Page 36 - 20145 AMA Spring

Exercise Black Gendarme
A tri-service expedition to Makalu South East Ridge 2014
By Gareth Steel
It is rare to have the opportunity to take part in an expedition to an 8000m peak, rarer still to be invited to help establish a new route on such a peak. Therefore I count myself extremely lucky to have
been part of Exercise BLACK GENDARME. This expedition, which comprised of members of all three Services, aimed to be the first to climb Makalu solely via its extremely long and demanding South East (SE) ridge. From the start this was to be an ambitious project, something that we were all acutely aware of. Three previous attempts had been made on the ridge by service expeditions with the team in 2008 reaching 8000m. However, the summit remained elusive. Our team leader, Wg Cdr Colin Scott, had been on all three expeditions and therefore knew the mountain and the route intimately.
At 8463m Makalu is the fifth highest mountain on the planet and enjoys an intimidating reputation for defeating even the strongest of expeditions. Due to the sheer scale of the SE ridge (in excess of 10 km long) and the time likely spent above 7500m (at least 4 days), the route required thorough planning and preparation. This began with team selection: not everyone wishes to throw their hat in the ring for an endeavour with long odds of success. It would be fair to say that at the outset I thought our chances were probably only in the region of 10-20% and yet as an objective it still captured my imagination. Fortunately for me the route’s reputation, coupled with a change of dates from a pre to a post monsoon attempt, kept enough talented mountaineers at bay to allow me to slip through Colin’s selection process and on to the team.
Training serials included a week in the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland and an Alpine serial centered on Saas Grund, Switzerland.
Importantly, from the outset I felt that we had a strong and, most importantly, compatible team.
We were fortunate to have ‘Chips’ Rafferty on board as our performance consultant. Formerly of the Army PT Corps, Chips was an invaluable source of information on training for performance. He was also fond of reminding us that all these gems of wisdom were handily available in a book he had co-authored and presumably continued to profit from! Chips’ regimen was not for the faint hearted: everything from early morning pre-breakfast runs to naked open water swimming and breath holding in the bathtub were prescribed. Later in the training programme 100 mile cycle rides on minimal food and water were a feature. Most alarming was the fact that despite being of a certain (unspecified) age, Chips was still setting the standard personally! There was no doubt that those who could survive the exacting training would be adequately prepared both physically and mentally. Fortunately, time spent on military exercises and my civilian job meant that my personal training was tempered to a level which allowed me to survive and I was undoubtedly the stronger for it.
Of course, no expedition can thrive on PT alone! Thus there was much running around, letter writing and pleading with potential sponsors to be done. Personally I was responsible for sourcing and arranging the expedition food for the mountain phase. In these lean times sponsors were not easy to come by. However I would like to mention Tunnocks, Mountain House, BeWell, 9Bar and Mountain Fuel who were all kind enough to either provide us with free goods or offer us substantial discounts on their products.
34 ARMY MOUNTAINEER