KYBEROUTERWEAR

Training: hockey and swimming
Diet: lots of beer and chicken wings for the last three weeks
Kathmandu arrival weight: 182 pounds
Two months of Everest food and climbing...
Summit day weight: aprox. 150 pounds

I began the trip about 20 pounds overweight with the expectation that I would lose 30-40 pounds during the two month climb due to poor diet and the harsh conditions. I wanted to be around 150 pounds for the summit day push so that I would be light and strong but not lose muscle. Everyone else on the team arrived in Kathmandu in amazing shape and super fit. I drank beer and ate out each night in Kathmandu while the rest of the team stayed at the hotel and rested. I was pretty slow when we started hiking the following week. Expectations of me from the other 6 Canadians on the team were probably quite low.

Four days of cancelled flights out of Kathmandu due to weather.
The trip begins with a flight from Kathmandu to Lukla and a crappy airport with a runway that has a 10 degree slope down the mountainside. Sylvia's scream deafens everyone in the small turboprop plane as it unexpectedly drops like a stone for a few seconds.

It is about 8 days to get to Everest base camp. There are a few acclimatization hikes as we gradually go up to 17,600 feet. Everyone is getting to know each other and wondering who will summit and who will not. It is very apparent who the strongest climbers are at the beginning of the trek in. It's intimidating when you're not one of the stronger climbers and still suffering from the beer and chicken wing diet.

Base Camp main tent... 17,600 feet
Everyone arrived suffering from light headaches and winded at the slightest endeavor.

The first day of playing in the icefied. Everyone was exhausted and we hardly touched the icefall. Everyone is short of breath but excited.

Puja: No one is supposed to enter the icefall before the Puja, a ceremony that blesses everyone and the equipment that will do the climb. It's considered bad luck to enter the icefall before the Puja. Our expedition had its share of bad luck��

The climb to Camp 1 is through an icefall that seems to never end. There's about 25 vertical and horizontal ladders to cross and it's an exhausting climb. It is the most dangerous part of the climb and not a place to stay for too long. Everyone is nervous going through the Khumbu icefall. In total, we made five trips up and down the mountain through the icefall to supply the higher camps and acclimatize.

A member of our team and a Sherpa are nearly killed in this avalanche. They are visible just under the avalanche. I hope they had extra underwear...

The first climb from Base Camp to Camp 1 (20,000 feet) is a brutal day climb and then back to base camp on the same day. It is a long day and takes a day to recover after it.

The second trip was from Base Camp to Camp 1 with an overnight stay to acclimatize. The next day we went to Camp 2 (21,000 feet) for a few hours to acclimatize and then back to Camp 1 for the night. The next day we all went back to base camp to recover from exhaustion.

A few days off and then back up again to Camp 1 for a long night alone. Fierce winds made it a sleepless night as I hoped the tent didn't blow away with me in it. I sat up all night with my back against the tent wall and the wind. Everyone else at Camp 2 experienced the same winds and sleepless night. An hour before I got into Camp 2 in the morning I met our team coming down off the mountain telling me that the winds were even worse up at C2 than we were experiencing where we stood. I got to C2 and dropped my 50 pound load in one of the tents that was collapsed with rocks on top. Brutal wind and cold meant a quick descent back to base camp that morning after leaving my food and gear at C2. We lost one or two tents in that storm at C2.

The forth trip was to Camp 2 and then a climb to Camp 3 after a few days of rest at C2. Tim and I left C2 for C3 at about 5am in the cold but clear day. After an hour we were at the foot of the Lhotse face, the beginning of a 3000 foot climb to C3. The climb is steep with fixed ropes. The weather turned even colder and the strong wind and snow started as soon as we began the ascent to C3. Five hours later we arrived at C3 and took shelter in the tents to wait out the storm. I had cold fingers that day. Jan and a Sherpa who left from C2 shortly after us turned back near C3 due to the severe conditions and worsening storm. A week later, we heard about a female climber who lost her fingers between C2 and C3 as a result of frostbite during that same week that we had gone up.

The next day everyone went back to Base Camp for a day and then down to the valley for a 3 day rest and get our oxygen saturation levels up.

Rested and feeling good, we went back to base camp, waited about 4 days for the weather to break and then it was summit week. After a climb from BC to C2 and a rest day everyone was pretty excited to be only a few days away from the summit. The climb to C3 was long and hard for everyone but we had great weather. After a night at C3 we left for C4 South Col (26,500 feet). After a ten and a half hour climb I arrived at 6:30pm in severe wind and -20 degree temperatures. We had planned to do summit push that night at 8pm but it was too windy. Weather permitting, we could have been the first team to summit in 2009.

Five of us spent the night at C4, cold and trying to sleep with oxygen masks on. Three of us were in a 3-man tent with our gear so no one slept. The next day we took a trip over to the back side of the South Col to check out the North Face while we waited for summit bid at 8pm.

After 24 hours in the "death zone" we made our summit push at 8pm. The weather was cold (-37C degrees) but there was little wind. Shortly into the climb the wind picked up and it was howling when we were on the ridge. With the wind chill factor the temperature was probably in the -50 degrees range. My boot heaters couldn't keep up and I thought they weren't even working since my toes were so frozen I could barely move them, let alone feel them. There was far too many people going for the summit that night and it was very slow going. Later, I met several people from that summit night who will lose toes from the cold.

On May 18th at 8pm we left for the summit. At 5:00pm the next day, after having climbed all night and all day for 21 hours I got back to C4. It was snowing and getting windy again but I was happy. I made it to the summit and got back to the relative safety of C4, exhausted and severely dehydrated.

Jan, my teammate got back down to C4 at 8pm after 24 hours of climbing, totally exhausted with two inches of ice covering all of his chest from the wind, snow, and breath. He was too tired to take his boots off so I helped get his boots off. He was too tired to get into his sleeping bag so I just put it overtop of him. That night, his mask intake froze up which sent him into a panic when he couldn't breathe. Later, his regulator froze up and had problems and again he couldn't breathe in a panic. Too exhausted to help himself, I took care of the problems only to face more problems all night. Fluid was building in his lungs so I gave him diamox and dexamethasone to try to stop the problems and on Tim's advice cranked his oxygen up to seven times our normal flow rate while resting. Finally, after no sleep for nearly 3 days and still wearing my oxygen mask I slept a few hours, totally exhausted. Jan had problems all night but he managed to get going down in the morning.

The next morning I woke up almost totally snow blind in one eye and about 30% snow blind in the other eye. I left alone to get down to C3 and then C2 before it got worse. At C3 I fell asleep for an hour while sitting on the Lhotse face, totally exhausted. Eventually I got back to C2, spent the night and then carried all my gear back to base camp the next day, still exhausted.

After nearly two months on the trip four out of ten members on our team made it to the summit. Of the seven Canadians on the team, I was the only Canadian to make the summit (29,028 feet) having spent more than 60 hours above 26,000 feet in the "death zone."
Apparently, a beer and chicken wings training diet can get a climber up the mountain after all...
Cheers,

Todd Lavigne