| Report Type | Full |
| Peak(s) |
Gasherbrum 2 (26,309') |
| Date Posted | 08/09/2019 |
| Date Climbed | 07/17/2019 |
| Author | mattr9 |
| Additional Members | mgorb |
| Gasherbrum 2: Success and Shortcomings in the Death Zone (Report 1 of 2) |
|---|
|
Gasherbrum 2 (26,309') Expedition Report 1 of 2: Background: June 14th - 26th: Arrival to Pakistan and Trek to Basecamp via Baltoro Glacier ***My intention is for this to serve as a helpful guide for anyone looking to go into the Karakoram. If you are looking at attempting any of the Karakoram range mountains, you will likely follow a very similar program for getting to and from your base camp. This first report deals heavily with the trek in and just gets into the climbing aspect, the second report will be almost entirely centered on climbing*** June 27th - 29th: Acclimatization Rotation 1 June 12th-14th: My lovely mother, Mary Jo Randall, so graciously took me out to breakfast at Village Inn in my hometown Brighton, CO before loading me up and taking me to Denver International Airport. There was not a shred of worry in her demeanor as she wished me luck and watched me go through security from the overhead balcony, almost as if she was watching her little boy leave for something new and exciting… wait a minute. Maybe its a mother thing that she was able to hide her worry so well, or maybe she believes my training, preparation, and decision making are adequate to bring me back safely? Either way, she is my biggest supporter and I love the F out of her.
Flights to Boston, Dubai, and Islamabad were all pretty standard and there were no issues with luggage accountability, thankfully. My climbing partner for this trip, Matthew Gorbett (Matt G), met me in the Boston Airport as he had been visiting his family in Ohio and flew from there. During our 4 hour layover in Dubai, we decided to do some #TouristThings and see some sights. We hired an Indian cab driver, Piki, to drive us to some sights and then actually walk us around so that us silly Americans wouldn’t get lost. We saw an extravagant water show at the base of the Burj Khalifa, and then we went up in the worlds tallest building and had spectacular views of Dubai from thousands of feet up. I got to show Matt G a few things in the Dubai Mall (when I headed out to Afghanistan iOnly in Dubai are there things like "6 Star hotels", "A++ rated resorts) and "VVIP: Very Very Important Person". Clearly they want to be a step ahead.
We arrived to Islamabad in the morning on June 14th and once we rounded up our luggage, we were greeted by Ghulam Mehdi, or just Mehdi as we knew him, right outside the airport. Mehdi is the brother of Manzoor, the owner of the logistics company we utilized for this trip, Karakoram Tours Pakistan (KTP).The airport was a lot nicer than I expected, nicer than the Kathmandu airport actually. I would come to find out that it has been renovated recently and some of the climbers who hadn’t been to Pakistan for a few years were blown away at the improvements. We were taken to our hotel in Islamabad, the Envoy Hotel, where we promptly took cat naps to try and get over the chaos that traveling halfway around the world does to your internal clock. For dinner we ate at Kabul Restaurant nearby and met all of the other members that we would share base camp support with: Ben Kane from Australia, Sean James from Great Britain (but lives in Dubai), Jan and Libor from the Czech Republic, Mikel from France, and Atanas Skatov from Bulgaria. There were also 2 other members, Mattia from Italy and Segei Mingote from Spain, that would be joining us at Gasherbrum base camp later on, after they attempted Nanga Parbat. After dinner we promptly went back to sleep in an effort to get on the new sleep schedule.
June 15th - 16th: The next day we flew to Skardu in the morning (members who had been to Pakistan before told us how lucky we were to have good weather to fly out without any issues, awesome!) and drove to the K2 Hotel where we would spend two days before heading by Jeep to Askole, the last drivable village before we would begin trekking.
At the K2 Hotel, there are many newspaper clippings and posters showing the rich history of climbing in the karakoram, but what really catches my eyes is a single ski that is hung up on the wall that has “LAILA PEAK SKI WRITING” written on it and is signed by 3 skiers, one of which is Cala Cimenti. There was also the poster for our expedition, pretty cool to see your face plastered on some vinyl haha Foreshadowing alert: Cala Cimenti would end up asking from the summit of Nanga Parbat and completed the first ascent/ski descent of G7! This guy is no joke, and also super cool and nice. His partner ended up falling on G7 and getting really banged up, Don Bowie and Denis Urubko headed up to rescue him to camp 1, where he was flown to Skardu. When Cala Cimenti eventually got back to base camp, I ended up buying his spare set of skis from him…. Now why would I need to buy his extra pair of skis?…. #foreshadowing
During our 2 days in Skardu, I went on 2 easy jogs through the streets to get moving and on one of them, Matt G joined me and we ventured up to a nearby high point near “Kharpocho Fort” where we got some great views of the city of Skardu.
