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I believed I'd imagined Kent Harvey's call to me at ten minutes to four in the morning. I didn't have any alarm set; it was a rest day coming on and I was sound asleep in my tent. So fully unconscious that Kent called me several times and when I finally responded, I had no idea where I was or what was going on. It was dark, and as he suggested that something had happened that I might want to be concerned with, I finished rubbing my eyes and zipped open my door. The beauty of the scene seemed unreal and impossible. The moon had set, and the sun wasn't close to being up, but there was starlight on the Khumbu Icefall, Nuptse and the great bulk of Everest's West Shoulder. Kent was saying that he'd just seen a fairly large avalanche come down the Shoulder-sending a cloud of debris across the Icefall-and he was concerned that climbers may have been caught. I listened to him, but I was having trouble taking my eyes from the bright planet perfectly framed above the Icefall and bracketed by the mountains. I did manage to look down and left enough finally to see several small strings of headlamps, just where I knew the avalanche had to have come down. I turned on my radio, taking a guess that my friends at IMG had people in the area. I listened to Mark Tucker calmly and carefully check in with his Sherpa team to find out that they were ok...another near miss; and his Sherpa team was able to tell him that the only other team in the area was also ok and that everybody was going on with their climb. I related this to Kent...stared at the planet again for some time and then went back to sleep in my warm down bag. In the morning, we all looked up at the troublesome serac on the West Shoulder to gauge its stability. The same huge fin of ice had been threatening all week. It had sent down the major avalanche we'd earlier reported which caught some of our team on their way to basecamp while I was pushing up to Camp II. In the morning light, it appeared hideously undercut and I don't believe any of us expected it to last through another day. I went so far as to take "before" photos of it. But to my knowledge, no Everest climbers did anything different yesterday morning because of the serac. It wasn't like the Icefall route would be closed by any proclamation; there wasn't some safer way to go instead. This isn't the only mountain we frequent that has chunks of glacier ready to fall, and I for one have mistakenly pronounced dozens of crazily tilted hotel-sized ice-blocks in danger of imminent collapse only to watch them hang on for months. But this serac sent down a handful of lesser slides as the morning progressed...enough to keep our attention focused...and our cameras ready. I wanted the thing to come down. I certainly didn't want to walk under it again in its decaying state. At 10:35 AM it did come down. I was sitting in my tent doorway, and I didn't need to fully look at Everest's West Shoulder to know that this was the big one. In this valley of avalanches, the quality of noise was easily different and distinct for this particular slide. I fumbled with my camera and began shooting. I didn't see the tiny dots representing climbers in the avalanche path. Partly because they may not have been visible down in the rough terrain of the Khumbu Icefall, and partly because I was totally mesmerized by the power and majesty of the white explosion I was witnessing. I kept taking pictures as the cloud engulfed basecamp. I knew it was only a cloud...we were nowhere near close enough to be hit with actual debris, but it was ominous and disturbing even so. It rolled over us like a volcanic ash-cloud, blotting out the sun and rocking the tents back and forth in its wind while pelting us with a "snow" of overly large ice crystals. And then, quite quickly, it was gone and what remained of any mist in the air was quickly burning off in the bright sun. I assumed that it had been a lucky day...that what needed to happen had happened and that nobody had been affected. It is possible that I went on in this belief for a full twenty minutes before word began to filter around that people had been caught in the avalanche. I began putting on my climbing boots and quickly loading my pack...by then, word had it that it was an acquaintance of mine of several years and many mountains. My friend had been caught along with his client and the Sherpa working with them. I saw Willie and Damian Benegas going past our camp, both speaking into their radios. There were a number of Sherpas moving toward the start of the Icefall route, including Tendi and LamaBabu from our own team. Seth Waterfall was ready before me and stood patiently as I finished up my climbing harness, then we started walking fast and I joined the ongoing radio scramble to get men and equipment to the accident scene. Since IMG's Sherpas and clients were descending the route at the time and were very lucky to come through unscathed, they were among the first to report the situation via radio, and so all other teams migrated to the IMG frequency. This seemed right since Mark Tucker and Ang Jangbu Sherpa at the IMG basecamp had shifted into their familiar role in bilingual crisis management. Seth and I checked in and learned that HimEx was offering up a full rescue pack cached near the start of the route. Russell Brice came on the radio, directing us to the gear. We loaded up heavy packs full of oxygen, sleeping bags, medical equipment, and rescue hardware and began climbing. We listened as various expedition leaders, guides and Sherpas reported in and offered up a mountain of resources. This from supposedly competing companies-none of whom had any reason to think that their own staff or customers were involved or injured. We began to feel the sense of community that is so often overlooked or ignored in modern media coverage of the Everest "scene." And we began to feel the intense sun that we normally avoid working under at midday. The glacier surface was brilliant in its new coat of "snow" from the avalanche and seemed to be reflecting 100% of the sun's radiation onto the skin I hadn't had time to protect in my dash out of BC. Within minutes under the big packs, we were covered in sweat. It turned out that a descending Indian team was instrumental, along with IMG's Sherpas, in getting my friend and his client out of a crevasse that the avalanche had pushed them into, but now the radio chatter was focusing on the Sherpa that had been with them. He was missing. Willie and Damian Benegas (Argentinian-American brothers leading two different Everest teams) were among the first Western professionals on the scene, and we relied on their reports of the situation as we continued to climb. My friend, badly hypothermic and shaken, was being placed on a stretcher as Seth and I arrived in the blast zone. We dove into the medical supplies we carried in an effort to help stabilize him. Seth concentrated his efforts then on escorting the remarkably unscathed client down. Willie Benegas and a strong team of Sherpas worked to get the stretcher down, as I then went up to join Damian and perhaps 20 Sherpas who were searching for the missing man. After 15 minutes or so, I was encouraged to hear Willie describing my friend as "combative" enough that they could no longer carry him on the litter. He preferred to walk, as it turned out, and of course that was a fine outcome. At the "point-last-seen" I was amazed at the bravery and high energy of the searching climbers. Damian and a British guide were roped up and jumping crevasses in an effort to reach islands of glacier that might offer better views. The Sherpas had fixed ropes down a series of steep, debris-strewn ice gullies and were exploring every crevasse and alcove along their path. I kept looking up at the origin of the avalanche, where it appeared that a tooth had been broken from some massive jaw. Unfortunately, there were still other teeth, and the searchers were clearly in a terrible position should a second slide follow the path of the first. I checked my watch and my radio to confirm that two-and-a-half hours had passed since the avalanche. I began asking the team to suspend the search. The missing man's boot, with crampon still attached, had been found close enough to his last known whereabouts that we were each haunted to imagine the power of the wind that had hit him. His pack was eventually retrieved some 100 meters distant. The clues only made it more difficult to quit. The Sherpas all agreed that there was now no chance of finding a buried man alive. They agreed that it was time to quit and move to safety. But they wouldn't. Nobody wanted to be the first to leave. Tendi and LamaBabu continued to twist in ice screws and rappel into crevasses..."Just this last one." But they couldn't find the 31-year-old father of two. Knowing how many of them were also fathers, I insisted that they quit-eventually they listened to me, to their own leaders and their own valid concerns. We walked down through the ice rolls and ridges of the lower glacier without much talking. Dozens of good folk had come out from basecamp and stood on the ice ridges with water and tea for the search teams. Upon reaching basecamp, the teams melted back into a tent village composed of twenty different expeditions, but not without a number of quiet handshakes and a hundred expressions of thanks. To each other...to a missing man's sacrifice...to the good luck of survivors.

