July 2019 - Page 2 of 2 - Adventure Mountain

12. July 201929. November 2019

Everest traffic jam: “I wished there was a cop”

The whole world has seen the queue of people on the Mount Everest summit ridge, Mariam Ktiri got stuck in it. On 22 May, the German-Moroccan had reached the summit of the highest mountain on earth already in the night, at 2.35 am local time. On her descent she was caught in the traffic jam that became public through Nirmal Purja’s picture and made headlines all over the world. “Shortly below the summit, the masses ascended towards us. Many of the people were extremely slow. You could see that they were completely exhausted. It took us about an hour and a half to get below the Hillary Step,” Mariam tells me. “Thank God I still had enough oxygen. My Sherpa checked this all the time. At that moment I wished there was a cop to stop the people and say: ‘Wait until those who come from above have climbed down! Everything else makes no sense.'”

10. July 201910. July 2019

Kim Hong-bin: Without fingers on 13 eight-thousanders

He’s almost at the final goal of his dreams. Last Sunday, the South Korean Kim Hong-bin reached with his compatriots Cho Cheol-hee and Cheong Ha-young, the Nepalese Pechhumbe Sherpa and the Pakistani Muhammad Hussain the 8080-meter-high summit of Gasherbrum I in the Karakoram. It was Kim’s 13th eight-thousander success. To complete his collection, the 54-year-old still has to scale Broad Peak. In this case, Kim would be the first disabled mountaineer to stand on all 14 eight-thousanders. Since 1991 he has been climbing without all ten fingers.

8. July 20199. July 2019

K2: Equal distribution on two routes

The teams at the second highest mountain on earth have sorted themselves. As Herbert Hellmuth, German climber in the team of the Nepalese expedition operator “Seven Summit Treks” wrote me yesterday from the base camp, the summit candidates are distributed quite evenly on the normal route via the Abruzzi Spur and the Basque route (often also called Cesen route).

Herbert had a look around the base camp: Of the 120 climbers with permits (75 international mountaineers, 45 Climbing Sherpas from Nepal – they are spread over ten teams) 64 want to climb the Abruzzi route, 56 the Basque route. The Pakistani High Altitude Porters do not appear in this calculation as they do not need a permit. Around ten climbers who had granted a permit had already left the mountain, Herbert writes me: “All in all not such an overcrowded year.”

7. July 201910. December 2019

Thomas Huber before his expedition to Choktoi: “Open for all mountains”

Thomas Huber (r.) with Yannick Boissenot (l.) and Simon Gietl

“I don’t go to the mountains for social media, I go to the mountains to climb,” Thomas Huber tells me. “In this regard I’m old school.” The 52-year-old, the older of the two Huber brothers, wants to report only after his return from the Karakoram what he and his two companions have experienced. On Monday he will leave for Pakistan along with the 34-year-old South Tyrolean Simon Gietl and the Frenchman Yannick Boissenot. Thomas doesn’t want to talk about the exact destination, he only reveals that they head for the mountains around the Choktoi glacier. In summer 2018, the trio – then accompanied by Rainer Treppte – had set out to climb the still unmastered North Face of the 7,145-meter-high Latok I, but had been unable to enter the wall due to the great danger of avalanches.

Thomas, can I say that the mountains at the Choktoi glacier have become something like your second living room?

4. July 201918. February 2020

First ascent by Simon Messner, furthermore summit success on Broad Peak

He‘s a chip off the old block. Simon Messner, 28-year-old son of the legendary South Tyrolean climber Reinhold Messner, says he succeeded the first ascent of the 6,200-meter-high Toshe III in the Karakoram last Saturday. The widely glaciated Toshe mountain range lies about 18 kilometers as the crow flies southwest of the eight-thousander Nanga Parbat. Simon climbed in a style that should please his 74-year-old father.

Light and fast

“Due to the difficult snow conditions, the warm temperatures and the very unstable weather I decided to climb the mountain in a single solo push from Advanced Base Camp (at approximately 4,600m),” Simon Messner writes on Facebook: “The plan was to climb light and fast to avoid the bad weather coming up and although I had to track every single meter I reached the summit at 9:30 am (needing 5,5h in total).” The avalanche risk on the descent was high, according to Simon, but he was able to reached the base camp on the same day.

4. July 20196. July 2019

Summit successes on Nanga Parbat

Wednesday was a successful summit day on the eight-thousander Nanga Parbat. Several groups that had formed a large group during their summit push reached the highest point at 8,125 meters. The data from their GPS trackers confirm the summit successes of the Spaniard Sergi Mingote and the mountaineer Stefi Troguet from Andorra.

Sergi Mingote scaled Nanga Parbat without bottled oxygen – after Lhotse in spring it was his second eight-thousander this year he climbed without breathing mask. “Happy!!!”, Sergi let us know about his emotional state via Facebook. Last spring, the 48-year-old had originally wanted to climb Mount Everest after Lhotse, but after an in the end futile rescue operation for the Bulgarian Ivan Tomov (who died, apparently of an high-altitude cerebral edema) he decided not to do so. In 2018, Mingote had reached the summits of three eight-thousanders without bottled oxygen: K2, Broad Peak and Manaslu. This summer, after having scaled Nanga Parbat now, he has set his sights on Gasherbrum I and Gasherbrum II.