was quite a, quite a lot of cloud around, I wouldn't say it was socked into the point where it was probably 300 meters visibility. So,
00:45:48
Speaker
enough that you could see where you were going and where you come from. But unfortunately, we didn't get that iconic view of all the peaks of the Karakoram below. But stepped onto the top and there was probably about maybe 15, 15 or 20 other people on the top. I always find it interesting on the top of these summits, you don't feel, well, I don't feel
00:46:18
Speaker
a sense of elation, because I feel like, I genuinely feel a sense of the job's only half done. And that is a real cliche, but you really feel like I'm as, right now, I'm as far from safety and everything as I possibly could be. And I had experienced in the past that feeling of adrenaline flowing out of you at the summit, and then
00:46:47
Speaker
suddenly feeling incredibly tired the moment you take a step down the mountain. And I was aware that that was probably going to happen and it definitely did. But it being, you know, without oxygen, I really recognize that I probably only had a few, few minutes on the top. And then I really need to start, start thinking about coming down. I was probably about, you know, if there was, if there was a hundred people who summited that day, I was probably in the, maybe around 60th or something like that. So,
00:47:17
Speaker
There was quite a lot of people who'd already turned around and were already heading down. Um, I really felt like I didn't have the luxury of spending 30 minutes on the top or anything like that. Um, what time was it roughly? It's 11, about 11 o'clock. How did you, how did you feel you experienced some health issues? So when did you start feeling those, the lungs and the eye problem?
Post-Summit Reflections
00:47:43
Speaker
Actually, I didn't feel.
00:47:45
Speaker
I didn't feel those until I was back down at our camp four, at our lower camp four. So obviously, I was breathing heavily the entire summit push. And it wasn't really until I got back to the tent that I started coughing and having unpleasant
00:48:10
Speaker
pieces of lung and whatnot actually coming out. Even just describing that to you now, I have almost a physical reaction. For me, that would be so bad. And then you'd often gag on it and then maybe start to vomit. It is so uncomfortable. Oh, boy. That's right. Yeah.
00:48:41
Speaker
I have to say at that point, I was sort of worried, like, I was just, is this what pulmonary edema feels like? Or is it, I certainly was a bit, was a bit concerned, but look at the same time, I recognized that I was, you know, I was back in a tent. I was able to breathe. I wasn't, didn't feel like I was getting worse. I was able to, I was able to stay calm. I didn't feel like,
00:49:10
Speaker
I didn't, there was a few, you know, I had an understanding of a few of the pulmonary edema symptoms and I didn't feel like I was having those. So I just, I think, you know, and obviously you don't have anybody you can really reach out to for medical advice. So you're sort of trying to, I'm trying to sort of think about my own previous experiences and what I've, you know, there was actually ironically another guy on our expedition who had had pulmonary edema before.
00:49:39
Speaker
And I'd spent the last few weeks chatting with him about his experience. And so I think in some ways that gave me a bit of comfort when I was back in the tent that probably I just had a very exhausted set of lungs that were... Yeah, they had been highly stressed. And for those listeners that are not familiar, pulmonary edema is one of the
00:50:05
Speaker
one of the two main altitude illnesses and it's essentially a leaking of the fluid of the plasma from the blood into the lungs and your lungs sort of fill up with plasma. And one of the hallmark symptom is that you cannot catch your breath at rest. If it's just altitude, like normal high altitude, you stop and your breathing rate comes down.
00:50:34
Speaker
When you have pulmonary edema, that never happens because your lungs capacity is getting lower, less and less and less as the fluid kind of fills. And I've had it as well. It's very scary and very uncomfortable. That's another story. So you got down.
00:50:54
Speaker
Let's fast forward a little bit. You and Martin were in the Karakoram at the same time. Unfortunately, I don't believe you managed to meet there, especially since you climbed into after Martin had already headed out.
00:51:14
Speaker
It was a tough season. There was a lot of snow. We're going to have some other podcasts about some of these other expeditions and what they experienced in terms of the weather and conditions this year. And how was the reentry process and what went through your mind and what was your emotional journey like? So look, I think I've always tried to
00:51:41
Speaker
preserve that feeling of success being achieved until I'm back in base camp. And so I, I did really feel really when I got back into base camp, that was when it was quite, quite an emotional return back to the base camp as well, because I felt like I now, I now genuinely am out of harm's way. You know, you can, you can descend the bruisey spur and, you know, at the end, completely distracted by your own success and, and, and, you know, potentially have an accident or, or
00:52:11
Speaker
you know, you're really not, you've got nothing to celebrate, I don't feel until you're back at base camp. So, so then it all, it all felt very real at that point. And obviously we wanted to wait until our other teammates were down as well before we could really, really call it a success. But that was, yeah, that was really something. I mean, I, this,
00:52:38
Speaker
to climb K2 was an ultimate dream of mine. And then to do it without oxygen, which was really meaningful for me, was beyond my wildest dreams. I mean, I wouldn't have imagined this was something that I was capable of doing. And really, to be able to do it just gave me this very overwhelming sense of achievement that
00:53:05
Speaker
know, it's a month, months gone by now, it's feel exactly the same. I don't know if that'll change. It's a feeling I've not, I've not had after climbing other mountains, or had, or other successes. Well, it's a great feeling in that no one can ever take that away from you, right? Like you own that experience forever. And
00:53:28
Speaker
you put in a lot of work to, you know, as your coach, I kind of tested that and, you know, you can obviously test that personally since you actually did the work and, you know, you went up and climbed and it was all, it was a great, you know, I think that one of the, one of the,
00:53:46
Speaker
One of the reasons why we love mountaineering so much is because the climb itself is such a perfect sort of story. It's a classic. It's a classic story, right? You have sort of the working in isolation day after day, week after week, month after month for an unknown sort of reward. And you work really hard. You put it all out there. A lot is left up to chance.