The Four Day Climb led by RMI Guides Christina Dale and Dominic Cifelli turned at the top of Disappointment Cleaver early this morning.  The team had clear skies above, but due to recent winter-like storms, route conditions on the upper mountian are unstable. The team is in route to Camp Muir and will be descending back to Paradise in the early afternoon.

Congratulations to today’s team!

The team enjoyed a well deserved rest day today. We leisurely ate breakfast, sipped coffee, and explored the city. We stay in a hotel close to the main square of the city so everything we could want is within walking distance. Tiny street markets, beautiful churches, old dive bars, and the colors of the buildings make Puebla a true joy to wander in. The team met up for dinner at a local favorite, El Mural de Los Poblanos, where we shared stories of our days and recalled our climb of Ixta. After we walked to my favorite ice cream place in town and enjoyed the sweet treat to end the night. We leave early for Tlachichuca tomorrow, but not before one more good nights rest in our beds.

RMI Guide Dominic Cifelli

The advice “show up in the best shape of your life” can mean very different things for different people. People from all sorts of different backgrounds come to Mt. Rainier for an adventure and they can all have great success, but it helps to know what you are training for. For an Ironman triathlete, perhaps it isn’t so much about showing up in the best shape of their life, but in the right shape: the physical demands of mountaineering can be very different than those of a triathlon. For someone venturing into the mountains for the first time, building overall aerobic fitness and core strength may be the focus.

