Apa’s plan for the mountain
I sat down with Apa yesterday and we talked about his plan for climbing Everest for the 20th time. The center of the plan is minimizing the number of times he has to cross the dangerous ice fall. Many old timers on the mountain have told me that warmer seasons in the past couple of years have made the ice fall more dangerous than ever. Avoiding it as much as possible is the only sensible thing to do.
Apa’s advantage here is that he requires less acclimatization than most other foreign climbers. So, this morning he left for his first rotation. In his first leg he will go up to camp 2 and come back down in the same day. The next rotation he will sleep at Camp 3 and come back. The final trip through the ice fall will be on his summit push. So he will have a total of six trips through the ice fall.
Compare that to when he was working as a climbing Sherpa and had to navigate the ice falls up to 30 times in a season. I asked Apa what his main concern was with the ice fall, expecting a technical answer. He replied that it made his family nervous, and he didn’t want them to be concerned. Classic Apa.
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