Page 10 - AMA Winter 2023/24

GUESTWRITER
I wanted to get down as fast as possible out of the ferocious storm that had completely obliterated us. Within moments of warming my hands up an excruciating pain enveloped my body from the tips of my fingers, the pain of my damaged nerves regaining sensation. It was so intense I couldn’t physically push my legs to walk anymore. Nims screamed at me “WAKE UP ADRIANA, SNAP OUT OF IT, I’VE NEVER SEEN YOU LIKE THIS”. With this reaction from Nims blasting in my ears I knew I had to get the hell out of here and to safety. Eventually we made it down to camp 2 just in time to warm myself and the rest of the team up enough to prevent any serious frostbite or hypothermia. My fingers were frost nipped which was the first stage of that freezing process which meant that they were numb but would recover over a couple of months. I cried with relief knowing that I wouldn’t be losing fingers this time.
As the team shivered away for an hour or so, and sipped warm tea, our plans were
flipped 180 degrees. We knew we didn’t want to go down, but we also didn’t know if it was possible to go up. We saw there was a weather window approaching in 5 days or so which meant sleeping at camp 2 for 4 nights and making a summit push from camp 3 instead. After much deliber- ation we waited and made a summit push once the weather had cleared and it was indeed perfect. We reached the summit after a gruelling 16-hour push, trailblazing the whole way on snow that was solid on top and a soft layer underneath of nearly a metre which just crumbled every step of the way. It was tough. Dhaulagiri plays with your mind, you can see the summit once you reach the last traverse and it seems just an hour or so away, but you’re fooled and really the traverse took us almost 5 hours, the summit slowly inching closer to us. Once we stood on that very highest point, I felt a wave of nausea and suddenly I was weak at the knees and breathing heavily. Something was wrong again. I put my backpack down and checked my oxygen bottle. Zero. I was totally out of oxygen! I
grabbed my guide, a young sherpa whom I had been paired with as Gelje, my usual partner in crime, was out on Kanchen- junga. I checked his oxygen as well and again, pretty much zero. We were screwed, everyone had descended from the summit already and were well out of shouting distance, but I didn’t panic as I knew we could contact them by radio, and someone would have a reserve oxygen bottle. This seemed like a good plan, if only my guide hadn’t left his radio at camp 2....
Now I did start to panic. What on earth were we going to do? There is only one option here and that’s to get down, otherwise another few hours at 8000m without oxygen we would be dead. So, with that in mind, we sat down, took some deep breaths and got our minds back on the task at hand which was to abseil this first tricky section off the summit. Eventually we reached camp 3 where we found a radio and reassured the basecamp team that we were okay and would catch up to the rest of the guys soon.
10 / ARMY MOUNTAINEER