KATHMANDU
When Jaroslav Bansky and I were climbing the Kanchung Shar last spring, we accidentally took a picture of our tent Standing on the glacial plateau below the Peak. When I got home, I noticed that a eautiful western face of a mountain was visible behind. I found out that it is the unclimbed peak of Chumbu (6,850 metres).
Frenchmen Adrien and Patrick Wagnon were the closest to the summit in 2016. They climbed the beautiful southwest pillar which they called the 'Phantom'.
According to the Himalayan database, they did not reach the summit and "only" reached the pre-summit at 6,750m.
The only other known attempt was made by Koreans a year earlier, apparently along the route we used to descend.
The west face is undeniably beautiful, untouched and offers a lot of climbing possibilities. That's our goal!
I got together with Banán (Jaroslav Bánsky) for the climb, and soon Juraj Koren joined us. This elite Slovak climber and pilot aimed to fly from the top on a paraglide. The three of us would be ideal, it would be difficult for me to descend alone.
Considering the western orientation of the wall, we scheduled the expedition for autumn 2022. During the summer, Petr Kejklicek and Radoslav Groh joined us. So in the end there were five of us.
We arrived in Kathmandu on October 5, and after a few days moved to Lukla by helicopter. Our first acclimatisation peak was Sunder (5,300m), which lies above the village of Thame, where we got after three days of hiking.
While climbing Sunder peak, Juraj and I felt sick. We got fever, chills and pain behind the eyes. Despite feeling ill, Juraj continued with the Banán and Kejklas (Kejklicek) through Renjo La to Gokyo. I stayed with Radar (Groh) for a few days in Thame before giving up and moving back to Namche.
My condition was not improving. Radar was leaving to catch up with the boys and I ordered a helicopter for the next day. I kept losing weight and felt like after the climb, not before it.
But in the morning I felt a little better, so I called our Nepali agent Subin to cancel the helicopter and slowly hiked back to Thame. Even though the tourist groups walked faster than me, I slowly moved upwards. In three days I crossed Renjo La to Gokyo.
Fortunately, the boys had left me a tent and a stove. To reach Base Camp(BC) I had to cross two glaciers and I definitely needed two days.
I left early and in two hours I reached the place where the boys had left a fixed rope for me to descend onto the glacier. The place was marked by a small flag of our expedition.
I crossed the Ngozumba Glacier through an incredible mess of rock and ice. One unluckily rolled stone is all it takes and no one would ever find me here. Around noon I was at the mouth of both glaciers and I was climbing behind the moraine of the Gaunara Glacier towards the east. In the next two hours, I'd had enough, so I set up a tent in a small meadow and cooked lunch. I was not sure exactly where the guys had decided to build BC, but I guessed it was where the Gaunara Glacier turns left.
It was not far, but I decided to stay one night here as I needed better acclimatisation.
The next day I was at our BC in two hours. The boys welcomed me and Sabin was there too! He was going to cook for us.
Juraj had been taken by helicopter because of acute altitude sickness. I felt sorry.
Banán and Radar were preparing for an acclimatisation climb 'Malý Žalý' (our name for a rock bastion about 5,950m high). Kejklas and I would go the next day.
The next day I felt great, so Kejklas and I literally ran up. Banán and Radar climbed quite into the saddle of Changri La to photograph the descent. I watched them all day from the counterslope with binoculars. But I didn't stop worrying about them as the rocks there are really terrible.
In the evening we decided that we would pack up the next day and head to the bottom of the Chumbu Mountain the following day.
On the third day at the BC, I was not feeling so well and had headache. After lunch, I went with Banán to look for the jacket he had lost while walking over the glacier.
Meanwhile, I tried to eat and drink as much as possible. I was terribly thin and dehydrated after the illness.
After lunch we all left the BC towards the foot of the mountain. We agreed that Radar and Banán would go first and they would make the trail in the snow for me and Peter. That's probably how we would climb.
We pitched the bivouac under an overhanging rock wall directly at the foot of the wall at a height of approximately 5,700m. In the morning the conditions looked great and we traversed on corn snow to the place where we began climbing.
We climbed the first few pitches in parallel up to the point where the terrain was already too steep. At the same time, even the corn snow turned into unpleasant incoherent snow, fortunately somewhere alternated with good ice.
We were still following the snow-ice fields to the left of the serac belt. Around 2:00 pm, we were all done and started looking for a place to bivouac. We rappelled diagonally one pitch to the right down to the belt of ice cracks and seracs.
Radar found a beautiful ice cave where the air hardly moved. It was warm there. It took us well over an hour to build platforms for our two tents. Then we cooked, got dry and looked forward to the next day!
