The life and struggles above 6000 meters- A mountaineers life

Where the oxygen level drops to 60% of what you’re breathing at sea level, it is a place where humans aren’t meant to be! But for mountaineers such as myself, that’s a challenge that we love to take head on! Allow me to give you a glimpse of the life and struggles of being above 6000 meter (20,000 feet).

Before I started high altitude mountaineering, I used to watch a lot of mountaineering and climbing films. To me, the most fascinating part in those movies used to be the events that took place in high altitudes. The struggle, the pain of high altitudes, the science, the process and the techniques for acclimatization that the mountaineers followed really ignited my love and curiosity for high altitude mountaineering.

The process for high altitude mountaineering begins much before stepping into high altitude. The key to a successful expedition is a process called acclimatization. It is where you get your body used to the rising altitude, the changing climatic conditions and temperature. Let’s assume, if by magic you are taken directly from sea level to an altitude of 6000 meter, you will be unconscious in seconds and dead within a few minutes. This would happen because your body is not acclimatized. Let us understand what acclimatization means biologically and what happens in the body during that process. In a human body, oxygen is carried to every part by blood cells. With the rising altitude, the oxygen level and the air pressure in the atmosphere goes down. To help cope up your body of diminishing oxygen levels, your body regenerates blood cells to carry more oxygen. This process is called acclimatization. This process is gradual so one must not ascend more than 500 meter (1500 feet) in one day once you are above 3000 meter (10,000 feet).

We start off from base camp for the summit push at night because the snow is hard and stable and the weather is comparatively better during the night. The struggle starts when you start getting ready for the push. Usually it takes around an hour to get fully ready. The temperature during the summit night goes as down as -20 C and with winds, it could go even below. Because of this, we wear at least 5 layers of thermal wear that makes it very difficult to move your arms and legs to its full extent. Wearing the layers in the confined area of tent is a task by itself! Then there are the massive and heavy snow boots which restricts the movement of your ankles to a very uncomfortable level. With each and every knot on your boots, to zipping your layers, to wearing crampons becomes a tedious task at high altitudes. You'd be panting after doing the tasks as little as wearing crampons on your boots and you ask yourself that there lays a huge mountain in front of you to be climbed, how on earth would you be able to do that if you are panting by just tying your laces? But with that doubt and uncertainty in mind, you head off anyway. With each step you take on those relentless slopes and with cold creeping up on you, it drains you more and more. You can't stop to take a break even for a minute, as the cold hits you all of a sudden, so you keep moving at a super slow pace. All you can hear is the sound of your breathing and the typical sound of crampons hitting the snow. After some time, you find a comfortable pace. You take five step- stop then ten heavy breaths- then onto the next five steps. This is a cycle that gets formed and you try to stick to it. The toughest time for me has been between 12am and 4am. Sleep is trying to creep up your mind every time you stop. All that comes into your mind is that there is a warm comfortable sleeping bag in your tent waiting for you if you just turn around. You have to fight this desire of turning back because at the time, it seems so easy and effortless. You have to keep talking to yourself to keep awake and keep putting that one step ahead of other. I tell myself that this is where you wanted to be and this is what you wanted to do, now you are living it so don’t you dare give up, take that next step. I always convince myself that this is the last time I'm putting myself through this ordeal, but for tonight, I've got to push on and take that next step because I have worked too hard to be here, I've gone against too many people to be here, I've spent too much money to be here, so quitting because I am tired is no excuse. You wait the entire night for the crack of dawn, the ray of sunlight that appears on the horizon and when it finally does, you can see the mountain slope you've been climbing through the night and then you look up and see the summit from an angle you've never seen from before. The whole valley that you’ve trekked up since the last few days is below and behind you. It's absolutely amazing and at the same time you realize you've got a long way up. But you keep heading up because the summit now looks closer than ever before. You give it all you got in those last few hundred meters and then comes a time when there's no more land to climb, you reach the top of the mountain you had been training for so long. You take a good look at the view around you that you've only seen in pictures, it shows you emotions you didn't know existed. It satisfies your soul. It's a surreal feeling and I'm completely addicted to it.

I’ve often seen mountaineers use arrogant terms such as ‘conquer’ after summiting a mountain. The one lesson I’ve learnt by being up there is that you are no one to conquer the mountain and nature. You can only step on the summit a few brief moments and then the winds will blow away your footprints. You can only summit the mountain if the mountain God’s allow you to, so never forget to bow down to her and thank her. We are literally no one in the larger scheme of life and nature. We should keep our heads down, do our work, love and respect one another.

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