Word: snow
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Tsurphu, the capital of the Kagyupa (Black Hat) Tibetan Buddhist sect, is hidden at 4,480 m in the remote and desolate snow-capped peaks of central Tibet. Founded in the 1180s by the first Karmapa, it is a mere 50 km, but a rocky two-and-a-half-hour drive, from the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. The road is little more than a path distinguishable from the rest of the moonscape by the occasional tire track. My Lhasa-born Tibetan driver has to stop twice to ask farmers the way. Finally we reach a rickety bridge over a fast...
...shelf into a crevasse, get waylaid by an avalanche, develop cerebral edema from lack of oxygen and have your brain literally swell out of your skull) and the banal (become disoriented because of oxygen deprivation and decide you'll take a little nap, right here, in the snow, which becomes a forever...
...reason to the lay of the frozen land. On the other hand, "it is so specific in terms of where you can step," Erik recalls. "Sometimes you're walking along and then boom, a crevasse is right there, and three more steps and another one, and then a snow bridge. And vertical up, then a ladder and then a jumbly section." It took Erik 13 hrs. to make it from Base Camp through the icefall to Camp 1, at 20,000 ft. Scaturro had allotted seven...
...this was their last shot at the peak. That's why when Erik and Chris Morris reached the Balcony, the beginning of the Southeast Ridge, at 27,500 ft., after a hard slog up the South Face, they were terribly disappointed when the sky lit up with lightning, driving snow and fierce winds. "We thought we were done," Erik says. "We would have been spanked if we made a push in those conditions." A few teammates gambled and went for it, and Jeff Evans and Brad Bull heroically pulled out fixed guidelines that had been frozen...
...vertical fall into Tibet on one side and a 7,000-ft. fall into Nepal on the other, the South Summit, at 28,750 ft., is where many climbers finally turn back. The 656-ft.-long knife-edge ridge leading to the Hillary Step consists of ice, snow and fragmented shale, and the only way to cross it is to take baby steps and anchor your way with an ice ax. "You can feel the rock chip off," says Erik. "And you can hear it falling down into the void...