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And that brings us back to today, hanging of a rope which suddenly looks very thin, north face coat,feeling very isolated and helpless as the waves crash 100ft below me. The last of the pegs have gone and the wall seems a lot fresher, like it has just received a new lease of life.
When you are on the route, you can’t see any holds unless you are right on top of them and so you need to try to remember 40m of intricate slab moves which as you may guess is not easy. The rock is very frictionless meaning you need to look for edges to stand on, but the rock is also quite brittle and crumbly so small edges have a habit of breaking off! Add to this very spaced and hard to place small gear, combined with the slightly dubious rock I mentioned before and you have the makings of a pretty tricky undertaking.
To climb this wall, in one push, on natural gear,north face coats , from bottom to top will be an interesting journey. There is no doubt I will find it difficult, possibly more so than anything I have done before but I am looking forward to the challenge. The wall is one of the most impressive I have seen in the UK, truly inspirational and for me this is what climbing is about. From Base camp we have been hauling gear up to Camp 1 to begin our climb. On our first attempt to Camp 1 new snow slowed our travels and we decided to camp about an hour short of Camp 1. The new snow and hot weather made post holing really slow and taxing. The next morning we made it to Camp 1. We set up our tents, probed out our area and crawled into our tents to avoid the midday heat that has been getting so hot! It is amazing that it can snow and that water bottles can freeze at night and then the sun comes out and it gets so hot, probably close to 100 degrees in the tents. We have been draping out sleeping bags over the tents during the hottest part of the day to help keep things cool inside. After one night at Camp 1 we headed back to Base Camp to regroup and get ready to head back up. This is our program for now, I am guessing we will trek through the ice fall to Camp 1 about five times before we move to Camp 2, Camp 3 and for a summit push.
On our next trek to Camp 1 we brought tents and gear to set up Camp 2. Heading to Camp 2 might be the most technically challenging and is where we will see some fixed ropes. After meeting with some of the other climbing groups it was decided that we would help fix some ropes between Camp 1 and 2.
Waking up early was easy after spending most of the day in our tents hiding from the sun. By six we were heading toward the bottom of the face and feeling good about moving up. The bottom of the Gasherbrum 2 face is the steepest and most technical. Here, on a section called the Banana, there will be areas of fixed line so these sections will be safer to climb.
At the top of the Banana our team split into two groups. One group went higher to set up Camp 2 while Kris and I began working to re-fix all the rope below.the north face coats , I found it enjoyable and fun to help Kris and learn more about fixing lines.