North Col Day - 7000m

Armed with my ‘Big Girl Boots” trekking poles, several layers of down, and the most positive attitude that I could muster up under the freezing cold windy conditions I began my 1.5 hour ‘slog’ to “Crampon Corner” and then onto the headwall of Everest North Col. It was 8:30am, about 40 minutes later than I’d planned to depart but I just couldn’t find the energy to ‘kick start’ the engine. I think I was missing my Starbucks vanilla latte and the morning papers to help get me in ‘the zone’.

I’d spent a rather restless night on the floor of the dining tent tossing and turning surrounded by an orchestra of lung-related mountain ailments. Yesterday I felt as though I could have run up to the headwall and back but today was an entirely different matter. The shale seemed to slide from under boots creating the dreaded “two steps forward, one step back’ effect. My left hand mitten didn’t seem to fit properly and I couldn’t’ manage to find enough oxygen to fill my lungs and feed my starving muscles. By the time 10am rolled around I was sat on a piece of ice at Crampon Corner, exhausted, out of breath.

I sucked on a frozen chocolate “Maximuscle’ energy bar and weighed my options. This was made easier by the fact that I really didn’t have many options to weigh. It was a simple case of get the hell up the Col, get the hell down ad get the hell back to ABC so that this 7000m milestone could be checked of the list.

I looked up at the headwall of the Col. It’s 400m blue-ice face glistened menacingly in the sunlight as ice crystles bounced off its surface. A steady stream of people could be seen making their way up and down the wall, their paths clearly marked by a white rope indicating ‘jumar up’ and red rope indicating ‘ way down’. I clipped onto the white rope and thought, “Let’s get this done and over with’ and pushed the jumar upwards as I felt my crampons bite into the thick blue ice. For the next 20 minutes, although it seemed like an eternity, I managed to find a rhythm of: three small steps, an arms length slide of the jumar up and then a three second rest. Admittedly I was quite liberal on the three second breaths which regularly stretched anywhere from five to ten seconds in duration.

Every ten metres or so there was an anchor where I would clip into a new rope and tie off the old one to continue onto a new section of the climb. Sonam Sherpa stayed with me for most of the ascent, quietly encouraging me and also acting as support during some particularly tricky sections where the traffic flow on the up and down ropes seem to resemble a New York city traffic jam. Looking back, I don’t remember much of the 4-hour ascent apart from focusing steadily on the various ‘landmarks’ hat had been flagged in conversation by Simon, Jonathan, Noel and Josh on the previous days mission - the blue ice ‘bobble’, the giant cravasse, the aluminium ladder, the 1st ‘cave’, the second ‘cave’, the final switchback… Each of these frozen landmarks passed but I didn’t even have the energy to feel a sense of achievement.

During an especially long rest step which found me laying flat on my stomach in exhaustion I looked up at Sonam who sat next to my splayed body whistling a tune as if he had just climbed Primrose Hill. I had about 15 minutes left to climb before the turn-around time but knew that it was time to start to concentrate on getting down. I’d reached about 6900m - not a bad effort - and would have effectively had about 3 - 40 minutes left to reach the ‘summit’. Taking into careful consideration the time, I began to focus on the bigger challenge ahead with the little ‘energy’ that was ‘left in the tank’. I was going to have to dig deep.

A fundamental difference between cycling and climbing is that with cycling you always have the thrill of a downhill to look forward to after a gruelling uphill. The wind in your hair, the feeling of sheer weightlessness… Unfortunately, this is not the case with high-altitude climbing where going down is often more treacherous than going up. Every time I watched as the rope slid through my abseil device as I slid down the seer ice face, carefully moving from one section to the next I could feel my lungs aching for breath and my feet longing for the stability of solid ground. When my feet finally hit solid ground and I could unclip from the fixed lines, was incredibly relieved and managed a lop sided smile giving Sonam a big hug.

The descent took 1.5 hours and as I looked up at Everest in its 4 o’clock shadow I had a newfound respect for the mountain. Exhausted and joined by other members of the team we turned on our crampons and headed back across the glacier to Crampon Corner. To our delight, a Sherpa had been stationed here for about 30 minutes waiting to greet us with a hot lemon drink to coat our stomachs before the 1 hour trek back down to ABC. Needless to say, sleep came relatively easily that night..!