What goes up, must come down*

*except dead mountaineers.

Well, thanks once again for your donations. Courtesy of the generosity of Johnathan, James and Steve we are now tantalisingly close to the terra incognita of having to look for summits outside the British isles. Our current total places us comfortably into the realms of the 5 highest mountains in Britain. We're slightly higher than the summit of Sgor an Lochain Uaine (and no, I can't pronounce it either), just shy of the summits of Cairn Toul, Braerich and Ben Macdhui, and quite a way above the point on Ben Nevis when I realised I'd burnt myself out.

About 8 years ago, I did the Three Peaks (Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon) in an earlier and less ambitious fundraising exercise. Up until that fateful trip, my approach to going up hills had been idiosyncratic, to say the least. I would go very fast for 5-10 minutes, then stop and get my breath back while everyone else in the party caught up. This technique worked very nicely for a long time and even worked for my first experience of proper altitude (an ascent of the 4,095m Mt Kinabalu on Borneo, which we did as part of our honeymoon), but I discovered on Ben Nevis that it relied on one critical assumption: that I was faster than the other people in my party.

The Three Peaks team included a couple of guys who'd recently been trekking in the Andes and who found my supposedly blistering uphill pace quick but sustainable. As a result, I didn't get my usual rest periods and somewhere on the ascent of Ben Nevis I found my legs just didn't want to go any more. I struggled through the rest of the climb, relying on frequent cans of Red Bull to get me up the steeper bits [1]. It was a painful education in mountain walking technique. I slowed the team down for the rest of the trek. though not so much as the thick fog that descended when we were on Scafell Pike. [3]

Faced with the climb to Namche Bazaar - 600m of steeply ascending switchbacks, in many ways the toughest climb on the way to Everest Base Camp - I remembered my time on Ben Nevis and tried the more traditional technique of finding a pace I could maintain indefinitely, and just keeping on keeping on. It works.

As part of my preparation, I've been scaring myself stupid mentally preparing myself by reading a number of books on mountaineering. Currently I am reading Nick Heil's Dark Summit, which tells in chilling terms how several climbers were left to die during the 2006 season on Everest. Previous seasons - most notoriously the 1996 one - had seen similarly shocking death tolls [5], but severe weather conditions had always been a contributory factor. In 2006, the weather was cold but clear, stripping bare the truth that, above 8,000m,  most individuals are so close to death themselves that they have almost no capacity to help others. By a similar token, it is almost impossible to remove bodies from a mountain. The dead of Everest are mostly still where they fell; some of them have become, in the ghoulish irony of extreme altitude,  landmarks in their own right.

Fortunately for me, Aconcagua doesn't take me into quite such rarefied altitudes. There are still a few deaths every year, but from what I have read these are almost exclusively people who are taking proper climbing routes up or cutting short the acclimatisation schedule, or both. I'm not doing either of those. There is still a risk of bad weather, and there's no certainty that I will acclimatise [6], but I am pretty confident of reaching the highest camp and making a bid for the summit. If I make it, it will be a bonus.

High mountains are littered with more than just dead bodies. Discarded equipment - tents, oxygen bottles, unused food - is a real problem on more popular mountains. It had become a particular issue on Aconcagua, and the Argentinian authorities have moved to change that.

A climbing permit for Aconcagua now comes with two numbered plastic bags. On the way back down, you have to hand them back in, full, or face a fine. One is for your rubbish. The other is, well, for your poo. Unpleasant, but better than leaving it exposed on the mountain, I suppose. Top tips, apparently, are to double-bag, and to leave the bag outside overnight so that it freezes. The rhetoric of "take only photographs, leave only footprints" takes on a very different tenor once you get to grips with the practicalities.

p.s. Coming soon - a fundraising prize draw with 5 superb prizes - watch this space.


[1] If you believe, as some do, that Red Bull is essentially pure evil in a can [2], you may shudder to think about what that has done to my immortal soul.