00:54:12
Speaker
There's a lot of risk, there's a lot of danger, there's a lot of other people and personalities and influences, and you're literally living in a novel almost, it feels like. The novel has a conclusion, which is obviously...
00:54:29
Speaker
coming home, but I don't think it really ends there because he always carry that with you and truly becomes part of part of you and part of your story and part of how you know yourself. And, and I think that that's, you know, part of what makes mountaineering such a beautiful thing. Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. Um, yeah, it really felt like such a, a combination of puzzle pieces that all came together and then, and then combined that with,
00:54:56
Speaker
a lot of things that I couldn't control at all, all went my way or went our way as well. And so certainly felt very fortunate. So yeah, so coming down, so I mean, leaving base camp, I really could feel then that my lungs were not what they normally would
Return Journey and Recovery
00:55:22
Speaker
be. And even just the most mildest of
00:55:28
Speaker
sections of the trail that pitched uphill, I would lose my breath instantly. And I was a lot of coughing and all of that sort of thing. So the three days hike back out to Ascoli was, for me, was much more challenging than the seven days hiking up to base camp. Just obviously elated with the success and
00:55:56
Speaker
the fact that I was heading home and all of that, but certainly very, found it very challenging. I'd have to, there were sections in the first day where I would, you know, I'd walk 10 meters and then I'd have to stop in a coughing fit and then another 10 meters and be sipping water and all sorts of things, just trying to be able to keep it under control. But anyway,
00:56:20
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I don't think we should gloss over that because it speaks to how wrecked you are after these events. Like I remember, you know, just walking from, you know, Naga Parbat Base Camp back down to the trailhead, which is literally like a three hour walk. And it took us all day. And it was like walking up the final moraine that separates kind of the, you know, valley from the, you know, the road head.
00:56:50
Speaker
I mean, um, that was like, that was like its own summit. It felt like it's owned like a power pot, you know, 50 vertical meters, but you know, just exhausted. You're so depleted. It's really, it's, it's really kind of brings home, you know, when you experienced that for me, it really brings home just how hard these things are on to do and how, how much it takes out of you and what it's actually like to be up there.
00:57:19
Speaker
If you could magically teleport yourself from 100 meters below the summit and put yourself down on the trail to Ascoli, you would probably just feel just as bad. That's where you're operating from.
00:57:35
Speaker
and you're operating at above 8,000 meters. I don't think it's something to just gloss over. It's a real thing and you get home and you get to that thick air and you get to that nutritious food that tastes good again and you get to those beds and the showers and all of that thing and you just have this deep, deep fatigue that you can finally let yourself sink into, right? That's right.
00:58:02
Speaker
I think, yeah, as I said earlier as well, I allowed myself to enjoy it, the whole, you know, the summit outcome at that point, whereas I sort of hadn't prior to that. And then as you said, just, we had a, it was a very long, you know, it's 100, it's a hundred kilometer hike back to Escoly and it's not the, you know, it's not a trail,
00:58:29
Speaker
It's a well-defined trail by any means. A lot of it is on that moraine and it's the trails. You're constantly losing the trail. You find yourself slipping and sliding all over uneven rocks and whatnot. So it is a challenging 100 kilometers, certainly. And then to do that in three days was certainly
00:58:57
Speaker
Certainly we all had to dig quite deep for. But then getting down to Ascoli, that's when finally you're having, just as a personal preference, I don't really have meat during when I'm at altitude. And just although I love meat normally, I just choose not to have that when I'm sort of trying to acclimatize to altitude. So really back in Ascoli was where I first
00:59:27
Speaker
got back to having meat again and it was just, I mean, look, the food you have on these expeditions is, you know, I sympathize with the task of trying to cater for people up there because every piece of food is coming by donkey from Ascoli. Nothing's coming by helicopter. There's no private aviation that's bringing in, you know,
00:59:57
Speaker
anything like the sort of food people now expect at Everest Base Camp. So it was good to be back having fresh food, fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, those sort of things probably missed a lot. So getting back to those was great. And then really we were so keen to get to Skadoo that we got a jeep
01:00:26
Speaker
that night, so we did that sort of notorious or quite well-known drive between Ascoli and Skadu. We did that in the dark, which has probably made it even more confronting. But then got back to a proper bed in a hotel in Skadu. So that felt great, because it sort of felt like, OK, at this point,
01:00:55
Speaker
There's not going to be any more human-powered movement. It sure feels good to sit in a Jeep after you've been on your leg on two feet for a couple of months. Yeah, that is great.
Conclusion and Future Discussions
01:01:14
Speaker
Well, I think we're going to wrap it up here for today. And we're going to come back in another episode and talk about the training, both in 2016, 2017, when I helped you prepare for climbing Everest, as well as the specific training.
01:01:32
Speaker
physically, all the things we did in terms of your specific workouts and the hypoxic protocols we use that Martin helped direct and all of that. We'll get into that in a whole other episode. So look for that, everyone. And thank you, John. Thank you, Martin, for your input and time today. It's just not one but a community together. We're Apple athletes.