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.