원정 개요

From expedition website (https://projecteverest21.com):

28 May 2021

We turned around. After five rotations through the Icefall and being sick for almost 10 days, my body was tired and empty, and I lost many kilos in the process. People asked me if it was difficult to turn around, but honestly it was not. It was sad and emotional, but the decision felt good. After climbing and guiding for more than 10 years, I know how I should feel like to even try a mountain like this. And I didn’t feel like that at all…which meant too much risk if we would have pushed on. So we packed our camps and all our gear, almost 35 kgs of it, and descended back to BC… that was it.

We used no oxygen and we carried all are own gear up and down the mountain. We even carried our poo back to BC when there were no toilets and cleaned up the track of rubbish between BC and C2. And by doing it this way it made me proud; we stuck to our own beliefs, although it was sometimes difficult and hard. Many people didn’t seem to understand us on the mountain or why we wanted to do it our way, but that was not important. We knew what our climbing ethics and style were, stood by it and I feel we can now leave this mountain with our heads held up high.

25 May 2021

The trip through the Khumbu Icefall went smoothly, although you could see it was getting late in the season: crevasses were larger and snowbridges thinner. A lot of fresh, ice debris was evident everywhere and I was glad we only had one more passage through it to do.

Camp 2 (C2) was relatively quiet and we could easily see where everyone was: the slow, ant line of people heading up toward camp 3 (C3) and South Col, aiming to catch the next window when the wind dropped. And it was blowing furiously higher up, it could not have been easy on the climbers to hang around there waiting for the break in wind.

We continued our summit push toward C3 the next day, but it didn’t start well. Roeland was feeling weak and I was also not in my top strength, but we decided to continue toward the bergschrund. Perhaps we’d find our ‘oomph’ on the approach? Perhaps it was just morning slowness at altitude?

Sadly, it wasn’t. As we continued Roeland got increasingly slower and I was wondering how I was going to manage to get the gear in my bag, and get myself to C3 and South Col — it felt so, so heavy. Roeland slowed down even more until we decided to stop for a break and then he admitted that he could not go on. His tank was empty and although I had not reached the same level yet, it was obvious that summit push wasn’t going any further uphill anyway. Our bodies just put a stop to it.

As hard as we had tried to recover, after the illness, it seemed that we never quite got the full 100% strength back, which we’d had before, and it became evident when attempting to get higher.

And as we stood below Lhotse face looking up at the windy C3 and beyond, it was obvious: to continue was unwise and unsafe. By pushing to C3 we’d enter a more difficult, demanding, and dangerous terrain, and for this you needed to be in top form, which at that point, we were not.

The decision to turn around was not hard as such, because it was very black and white: your health comes first, always, but of course it was crushing, sad, and disappointing. We had poured so much time and effort into it, trained like crazy people for two consecutive seasons, and now we didn’t even get to test ourselves higher up! It felt hard, but it would have been even harder to justify continuing up like this.