[2] Like the thing in the microwave at the end of Time Bandits, only drinkable.

[3] Visibility dropped to about 10 feet, and the mountain came alive to the sound of emergency whistles as teams tried to locate each other. Armed with a shiny newfangled gadget called a GPS (and they really were new back then - less than a decade ago), our team navigated to the top by OS co-ordinates, and then made the mistake of trusting a team who thought they knew what they were doing on the way down. They might have known in clear weather, but fog plays tricks on you. Another important mountain lesson.

[5] Worth reading about in its own right. Start with Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, but they read the alternative perspective of Anatoli Boukreev's The Climb. Then, if you can, catch the IMAX film "Everest", which was meant to be about Tenzing's son climbing Everest, but ended up being about the 1996 disaster.

[6] Acclimatisation is an inexact science, and can affect the same person in different ways at different times. For instance, Ed Hillary broke some ribs in the assault on Lhotse that was his next big climb after Everest, and thereafter couldn't climb above 6,000m. He never reached the summit of another high mountain again, though he made up for it by driving a tractor across Antarctica, jetboating up the Ganges, and building virtually every public building in the Khumbu region [7]

[7] Including, splendidly, rebuilding the monastery where the 1953 Expedition was blessed (after it burned down due to dodgy electrical wiring), and personally supervising the construction of the region's airport at Lukla. Which, in a fitting touch, was renamed Tenzing-Hillary Airport after his death, making possibly the only person in history to have built the airport that is named for him.

Das Boot

If there is one thing in my preparation that is more appealing to me than statistics, it's kit. Few things call to the British male like the siren song of an opportunity to buy new toys, and mountaineering sings it like a particularly delectable version of Mozart's Queen of the Night. High altitude mountaineering doubly so, because altitude gives you an iron-clad excuse for getting tip-top stuff. Better err on the side of quality, because your choice of kit has a big bearing on questions like "Will I succeed or fail?" and "Will any bits of me fall off as a result of frostbite?"

Perversely, there's also a deep satisfaction to be gained from being cheap, as long as you're confident that the stuff you're getting is good enough. Websites were scoured for end-of-season bargains (new kit comes out in the autumn, so the summer is a good time to buy). Teeth were gnashed at the realisation of bargains missed - joining the BMC to get cheap travel insurance could have saved me money at outdoors stores if only I'd waited! Old favourites were revisited (finally an excuse for a new Alpkit down jacket). One notable success was finding a neighbour giving away a pair of Nepalese-made down sleeping bags (they'd traded up to something lighter and in slinkier fabric, but these were warm enough for me).

Throughout it all, there was one nagging doubt: the question of boots. A pair of ordinary walking boots had got me as far as Everest Base Camp (and then fell apart on me on a wet weekend in Snowdonia), but serious altitude demands serious boots. Leather boots freeze at the temperatures we'll experience above base camp and they don't have enough insulation to protect your toes. They also tend to have too much flex to hold on a crampon [1]. Mountaineering boots are instead made of exotic plastics with daft names [2] and come in two pieces. The plastic bit is the outside and is basically bombproof. The other bit is a kind of adult-sized bootee of highly insulating foam that you put on first and then shove into the outer.

One consequence of the two-part construction is that sizing is a bit tricky. Most people find that they need to go up at least one size and I was no exception. Experimentally trying on a pair in Cotswold Outdoors, I could tell within a few painful steps that I was, to paraphrase Chief Brody from Jaws, going to need a bigger boot. That would be size 13, then.

Which made one decision for me. A lot of people rent their boots when they get out to Mendoza. There are lots of gear shops, mountain boots don't need breaking in like walking boots, so why lug a pair half way round the world when you can hire locally? Because you don't want to fly half way round the world only to be defeated because no-one has size 13 boots. That's why.

