Nepal 1998 - Khumbu Trekking & Island Peak Climb

Climbing Island Peak
Crevasses on Island Peak - 403x640 JPEG, 43K Rappelling down fixed ropes on Island Peak - 405x640 JPEG, 59K Climing to Island Peak summit
From Chukhung, Island Peak is less than awe inspiring. That's because just to the north towers the South Face of Lhotse, at 8501 meters (27,890 feet) one of the most impressive mountain walls in the world. As you approach it starts to look more impressive. And when you're on it, it can start to look a bit scary especially as the air thins. The mountain was given its English name by Eric Shipton's party in 1952. The local name is Imja Tse.

It's possible to do the summit in one day from base camp, but setting a high camp turns a hellish day into merely a very long one. The cost was a hellish windtorn night. We ate in a wildly flapping cook tent and did our best to get some sleep in an equally wildly flapping sleeping tent prior to a 5AM departure.

The first part of the climb was a rock scramble in the dark up to the rock-ice interface at about 19,000 feet. I was glad for some climbing instruction the previous summer on Shuksan in the North Cascades, whose rocky summit cone provided some preparation for climbing rock in ice boots.
Approaching Island Peak on glacier - 640x366 JPEG, 36K On the summit of Island Peak - 640x396 JPEG, 53K
From there, it was a slog up to the base of the fixed ropes. What would be a fairly straightforward glacier crossing at the sorts of elevations one encounters in the North Cascades is exhausting at over 19,000 feet. I was moving at some small fraction of a mile per hour and we still passed another group. It's difficult to imagine what it must be like above 8000 meters.

Our climbing sherpas, who were incredibly strong and well-acclimitized, had set fixed ropes up to the summit ridge and then up the ridge to the summit cone. Even so, it took me about half an hour with ascender and ice axe to reach the ridge and about another fifteen minutes to reach the summit. After a brief rest and the obligatory summit photos, we rappelled down the fixed ropes and headed back down the glacier
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