ADRIAN BALLINGER'S JOURNEY WITH THE BIVOUAC 9000 - SUMMITING EVEREST

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roadwarrior

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https://blog.favre-leuba.com/mt-everest/

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You Can Plan for Everything…

…but Mt. Everest is still Mt. Everest. If there is one takeaway from my eleventh season on the tallest mountain in the world, that is it. A season that seemed to be going perfectly, where the weather, the team’s strength, and my company Alpenglow Expedition’s logistics, came together for a perfect, almost easy summit. That’s when the unexpected, really the impossible, actually happened, and everything was out the window except survival. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My team’s goal this year was to climb two 8000 meter peaks in less than a month. We began on Cho Oyu, the world’s 6th tallest peak, 8188m/26,864ft. I’ve summited and skied Cho Oyu twice before, but this season felt different. There were only thirty-ish total climbers on the mountain this season, and when we arrived in Base Camp (already acclimatized thanks to our Rapid Ascent system) no one had done any climbing on the mountain yet. But we only had one week before we needed to move across to Everest, so we dove in.

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Everest: The Mountain With No Mercy

And we almost did. Until 8600 meters the night was perfect and we knew we would stand on top. And that’s when Everest reminded us that the impossible can happen. Above 8600 meters our oxygen systems began to catastrophically fail. The regulators that reduce the pressure between the bottle and the mask “exploded”, allowing oxygen that should last 4 hours per bottle to shoot out into the atmosphere (in geysers that went meters into the air and sounded like a jet engine), emptying a bottle in a minute or less. Only a few climbers (including me in 2017) have ever summited Everest without supplemental oxygen, and the effort requires an entirely different acclimatization schedule. For our team, losing oxygen is immediately a grave situation, with climbers only having minutes without oxygen before they begin to lose strength and cognitive ability.

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