June 17th: The jeep drive from Skardu to Askole takes about 6 hours and is quite bumpy, and since we were 6 people crammed in a jeep, Matt G and I switched multiple times between sitting shotgun and sitting Bi*** in-between Mehdi and 2 other Pakistanis. There are a bunch of suspension bridges that you cross in the jeeps one at a time, with wooden planks comprising the driving surface. Pretty cool experience to drive on a swinging, moving bridge over a river! Upon arrival to Askole, we met the large group of porters that would be carrying our gear to base camp and we got to see our living quarters for the next ~40 days: Pakistani knock off “The North Face” 2 person tents.
June 18th-19th: We departed for our first day of trekking. Today we would walk to Jhola Camp and the next day we would walk to Paiju camp, both of these days are pretty much flat and the net gain in altitude is minimal. At Paiju we run into Jace, a Canadian student working on his PHD in tourism, who I also ran into at the Skardu airport upon arrival. He was at Everest base camp this season and his PHD work is looking at what motivates people to travel to “the death zone”. We go into detail about the obvious issue with crowding on Everest and about the ethics of using Sherpas and oxygen. My opinion/rant on Sherpa and Oxygen Usage My lack of experience does not make me an expert on the subject at all, but I don’t feel I need in depth experience to know where I stand ethically about HOW I climb these mountains. I believe that one should aspire to RISE to the challenge of summiting an 8,000m peak on their own terms, its a huge endeavor! If you haven't been preparing for a long time for your expedition, your probably wrong! What I don’t believe in is ARTIFICIALLY LOWERING the challenge of climbing one of these giants through the use of Sherpa (to carry your gear and equipment, and at times carry/pull the client up, quite literally have seen this on Manasu) or supplemental oxygen (certain studies show staggering differences between perceived altitude due to using oxygen and the actual altitude, that resting at the summit of Everest on full flow is similar to being at 4,000m/14,000+’!!! That’s ridiculous!). By making oxygen and Sherpa so readily available for clients, as seems to be the norm now, the entry criteria is much lower to reasonably attempt an 8,000m peak. This allows people with no self sufficiency or climbing skills to get away with coming here, totally reliant on their Sherpa or guides to keep them safe. To me, self-sufficiency in the mountains is HUGE! if you aren’t self-sufficient, you are just a liability to others’ safety. Whereas one day the norm was to use no oxygen or Sherpa, today it is the exception. I would rather have a much lower chance of summiting and a less than perfect track record (and spend less money!!!) than to give up my ethics just to get to the summit. I climb under my own power and if I get into a bad situation I am confident that my skill set can get me out (excluding any mega emergency), simple as that. #RantOver #ChangeMyMind
June 20th: We took a rest day in Paiju and I did a 3-4 hour scramble up to about 13,000’, probably wasn’t the best idea, should have just rested, but whatever! June 21st: Today, we would take our first steps onto the Baltoro Glacier and camp at Urdukas Camp. When I first thought about walking on the glacier, I imagined a lot of walking on ice, boy was I wrong. The glacier is surely made of ice, but it also carries with it the tons and tons of rock from the mountains that it slowly breaks down. These rocks stay on the surface and so it actually looks like you are walking on rocky terrain. If you were to swipe away the rocks, just a few inches below you will find the ice. We walked on the glacier most of the day, but Urdukas is situated on an adjacent slope to the right of the glacier and is perched up higher than the glacier with some large boulder and grass. I heard Urdukas was not a nice campsite but I found it to be quite beautiful. Overlooking the glacier and having amazing views of the Trango group and Cathedral peak was quite amazing!
June 22nd: Our next day of trekking would bring us to the Goro II camp, maybe this is the crappy camp people were talking about yesterday… It was on the middle of the glacier, so just rocky terrain, and there was human feces everywhere. Pretty sad at the lack of government intervention in the upkeep of the Baltoro glacier’s cleanliness, as well as the cleanliness of base camp. Years ago there was a deliberate effort by the government with toilets implaced and a system to get human feces and garbage removed, but that seems to not be the case now. Later on when we were departing, I would bring these issues to light with the Liaison Officer and folks in the town of Hushe, hopefully these issues do not fall on deaf ears, but from the looks of it, they do. I had seen a nice looking slope that led to a couloir on the right side of the glacier, so I geared up and headed towards it. Unfortunately the snow was so wet and heavy that I turned around pretty early to not get into any steep terrain. The ski down was marginal at best, so wet that I had to point straight downhill just to keep any speed. Again, probably wasn’t a great idea to waste energy, but I was feeling good and I like to learn lessons the hard way haha June 23rd-24th: I had been getting excited to reach Concordia in hopes of seeing K2 and Broad Peak. Today was the day. Once we got to Concordia, weather was preventing visibility, but later on in the evening, K2 and Broad Peak showed themselves in the fading light of the day. Absolutely magnificent! “One day” I told myself, “One day”.
