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When
you hear that someone has reached the top of Mount Everest,
you may assume that he or she climbed the southern route used
by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953. After all,
this route—which begins with the Khumbu Icefall, and then proceeds
through the Western Cwm, up the Lhotse Face, and to the summit
via the South Col and the Hillary Step—is used by more climbers
than any other path. There are, however, 14 other routes (see
the map on pages 14-15 of our May issue), and most of them are
more difficult than the most popular way.
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Take,
for example, the North Ridge route, which begins in Tibet. This
route has become almost as popular as the South Col route, but
is somewhat more challenging. As Eric Simonson of International
Mountain Guides explains, not only is the North Ridge technically
difficult because of its terrain, but it also requires some
particularly careful, even counterintuitive, planning. First
of all, Simonson points out, on the North Ridge climbers spend
a lot of time on steeply sloping shale and ice, and "it's tough
to get your crampons into that stuff!" To make matters more
difficult, the geography of the North Ridge requires the final
camp to be at a much higher elevation than the final camp on
the South Col. The result, says Simonson, is that "North Ridge
climbers are forced to spend a lot more time at higher altitudes,
and this in and of itself makes the route more demanding."
Another
challenge posed by this route is the long traverse along the
North Ridge on summit day. The guide explains that this "means
you are covering a lot of lateral distance, which really comes
into play on the descent." Here's where careful planning becomes
so important. Because so much of a climber's time on the North
Ridge is spent negotiating sloping rock and ice at the highest
altitudes, he must make sure to have plenty of oxygen and energy
for use on the difficult descent—at least as much as he needed
to ascend to the summit. Basically, says Simonson, "you have
to have enough gas left in your tank (both literally and figuratively)
to make the descent. You can't afford to burn more than 50 percent
of your reserves going up, because you'll definitely need the
other half to get down." The most common problem he's seen with
climbers on the north side is that they underestimate how long
it will take them to make the technically difficult, traversing
descent to camp from the summit, and they run out of oxygen
before they reach the camp. Overall, he explains, "the prolonged
time spent at higher altitudes and the time it takes to do that
traverse in both directions catch a lot of people off guard
on the North Ridge." Sometimes, it seems, knowing that "it's
all downhill from here" isn't much of a comfort.
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