Day 6 adendum...

Hey,

Might as well start with what I missed last night in the cold. 15.x to 18.x thousand feet. All previous days were easy and almost boring. Not so, day 6! We had about 2500 ft of gain and at the easiest, it was class 3. At the hardest... Well, more on the 5.3 free solo later.

We started off on a very enjoyable scramble reaching for some pretty lofty, but cloud covered goals. Hmm, I guess I could have said we were reaching for the clouds... Anyway, this trip and the constant clouds and constant rain at low altitudes (I'm writing this at 3100 m in a dumping rain storm) tells me that next time, we avoid the rainy season like the plague! I'd rather compete with the hordes of tourists than NOT SEE ANYTHING!

Back to the story. We were scrambling good class 3/4, so of course the team gave up on reminding me of pole pole (slowly). We came upon a part of the route that climbed sharply but it looked like an ice cascade, not something that a bunch of guys in 15 yr old leather boots and a jackhole in well worn 5.10 approach shoes should be messing with. James scouted another route and got stuck 3 ft off the trail. But his judgement seemed good, so I took over. I scrambled onto the route and started cimbing. It was very sustained, technical climbing, made difficult by the lack of oxygen, the 33 lbs of pack (long story short, the guy the porters in several companies have taken to calling commando muzungu, took lunch food and a thermos full of hot tea in addition to the standard 14 kg pack I carry), the break-away nature of the rock (think crappy Pinnacles rock), etc. It felt like 5.7, but I tend to over rate climbs under adverse conditions and it certainly wasn't class 4 with about 100 ft of non-stop moves.

As I finished, I looked back and Joshua (cook) was half-way up and positive that he could move no further. I found a rock to park my pack against and I dropped down the climb to meet him. He looked a bit scared and wanted a hand so I braced mysel and reached out. Three assists later, he cleared the route. He only "wore" a backpack, no porter load, and he was sure the porters couldn't make it, and we knew James couldn't. I scouted more routes and found what looked ideal. Sustained Class 4/5.0. Meanwhile James (guide, so no porter load either) found a route that he could make it up.

I dropped down the 5.0 I found and met Simon. I grabbed the 22~25 kg bag (varies by food/trash/gas, etc) off his neck and immediately wondered not only whether it was humanly posible to climb today's route with that load on your neck plus about 15~20 kg of your personal needs in a backpack, but also if I could manage to be helpful! Holy crap! I took the load, stuck it against the wall, made a move or three, hauled the bag up, repeat until we made it about 100 ft up... Back onto the "trail". Babu, carrying a similar load, but having been climbing the mountain for 20+ years, as many as 20 times a year, remembered an alternate route and went after that. James and Joshua maintained position with Babu and sent me to follow Simon. Well...

Simon didn't know where to go any more than I did. Look around for trail and follow it. Argh. After a while, I remarked that the scree we were on was getting close to vertical and it felt unsafe. About 5 minutes later, about a football field to our right, James, Joshua, and Babu called out to us: we were way off track. Crap! Crossing 100 yards of near vertical scree is not... Crapcrap, there goes Simon. He went for a 60 meter slide and came to a stop uninjured among some big boulders. Lucky for him, those boulders also provided a reasonable way to cross the scree I decided NOT to test my luck by seeing if I could survive the 200 ft slide of death, so I continued to make slow progress. Some places, nothing stuck and you couldn't 'press' into the wall to prevent slides. In those places, I controlled my slides with dug in hands and toes and aimed for likely suspects. Sometimes they tuned out to be just what I wanted, somwtimes they inceased my sliding mass. Exciting to say the least.

When I finally got to the finger of rock I was supposed to be on, it took a few hundred feet of class 4 to get onto the 'trail' which mixed class 3 and 4 for long distances.

Very awesome day and so far, by far, the most memorable, even if visibility was a hundred feet or less most of the time!

Reaching the crater was kinda anti-climactic. A big giant field of permafrost with the remnants of some big glaciers. We dropped gear and climbed the mountain in the middle of the crater (Hans Peak? - they all say its pronounced hash peak, so I guess I need to look it up) where we found a great view of a giant hole with a fearsome smell of sulfur.

Now that reminds me. I felt rock solid up the Western Beach. Best adventure in ages. Hard, but I was strong and could sprint when necessary, could shoot up a climb, could drag a 22kg bag while technical climbing, etc. BUT, a few hundred feet higher, in the crater, walking up a very non-steep, very easy climb, I felt wasted. I could barely move. I chalked it up to the end of adrenalin

But that night, frezing cold aside, I couldn't sleep and constantly awoke needing O2 desperately. The crew said the sulfer displaced a lot of the O2 and the effective amount of oxygen was really low. But... I smelled sulfer when we could see into the pit. I didn't smell it elsewhere in the crater.

I feel like I wrote already about the cold..Yes, f'ing cold. That comes into play on the summit bit...

Joel