So began a pilgrimage to Arundel, because when the going gets tough, the tough go to Pegler's. Pegler's, if you've never been there, is expedition kit heaven. It's a specialist outdoor kit shop that has been so (deservedly) successful that it's metastasised along Arundel's arterial roads, sprouting branches known as Pegler's On The Hill, Pegler's Round the Bend and Pegler's Below the Knee [3]. And there I found quite possibly Britain's only pair of size 13 nearly new Scarpa Vega High Altitude boots, plus also a pair of second hand crampons, an ice axe, a pee bottle, a cuddly toy, a teasmade [4] and a new pair of walking boots to replace the ones that fell to pieces in Snowdonia.

I staggered back to my car laden with goodies like a know-it-all child at the end of Crackerjack. Kit acquired. Job done.

Only one problem. A close inspection of the ticket for my flight from Buenos Aires to Mendoza reveals a miserly baggage allowance of 15kg (plus 5kg hand baggage). I haven't weighed them yet, but I'm guessing that the boots, sleeping bag and crampons will pretty much do for that. There's only one thing for it. I'll have to travel wearing all my layers at once like a sort of multicoloured Michelin Man.

[1] a vicious concoction of spikes that straps to your extra-stiff mountaineering boot almost exactly like a child's rollerskate and grips snow and ice almost exactly unlike a child's rollerskate.

[2] Imagine, if you will, Ikea's product naming team. Now imagine a team of people sacked by Ikea for their lack of subtlety and wit. And that is how you end up with a brand name like Peebax.

[3] Presumably named by someone whose CV was rejected out of hand by Ikea for wit, subtlety and ability to spell.

[4] No, not really.

Marilyn makes things prominent

Your generosity continues to impress me. Courtesy of Jonathan, Gib, Chris, Adam (who's recently completed a cross-channel charity swim), Paul, Alex and Nini, our fundraising is now into distinctly tartan territory. Not counting Gift Aid, we are about a metre shy of the summit of Beinn a' Bhùird, a Munro in the Cairngorms and the 11th highest mountain in Britain.

The Munros, as you may know, are the mountains in Scotland with a height of over 3000ft, named for a list drawn up by Sir Hugh Munro. I should qualify that by saying that we are talking about absolute height here - that is, the height of the summit above sea level. But that isn't the only measure of height that mountaineers care about. They also deal in the currency of prominence (or relative height).

Prominence is measured by looking at how far you would have to descend before you could start climbing to a higher peak. If that sounds a bit esoteric, we can make it more concrete by thinking about the South Summit of Everest. At 8.,749m, it's actually the second highest summit on Earth - and yet it's not on many people's lists of mountains to climb and the first people to reach it aren't much remembered [1]. The reason is that the summit itself stands only about 10m clear of the southeast ridge. You could probably walk out of your front door right now and find a hill with more prominence in a few minutes. Even if you live in Norfolk. 

So, prominence matters to mountaineers, and sufficiently that they have all sorts of lists drawn up around it. There is a list of British mountains with a prominence of at least 150m. They are known as the Marilyns, which tells you a lot about mountaineers' sense of humour. 

One consequence of thinking of mountains in terms of prominence is that the list of most prominent mountains is very different from the list of highest mountains. All of the world's really big mountains are part of a group of ranges forming a giant C shape around the Tibetan plateau, and so the "key cols" that you have to descend to before you can start your next ascent tend to be quite high in their own right. Prominence lists tend to prioritise mountains on islands, or the highest points on each continent. K2 is only the 22nd most prominent mountain. Aconcagua, by virtue of lording it over the Americas, is the second most prominent peak. 

Sorry about that. I'd intended the prominence discussion to be a brief intro to talking about the kit you need for this sort of expedition, but clearly my British male obsession with statistics has taken over once again. And now it's late, and I have an early flight, so you'll have to wait until next time to hear about size 13 boots, crampon extenders, and why they are a real headache for my baggage allowance.

[1] It was Charles Evans and Tom Bourdillon, who reached it as part of the first summit attempt by the 1953 expedition that put Hillary and Tensing on the main summit.