In order to reach the summit of Mt. Everest, one must not only be in top physical condition, but many factors must also be in alignment. First, climbers have to acclimatize to the extreme altitudes in which they climb. That means going up and down the mountain successively, each time climbing to higher elevations. Hence the various camps (Camp I, Camp II, Camp III and Camp IV), which must be reached in stages, with breaks at Base Camp in between. Once acclimatized, we have to wait for good enough weather near the summit in order to stand a chance at completing our mission. Typically, the weather window opens near the end of May, but sometimes the mountain is shrouded in bad weather until the beginning of June.

On Thursday of last week, we received weather reports indicating optimal weather on the summit on May 6th. The window had opened, or so it appeared, and we were most excited about possibly reaching the summit so early in the season. A plan was immediately sprung into action. We would depart directly for Camp II the next morning, rest for a day, and then climb up to Camp III for a few hours, before going back down to Camp II. That would mean that after resting for another day, we would be in a position to go for the summit on May 4th. That day would have seen us back at Camp III, where we were to spend the night, then climb to Camp IV on May 5th. After resting for seven or eight hours, we were scheduled to depart for the summit at 9:00 PM on May 5th in order to reach the summit before noon on May 6th.

Unfortunately, this plan did not work out as intended. Weather in the mountains is rather unpredictable. When we talk about weather reports, those reports usually take into account precipitation (in the form of snow) and the jet stream. The position of the jet stream is, for some reason, easier to predict than the precipitation. (As an aside: Everest’s summit reaches far into the jet stream, which is so strong that it would blow a climber hundreds of meters off the mountain; in fact, we can hear the roar of the jet stream thundering against Everest’s side as we lay awake at night in our tents in Camp II). The weather reports we had indicated that the jet stream’s position would change around the 4th and that precipitation would be almost zero.

As it turned out, on our third day at Camp II -the day we were scheduled to head up the Lhotse Face to “touch” Camp III- we were forced to stay inside our cramped tent owing to a massive snowstorm. Within hours, more than 18 inches of snow had accumulated and we were kept awake at night not only by the jet stream (which still had a day or two to move out of the way) but by the noise of avalanches crashing down the Lhotse Face and neighboring Mt. Nuptse. We were cut off from Base Camp because it was deemed too dangerous for us to go through the Khumbu ice fall in such conditions.

After two days of this, we were running low on food at Camp II. While the weather had improved, the danger of avalanches persisted. Despite this, and the fact that the many crevasses between Camps I and II were hidden beneath fresh snow, a group of four of us made a dash for the ice fall. What we discovered there, was a rubble field after a massive portion of the ice fall had collapsed near Camp I, thus making our descent safer (because the risk of its imminent collapse had been eliminated). Three hours later, we reached Base Camp exhausted, and decidedly unhappy about our failed attempt at reaching Camp III, let alone the summit.

Ang Namgel Sherpa and Michael Kobold cross a pair of ladders above a 100-120 foot crevasse in the Khumbu ice fall. There are 14 pairs of ladders like this throughout the ice fall this season.