 

Numbers that help to understand the climb:

17,982’ (5480m) of total elevation gain and loss

21 hours on our feet

45-55 lbs of weight potentially in your pack (pack weights do decrease for summit day)

30,000+ steps up and down (no one has ever actually counted them all for us)

2/3 roughly the amount of oxygen available to us at the summit versus sea level.

36 hours in which to do all this (*four day summit climb)

 

First off, aerobic fitness: For most, summit day on Mt. Rainier will be far and away the longest period of sustained exertion that they have ever done. A typical summit day involves 15 to 16 hours on our feet; as a general guideline that includes an hour of packing and prep, 10 hours of climbing to the summit and back to Camp Muir, an hour of packing and recovery at Muir, and 3 more hours down the Muir Snowfield. Even though the overall pace of our movement is slow, the sheer amount of time on our feet and moving adds up to be exhausting. Now consider that the previous day, the team spent 5 or 6 hours climbing to Camp Muir, and then got maybe 6 hours of somewhat fitful sleep prior to waking for the summit push. Having a deep aerobic base is the only way to be able to push through all these hours, and consequently, the bulk of your training should focus on this realm.

 

Recovery from anaerobic spurts: While 99.5% of the climb is accomplished in that zone of aerobic endurance, there are small sections of increased effort. It may be just a handful of tricky steps through a boulder jumble on Disappointment Cleaver, or a more sustained section of ice climbing through a tricky, steep section on the Kautz Ice Chute. At altitude, since we are breathing in less oxygen, these increases in effort can quickly become anaerobic, and the ability to recover mid-effort from these bursts is essential. Interval training helps to increase your body’s anaerobic threshold (the level of exertion at which you begin to create large amounts of lactic acid) and also builds your body’s ability to metabolize that lactic acid, effectively recovering. This way, though a few tricky steps may leave you feeling breathless or winded, you are able to recover in a matter of moments with a few deep breathes and fall right back into your rhythm.

 

Strength: While many focus on overall leg strength — consider that we will essentially be doing shallow squats all the way to the summit — and it is important, core strength and balance are perhaps even more important and more often overlooked. Throughout the climb you will be carrying a pack of varying weight. Your core muscles are responsible for helping to manage a load that is trying to pull you over backwards, keeping it stable and your posture in a position for efficient movement, and a base of core strength allows you to accomplish the more athletic moves that steeper climbing requires. While your core is doing the work to deal with your pack and much of your balance, the small muscles of your ankles and lower legs have to deal with ever-changing terrain: no step is the same, and your ankles and knees have adapt to the changes in slope and pitch to allow the rest of your body to remain in balance. Overall strength is still important, but strength exercises that incorporate an element of balance and coordination or involve your core will pay huge dividends once you find yourself on uneven terrain.

 

As you build your training plan, take these elements into account, and assess where you already stand. If you come from a strong endurance background, continue with that, but place more of your focus on recovery and core strength. If endurance sports are new to you, start here, focusing on building your base (as that really is the foundation of the rest). Most of all, have confidence that if you follow your plan, your will show up ready for the adventure of a lifetime!

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Questions? Comments? Share your thoughts here on the RMI Blog!

100% Summit!! RMI Guide Jake Beren and Team reached the summit of Mt. Baker today via the North Ridge. The team had perfect weather to take on the challenging route, and climbed strong. Congratulations Team!

Thursday June 20th (day 10 on the mountain)

We woke up to a chilly morning in camp 3 at 14,200 feet elevation. My tent mate Dave and I were lingering in our warm sleeping bags, listening to the crunchy steps of our teammates who had gathered enough courage to step outside.  Everything in the tent that could freeze had done so unless it was tucked inside our sleeping bags, including water bottles, sunscreen and even pee bottles…. The inside of the tent was crusted with a thin layer of frost that would rub off or drop down on us whenever we touched it.