After a very cold night, we didn't want to get out of our sleeping bags, but we ended up leaving again quite early. We liked to reach the top this day. Again, we were faced with climbing mainly ice and snow. We ascended quickly and inadvertently missed our assumed direction. We kept climbing straight up to the point where we simply could not go any further.
Radar threw huge chunks of snow and ice at us but he didn't move any higher. One piece even knocked Peter and me completely off the wall and we were both hanging just in the deathman (buried ice axe).
Banán and Radar abseiled back losing two ice screws. I tried the gully more to the left. It looked relatively easy. At the end of it, however, Radar again struggled a lot in vertically layered and unstable snow - secured only by two miserable deathmen and our bodies.
After another pitch we finally reached the mountain shoulder. We set a bivouac there; we could not go any further that day.
We had only 80 vertical metres left to reach the summit. The night was really cold and the temperature dropped to minus-25 degrees. So we did not rush in the morning and set off towards the top around 8:30 am.
Just below the highest point, Radar and Banán handed over the lead to me, thus I had the opportunity to look around from the top of Chumbu as the first person in the world.
I reach the top around 9:00 am. Banán, Radar and Kejklas soon joined me.
It was relatively warm and windless. We spent about 30 minutes there.
If it is said that reaching the top is only half of the ascent, then it was absolutely true for us. Hard work awaited us in unfamiliar and difficult terrain.
The first 300 vertical metres we waded down in places up to our knees in an unpleasant crust. Then we had to go uphill again. The ridge ahead was razor sharp. Radar and Kejklas were fighting on the ridge, while I went with Banán to see if there was another alternative to the descent.
However, we found nothing. We had to follow the boys.
Banán climbed with a backpack, but I was too heavy for the steep crystalline snow to hold me. I was forced to climb on a rope.
After a while we caught up with the boys and together we found the possibility of abseiling down to the glacier plateau.
There were only three pitches of abseiling, the last one slightly overhanging. We crossed the plateau and returned to the ridge, now oriented more southeast.
However, numerous vertical snow towers stopped our progress and we had to wait for the snow to freeze overnight.
So we bivouacked in a place where the ridge widened before getting sharp again. The views of the Pumori, Everest, Lhotse and Nuptse were phenomenal! We would trade them for a night anywhere down in the valley.
In the morning we tried to continue along the ridge. Banán heroically overcame the next tower, but beyond that it was completely impossible. The night frost didn't help us much. We threw Radar over the ridge and used him as an anchor from which we rappelled into a kind of rock window.
Radar then used a buried ski pole as a stand and in no time abseiled to us. Banán pulled out a camera for a photographed descent. There were too many rock sills below us.
Hopefully were not too steep!
Originally, we wanted to start abseiling a little further, but hopefully it would go well this way as well. One pitch after another, we followed the same routine. I abseiled 30 to 60 metres and drilled one ice screw in which we all settled down.
In the meantime, I drilled the abalak clock and continued down ...
We didn't even realise that the sun was starting to shine into the south wall. In no time, the unbearable winter turned into sweltering heat. There was a threat of the fall of some giant penitents, under which we are currently moving.
We hurried and climbed down into less steep terrain. One more abseil over the m arginal crevasse using a ski pole and we were on a more flat glacier.
Now it was just a matter of getting to the foot of the wall. I went ahead with Banán and we tried to find the safest way down. We would be down in an hour!
Relief drained us of the last remnants of our energy. We sat on stones and were unable to move further. It was over!
Kejklas had unable to feel his toes for three days and had difficulty walking. So I called the helicopter, for which we waited almost until dark. However, the pilot did not get there despite two attempts because of the strong wind.
So he had no choice but to grit his teeth and embark on eight-hour journey down to the village of Lobuche. About halfway down the Changri La Nup Glacier, we took a short cut over frozen glacial lakes and I sank knee-deep into the icy water. It was pitch black and the temperature had dropped to minus-10 degrees.
We changed the plan and I ran ahead with Banán while Radar stayed behind to accompany Kejklas. My feet were also starting to get cold and I could especially feel my former frostbite.
We reached Lobuche sometime after 10:00 pm. Kejklas and Radar did not arrive until the next morning.
In the end, we were both transported with slight frostbites to a hospital in Kathmandu where we found out that Juraj did not suffer from acute altitude sickness, but this year's widespread dengue.
We named the route 'The last flight of the Falcon TD', in memory of Polish mountain guide and friend Andrzej Sokolowski who tragically died in the Tatras earlier this year.
The author is a climber. Their expedition was organised by 14 Summits Expedition Pvt Ltd.
A version of this article appears in the print on November 20, 2022 of The Himalayan Times.
