8th August
August 9th, 2009 by Jake
2.30am. Ouch. I hardly felt as though I’d even slept before I was groggily trying to stuff my sleeping bag back into its stuffsack. It was too early to have anything significant for breakfast, so Kamil brought us biscuits and tea and some stale bread to get us going. The camp was a flurry of activity, with porters anxious to get collect their loads and make an early start towards the Ghandogoro La. Most of the porters don't have headlamps, but ours, and those of our staff cut swathes of light through the inky blackness. The cloud was low and although the moon was full, provided almost no ambient light to guide us through the darkness. As we set off it started to snow, and the precipitation got steadily heavier throughout the early morning. We walked along the moraine and across the ice of the glacier to the base of the Pass, which took us about 1.5hours. A thin trail of dark shapes illuminated by flickering torches lead up a rapidly steepening slope, seemingly without end. As the slope progressed beyond about 25 degrees, a single thin rope ran alongside the trail through the snow, to act as a handrail for the porters. We walked like a train of elephants, our weary heads practically resting on the pack of the person in front.
It took about another hour and a half to reach the 'summit' of the Pass, which was also just as it was beginning to get light. Coming down the far side, Fabrizio commented on how he'd never seen so much snow in the Hushe Valley, and that normally the mountainsides would be green and lush, not covered with snow and ice. The descent was even more treacherous than the ascent, as we came down the steep, snow and ice encrusted pathway, complete with a liberal sprinkling of loose stones underfoot to ensure that correct balance was almost non-existent. Although there were more ropes running down the trail as well, many of these were either held together with duct tape, or were so iced up that you couldn't grip them with your hands.
Eventually as the dizzying angle began to become more gentle, I could similarly begin to relax a little. The path turned from a series of jack-knife switchbacks to a more gradually winding one as the trail reached towards the base of the valley. After an hour or so of walking along first the moraine, and then the valley side we reached something that we hadn't seen for nearly 8 weeks - grass.
Lush green grassy slopes covered in wild alpine flowers of a multitude of beautiful colours. It was a wonderful sensory overload as the wonderful palette of colours, sweet floral odours and richer, more oxygenated atmosphere sent the brain into a spin. Upon reaching the camp, most of the porters had freshly picked buds behind their ears.
By 9.30am with the team all safely in camp, we had a real breakfast of tea and omelettes in our mess tent, just as the heavens opened. The first flowers, greenery and rain for weeks. Beautiful! Every step out of the mountains brings the return of the wonderfully mundane things that we usually take for granted, but have missed so much during our time at K2 BC.
It took about another hour and a half to reach the 'summit' of the Pass, which was also just as it was beginning to get light. Coming down the far side, Fabrizio commented on how he'd never seen so much snow in the Hushe Valley, and that normally the mountainsides would be green and lush, not covered with snow and ice. The descent was even more treacherous than the ascent, as we came down the steep, snow and ice encrusted pathway, complete with a liberal sprinkling of loose stones underfoot to ensure that correct balance was almost non-existent. Although there were more ropes running down the trail as well, many of these were either held together with duct tape, or were so iced up that you couldn't grip them with your hands.
Eventually as the dizzying angle began to become more gentle, I could similarly begin to relax a little. The path turned from a series of jack-knife switchbacks to a more gradually winding one as the trail reached towards the base of the valley. After an hour or so of walking along first the moraine, and then the valley side we reached something that we hadn't seen for nearly 8 weeks - grass.
Lush green grassy slopes covered in wild alpine flowers of a multitude of beautiful colours. It was a wonderful sensory overload as the wonderful palette of colours, sweet floral odours and richer, more oxygenated atmosphere sent the brain into a spin. Upon reaching the camp, most of the porters had freshly picked buds behind their ears.
By 9.30am with the team all safely in camp, we had a real breakfast of tea and omelettes in our mess tent, just as the heavens opened. The first flowers, greenery and rain for weeks. Beautiful! Every step out of the mountains brings the return of the wonderfully mundane things that we usually take for granted, but have missed so much during our time at K2 BC.