I have to admit that the early mornings in the tent are my least favorite part of mountaineering. Just the thought of unzipping the comfortable sleeping bag and pulling on stiff, frozen pants, forcing my feet into rock hard, ice-cold mountaineering boots and crawling out of the tent into the outside winter land makes me shiver. Still, I know that only a few minutes later life is much better after taking care of the morning routine and sitting in the kitchen tent with a hot cup of coffee, courtesy of our guides. Today was an “active rest day” which mostly meant hanging around camp and doing some ascender training, but also entailed a back carry trip down the slope from our camp to retrieve the cache we left a few days ago at 13,500 feet elevation. By the time we left camp just before 10am the below zero morning had turned into a blisteringly sunny day, and coming up the hill back to camp with heavy backpacks we were sweating through our single base-layers. Otherwise, it was a pretty uneventful round trip if it wasn’t for the fact that I did a complete face plant going down the hill while fiddling with my phone and tripping over my crampons. What a rookie mistake…

Coming back to camp we were treated to an amazing brunch consisting of burritos hot from the camp stove served by our bad ass guides Seth and Nicole. They had been granted a day off from carrying loads thanks to their super human efforts the last couple of days, accompanying our team mates Tait and Sophia who decided to abort this climb, all the way from camp 2 to base camp and then back again (a 20 miles round trip with 5,000 feet elevation gain!), only to rejoin the rest of our team on the 3,000+ feet ascent with heavy packs & sleds to camp 3 the next day. Truly impressive!

Given that today was mostly a rest day I had an opportunity to reflect on the experience thus far. I’ve been on a number of guided climbs in different corners of the world over the years, including some that have been expedition style like this one. They’ve all been great experiences and my guides have generally been top notch. However, I do think there is an RMI Difference based on what I’ve seen so far.  Not only has the guiding been outstanding thanks to our world class guides Dom, Seth and Nicole, but the overall logistics, route planning and camp facilities have been flawless. Climbing mountains is hard as it is, so having delicious cooked meals (not freeze dried), 3-person tents between 2 of us, and a few extra rest days in the itinerary has made this experience as enjoyable as possible and will hopefully allow us all the best odds possible to summit the mountain. A special shoutout to our lead guide Dom who is expertly masterminding the giant chess game that it is to climb Denali while at the same time fostering a genuinely positive and supportive team environment.

Just a quick note on the team before I wrap. We’re all from very different backgrounds as highlighted in Rossi’s blog a couple of days ago, and with a variety of mountaineering experience. However, 10 days into the trip I’m really impressed by how we have bonded into a cohesive team that helps and supports each other. We’re now all seasoned Denali mess tent small talk, being an introverted Swede, I do enjoy listening to it! �� fantastic experience so far! And a gentle request to the Gunnarsson family to leave some comments - we can’t have Dave get all the attention!

RMI Climber Mattias Gunnarsson

The Mt. Shuksan - Sulphide Glacier Climb led by RMI Guide James Bealer were unable to make a summit attempt on Mt. Shuskan due to rain and wind. While not the mountain experience the team hoped for, the team's time on the mountain was a true mountain experience. The team is back in town and preparing to warm up over burgers and beers.

Good afternoon, This is the Carstensz team checking in. We had a hike today into our base camp we got in pretty early this morning, and have spent the day getting ready for a prep day tomorrow. So tomorrow we will probably climb 6 - 8 pitches of rock as a warm up for Carstensz which we hope to attempt the following day. Things are going great. We are well established at base camp. It is raining still but there are long breaks of good weather during the day. And we're certainly hoping to take advantage of that. That's it for right now. We'll check in again tomorrow after we've done our training. Good night to all. RMI Guide Alex Van Steen

On The Map

RMI Guide Avery Parrinello and the Mt. Shuksan Sulphide Glacier August 16 - 19 team reached the summit of Mt. Shuksan yesterday.  Avery reported they had a beautiful summit day and had safely returned to camp for the evening.  Today the team will break camp and continue down to the trail head concluding their program.

Congratulations to all the climbers!

Feliz Ano Nuevo from Mendoza! Our last dispatch was from Aconcagua's base camp and we have certainly covered many miles since then. A big day of walking from Plaza Argentina to Pampa de Llenas put us in camp just in time for a big Asado prepared by our herreros, the mule drivers who transport our gear off the mountain. An early morning walk brought us to Penitentes where we showered and had lunch before heading to Mendoza. Now back in civilization our celebratory meal felt great and is a far cry from mountain food and the thin air of the Andes, but the significance of the last few weeks that put us on top of the highest mountain outside of the Himalaya is still sinking in. Everyone has done a great job and I am thankful for the time spend with a great team. Nice work all! RMI Guide Jake Beren