Since the donkeys with our duffel bags couldn’t get through on the snow, we had to wait a day in Concordia to allow the porters to shuttle our equipment forward. The rest day was relatively uneventful and it was truly nice to take a real rest day. June 25th-26th: We awake to a fresh foot or more of new snow, so we all geared up in footwear that was more appropriate. I threw my skins on and started off skinning. I put some lightweight La Sportiva racing skis on thinking they would be good to go, but using skins that aren’t designed for your skis is rarely something that will work well, as I was to find out. I ended up walking almost all of the way from Concordia to Gasherbrum base camp in my AT ski boots… Only the last 30-45 minutes or so was I able to use the skins on some very easy terrain to finally arrive. Upon arrival, we had hoped that things would be ready for us, nope. We had to dig out our own platforms which was quite a lot of work and then had to wait many hours before getting some food. Not sure if that is the norm, but the other members with more experience seemed to think it was not the norm. Either way, I was glad to have finally arrived to base camp! From here on out Matt G and I could climb at our own discretion, with just the weather telling us yes or no.
The next day we spent preparing our loads for our first acclimatization rotation. I approached this highly analytically, identifying what gear was absolutely essential for our first rotation and what was optional, listed in order of priority. We decided on a total weight of 35# for our first rotation, split up the group gear as evenly as possible, and then packed up. We ended up having all of camp 1 and 2 equipment (tent and stove) plus some extra food and fuel. My beloved skis would come up on the next rotation. We went to bed excited to go up, we would awake at 1:30am to take advantage of the overnight freeze to negotiate the icefall and reach camp 1.
June 27th - June 29th: Acclimatization Rotation 1 June 27th: We awoke at 1:30 and didn't end up getting moving until a little after 2:30, but once we were moving we made quick progress. I made sure to be hyperaware of not overexerting, since my experience of getting HAPE on Manaslu has left me nervous of a recurrence. Because of this, I was that annoying guy who kept saying "slow down" haha poor Matt G was probably thinking "This slow, lazy mofo" haha Within an hour or so we were at the base of the icefall. There was so much snow this year that apparently the icefall was much easier to cross than in years before. Within another 2 hours we were at the top of the icefall with a long snowy plateau in front of us. At the end of the plateau, perched on a little hill were 2 Polish climbers, Yarik and Yanos. They had established a camp 0.5. We continued onward and although there wasn't much new snow on the ground, myself and Matt G were the ones breaking trail and we were moving slow. There were a few other groups around, but every time we would pull over to let them do their share of the work, they would just follow our lead and pull over... It was mostly high altitude porters that didn't seem to understand what we wanted them to do. The only other person who I guess was "brave" enough to do some extra work was a well known Italian climber, Marco Confortola, and his high altitude porter. Before you top out into the large basin that holds camp 1, Marco charged ahead and thankfully the rest of the groups followed them now. Matt G and I decided that the heat that was now pressing on us, was too much at the moment and so we pulled over and draped one of our tents over our ski poles in a sort of hasty shelter. We melted some water and took a much needed reprieve from the burning sun. We continued on after 30 minutes at our little shelter and were pleased to find that we had only been about 30-45 minutes away from camp 1 when we made our little hasty shelter. 10 and a half hours after departing, we arrived at camp 1 (~19,400'). At this point in time there was only about 5-6 tents in camp 1, with the majority of them being the Korean team who had been there for a few weeks already, attempting G1. We got my North Face Mountain 25 tent set up and promptly got inside to get out of the heat. Our diligence to a slow pace and taking the small break to get out of the sun paid off, I felt great and fresh!
