(pix: South Summit photo taken from Hillary Step)
May18, 2006: March to the summit
"Below us, the train of climbers’ lights started to fade away. I saw that some teams decided to abort their climb, I couldn’t tell how many but it seemed like we were the only ones going for the summit. I looked back at the retreating climbers, wondering if we should do the same. Doubt began assailing me again, “Will I just tire myself out, and lose the chance to summit?”
I shook my head, took a deep breath and concentrated on nothing but moving my feet. We were on our own when we got lost. We wasted more than an hour just walking laterally on the first part of the icefall desperately looking for the starting rope line. The rope-line will confirm that we are going the right way and the rope will offer good protection from a fall when we are clipped to it. I began feeling hopeless, “Here we are at 27,000 feet in the middle of the night, tired, cold and miserable, lost in a middle of an icy hell!” Thoughts of a previous disaster played in my mind. Jan Krakauer’s Into Thin Air clearly described the place where climbers got lost and died of exhaustion and hypothermia, and I knew that we were IN it somewhere."
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