The three-man Russian team returned to Everest’s West Ridge but found the route even more difficult than they expected. After two days of struggle, they’re heading back to Base Camp.
On October 20, Andrei Vasiliev, Serguey Kondrashkin, and Vitaly Shipilov went back up to the Lho La and pitched their tent on the wide plateau beyond. They still had time to fix more rope higher up.
“We moved…over terrain we’d already covered on the previous rotation,” the climbers texted to team member Natalya Belyankina, who had to abandon the expedition due to illness.
“The weather is good: sunny, with light winds, but cold,” they noted. “Progress was painfully slow today due to heavy packs and a persistent cough,” the climbers noted later.
Sick and exhausted
On Wednesday, they hoped to reach 7,500m, spend the night there, check the route ahead, and then retreat to the plateau. However, they didn’t get as far as they had planned.
“We didn’t cover much ground today,” leader Andrei Vsiliev texted Anna Piunova of The Mountain Club. “The route is no walk in the park. We have to climb steep snowy slopes that conceal rock sections underneath.”
To make things worse, they found no suitable bivy spots at their highest point, so they had to retreat to a place where they could pitch their tent for the night. Today, they were just too exhausted to keep going.
“We’re heading down; we’re sick and need to recover,” Vasiliev told Belyankina. “We can barely keep moving.”