June 28th: My plans for the day were to either begin to open the route up to camp 2 on G2 up the banana ridge, or follow the path the Korean team had made up to camp 1 of G1. As I was getting ready, Matt G stated that his head was feeling weird and so he opted out of going higher today. Not wanting to cross the basin solo, since there are hidden crevasses, I went over to the 2 Polish climbers who had also arrived the day before from their camp 0.5 and asked them if they were interested in poking around on the banana ridge. They agreed and at 11:00am we headed towards the banana ridge as a rope team of 3. I led the way to the base of the slopes leading up towards the banana ridge and then Yanos opted to take lead as he begun establishing a bootpack up to 40-45 degree slope. Since we were on steeper terrain and still roped up, I decided that if one of us were to fall, it wouldn't be likely that we would catch the person, and on 40-45 degrees, the chance of falling is pretty minimal anyways. I yelled to the Polish climbers that I was unroping and there seemed to be some confusion as to why I was doing so, but we weren't placing any protection and it was a very manageable slope. Needless to say, the 2 Polish climbers turned around pretty shortly after and I told them I would continue and would be fine crossing back to camp 1 solo. They turned around and I continued, just me and the mountain, just how I like it. I continued up for another half hour or so before the visibility really started to diminish, I didn't want to push it too much and end up in a white out on my first day on the real mountain haha I had been carrying all of our camp 2 gear and supplies so that I could cache it at my high point, and so I dug a pit and buried the bag of supplies, ensuring to mark it with 2 tent poles for identification. I down climbed and within an hour I was back at camp 1, where Matt G was feeling much better after consuming a fair amount of water and calories.
June 29th: We woke up at 5:00am and were going by 6:00am. We were presented with clear skies overnight which meant a solid freeze, but also really cold temps! I made a mental note to bring my overboots for my ski boots on the next rotation, since they are not super warm to begin with. We made quick work up the already set in bootpack to where I had buried the camp 2 cache. We dug it up and divided the gear evenly between ourselves before continuing up the slope, establishing a bootpack. I felt in my element. The conditions were mostly snow with some ice sections, on 40-45 degree slopes, it reminded me of all of the spring skiing I did this year in Colorado, just another day kicking steps up a steep snow slope. Soon we had gained the actual ridge and just a little higher we stopped for a quick little break at ~20,300'. We decided since the angle had mellowed out, that we should emplace the cache here. It was about 9:30 so we decided that 10:30 should be our turn around time to avoid being on the steep snow slopes when the sun hit them directly (the slopes were SW facing, so they wouldn't get direct sunlight for a little bit).
We traversed to the left, crossed a bergschrund via a sketchy snow bridge (I cursed myself for leaving the rope at the base of the slope...), and then pointed straight up a pretty darn steep slope, 50+ degrees by my estimates. The going was slower here since the steeper it gets, the bigger your steps need to be so that you don't posthole into your last step. by 10:20 we were at ~20,500' and decided to call it a day and head back. Within an hour and a half we were back to the tents at camp 1, where we saw the rest of our base camp buds who had come up that morning and seen us climbing on the ridge.
We decided to head back to base camp no earlier than 8:00pm to allow the newly melted layer of snow to refreeze, but by 6:45pm we got antsy and started heading down. The going was good until we got to the top of the icefall. From there to basecamp was a post holing nightmare, it really drained our morale and energy! It took us 4 hours to get down to base camp, where I promptly chugged some Tang I had been craving and then went to sleep. June 30th - July 3rd: Base Camp Recovery June 30th - July 3rd: The next 4 days were very relaxed and our focus was on recovering as much as possible to be ready for a second acclimatization rotation, with the goal of getting a night at camp 3 (~23,000') which would set us up for a summit push. We also got our loads figured out again and my pack would be 37# this time with my beloved skis and camp 3 gear Our Pakistani Liaison Officer, Tahir, had said "Welcome to base camp" earlier in the trip, and with his accent it sounded like this Jamaican song I've heard before that says "Welcome to Jamrock". I was inspired to write a little rap about the trip so far and unveil it to our group members. I decided to poke fun at each member, and they seemed to love it. My delivery was shaky, but it led to a relaxed atmosphere and everyone seemed to be put in a solid mood, mission accomplished! I was really enjoying the company of most of the other members. Unfortunately, Mikel decided that the mountain was outside of his margins for safety and he made the decision to go home. He was a very level minded man and he was the person that everybody loved, it was sad to see him leave.
Hope you have enjoyed our journey thus far, it just getting started! Thumbnails for uploaded photos (click to open slideshow): 
|
| Comments or Questions | |||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Caution: The information contained in this report may not be accurate and should not be the only resource used in preparation for your climb. Failure to have the necessary experience, physical conditioning, supplies or equipment can result in injury or death. 14ers.com and the author(s) of this report provide no warranties, either express or implied, that the information provided is accurate or reliable. By using the information provided, you agree to indemnify and hold harmless 14ers.com and the report author(s) with respect to any claims and demands against them, including any attorney fees and expenses. Please read the 14ers.com Safety and Disclaimer pages for more information.
Please respect private property: 14ers.com supports the rights of private landowners to determine how and by whom their land will be used. In Colorado, it is your responsibility to determine if land is private and to obtain the appropriate permission before entering the property.
