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After
a while it turned out that we all had one problem in common, too.
Someone had taken the deposit, which I had left a couple of days ago
at Berlin. So now we had really little food. While boiling water for
our attack hydration we used each tea bag five times, and the cat-lap
which came of it we supplied with plenty of sugar, which we had found
in the shed (in it many people leave behind some food, which they do
not need any more, and so our deposit must have been taken for such a
remainder; why did someone, however, take my polar-sweater?). At
10:30 pm we slipped into our sleeping bags. Still, I had trouble in
falling asleep till 1 am because of breathing problems. Simply, when
I started drifting away I was beginning to suffocate! No wonder, the
barometer showed 445 hPa. There was probably 40 per cent of the
sea-level oxygen… At last I decided to take 2 tablets of
Dexamethason, which enabled me to fall asleep quite fast.
We woke up at 4.30 am. An hour too early, as all over the camp some bloody Englishmen kept yelling to each other. I was wondering at simply killing them but then I satisfied myself with a loud “Shut uuuuup!”. Well, I had gathered 3,5 hours of sleep instead of seven just before the summit trial. I do not think this is the way to do it…
Dudi and Mark set off at 6.30, me and Tom at 7.10. I felt like I had never been so exhausted in my entire life, a the real thing had not even started yet! First metres were difficult because of the steep slope and insufficient warm-up (the temperature was some 15ºC below). At the altitude of ca. 6000 m Tom gave up due to en eye problem. He felt an unbearable pressure in the eye-corners and his vision was blurred. He had better not take the risk, I agreed. And so I continued on my own. One down, three to go…
At
8 am I came across Mark and Dudi taking a rest in the first sunshine.
It felt warmer in the feet but now the eyes began to suffer. I tried
and stuck some plaster at the lower rim of my glasses to seal it up.
It was the only idea I had to raise the eye protection. Later it
turned out I was lucky enough to have found the effective solution!
As
far as to the Independencia Camp (ca. 6400 m) we trudged uphill with
no feeling of closing the summit. A simple struggle for metres: 10-20
steps up (slowly) and a minute or so to get the breathing rate down.
Further, there was a two-hour traverse – very windy and quite
steep, so again we
did more resting than marching. Thereafter we took
a short break – left one rucksack behind under a rock and set off
to conquer the famous Canaleta. That is, in my opinion, more of a
steep valley than a couloir but what really got on us was not the
steep slope or the renown scree, but the sun. Within ten minutes we
took off our gore-tex jackets and polar-sweaters staying in one
“polar” and a cap for sunstroke protection. The temperature in
the sunlit terrain may have been around 15-20ºC above!
Staring thoughtlessly at the snow under our crampons strenuously did we tread uphill. Every ten steps we indulged ourselves in a blissful activity of breathing as much as we like. Or at least for a minute. The question: “When do we reach that damn summit?” kept rumbling about in the tired mind. Finally, at 3 pm we were on the ridge and like a bolt out of the blue the view of the South Face entered our eyes. Another twenty minutes and we got to the SUMMIT! We were on the top of both Americas at 6962 m high! The forty minutes that we spent on the summit went by amazing ourselves with the views (Cordilliera de la Ramada including Mercedario, first-climbed by Poles in 1935), taking pics, filling in the summit book, and picking some stones for souvenirs. There was also much hugging each other, yelling, and even breathless singing. Such an euphoria can be experienced only There!
