THE FREEDOM OF HILLS (Me & My Adventure): November 2009

Nov 17, 2009

Glimpses..........

The day we touched our dream:

We got out of our sleeping bags at 12:00 at midnight. The snowfall had stopped last night. The sky was a bit clear. Lakpa Ji made coffee by melting the snow and served to us and then we came out of our tent. We packed our climbing equipments in our rucksacks along with the National Flag and Club Flag, took some dry food and after tying together with rope, at 1:45am, we moved for our summit attempt. The weather was cloudy, Lakpa ji was leading then myself, Sankar and at last Martuja followed. The route was in the Gangstang glacier with a gradient of 30 to 40 degree and we negotiated heavy snow over the glacier, we fixed crampons to our boots. It was a long march on the wide face of Gangstang. Our speed was considerably good. Almost mechanically, we were marching forward. Suddenly, we were charmed with the beauty of first sunrays glittering on Mt. Gangstang. We took some pictures of the golden moment. After 2 hours we climbed up over the south face. About 7:00am the weather was good and then we were in south-west ridge of the peak. We continued ascend, the gradient of the ridge was 40 to 70 degrees. We started fixing rope. We fixed a 300 meter rope along the south-west ridge. Our rope was exhausted and Lakpa ji came down and opened the fixed rope and re-fixed it later. With every step we were coming closer and closer to the summit. We fixed a 450 meter rope at the top along the south-west ridge. As the snow condition was very soft we used snow bar instead of ice pitons. Suddenly the weather deteriorated greatly and nothing was visible before us. The summit was 100ft away from us. Lakpa ji advised that it was not possible for the team to move towards the summit in such adverse weather conditions. Everybody was greatly exhausted and it was not possible to reach the summit according to Lakpa ji. It was decided that Lakpa ji would proceed with Sankar towards the summit and Murtuja and I would wait. At last they reached our dream summit at about 2:50 to 2:55pm. They spent 20 minutes at the summit and offered “puja”, clicked snaps when the weather was a bit clear for a few moments. The summit was rocky. After that at about 3:20pm they descended and joined us. We climbed down along the ridge amidst heavy snowfall and whiteout. On our return, the route became more dangerous because the open crevasses were field up with soft snow. At last we reached the summit camp safely at 7:30pm. We were all exhausted and after having our food entered the tent at 8:15pm.On that day we were continuously climbing for 18 hours.