Chronicles of K2 with Jon Lawrie and Martin Zhor: Part 1

00:01.57
Steve
Welcome to the uphill athlete podcast where our mission is to elevate and inspire all mountain athletes through education and celebration. My name is Steve House and I will be your host today joining me today is Jon Lawrie who’s just back from climbing K2 and Martin Zohr my fellow uphill athlete coach and our resident normal baric hypoxic training expert. So John and Martin it’s really great to have you both here. Jon why don’t you start us off by just sort of walking us through your summit day on K2 a couple months back.

00:44.98
Jon
Yeah, thanks Steve and thanks very much for the opportunity to to join this podcast. Yeah, I’ve sort of been back now for a month and it feels quite surreal to be back.

01:02.55
Jon
But my expedition was just a six-week expedition. Really sort of kicked off in terms of the actual climbing in the second week of July and then with a summit right towards the end of the month.

01:32.90
Steve
So take me through sorry, take me through this. Let’s paint the picture for me like the day that you left base camp heading up for the summit attempt. What was in your mind? What was what was going on with the weather. What was going on with the whole expedition really like take us there. What does it look like what did you feel like what were your thoughts? What were your emotions?

02:02.16
Jon
Yeah, so we didn’t have the most clear weather window ahead of us. We could see in about four days there was 1 or possibly 2 days but we knew that the preceding four days were going to be quite challenging from a weather point of view. We were effectively leaving base camp in socked in conditions. It was certainly not the inviting mountain that would have probably really given us a lot of the energy to really go for it.

02:45.40
Steve
So you were feeling more like we’re gonna go give it a try but it doesn’t look too good and you weren’t really that sort of pumped or is that what I’m sensing?

02:53.10
Jon
I felt very strong and I was really acclimatizing well to the altitude and the mountains I was you know I was feeling like I’d up until that point, was very excited about the possibility of climbing without Oxygen and climbing K2 in general but potentially trying to be very careful not to allow myself to get too excited and my expectations get away from me to the point where you know it would have been a summit would have been the only positive outcome that would have left me satisfied so it was almost like I was just trying to open myself up to the possibility that we may just be denied due to weather.

03:49.26
Steve
Yeah.

03:51.50
Jon
Just trying to keep focused though on obviously not letting anything silly happen in terms of a rolled ankle or a little silly slip or anything like that in those sort of first couple of days heading up.

04:10.90
Jon
So I think you know we did the base camp to camp one in a single day and then we went from camp on the next day we went from camp one to what we call Japanese camp three which was sort of probably a third of the way between camp 2 and camp 3 and that through that whole period the weather was quite challenging. We were having quite a lot of snow. There was a lot of snow even just sort of falling off I mean people familiar with K2 would know that the route you know the Abruzzi Spur route is more or less just straight up sort of the intersection of a rock um ridge and a snow ramp. And you’re effectively vulnerable to both rock fall and sort of chunks of snow and ice and we were probably fortunate this year that there was not a great deal of rock fall hazard and that was due to the bad weather.

05:23.74
Jon
Additional snow that had fallen. In some ways it had made it safer from the point of view of rock fall but had made it far more dangerous in terms of avalanche and you would find that you’re constantly watching slides.

05:35.14
Steve
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

05:43.23
Jon
To your right or dodging at least fearful of chunks of snow coming down and hitting you and it was just something you sort of tip.

05:52.20
Steve
And these are chunks of snow from other climbers like coming off of their crampons and the trail breaking the actions of trail breakers and that kind of thing. Yeah, okay.

06:02.91
Jon
Typically yes, I mean everyone is trying to be very vigilant and careful. By that point you know, but there’s yeah, exactly.
06:07.69
Steve
Yeah, but there’s only so much you can do and so you go from Camp Japanese Camp three and you go from there up to your high camp.

06:18.77
Jon
That’s right? So then we went from Japanese Camp three to a lower what we called lower camp four. So again, we were the only group to sort of elect to use a camp. That’s you know a bit different and then so that was about two hundred meter vertically above camp three where everybody else staged their summit push from camp three so we were a little bit, that probably gave us about 2 hours less climbing to do on the summit day.

06:43.77
Steve
Okay.

06:51.58
Steve
So take me to the summit day now like what time was it? How much time did you have before arriving at that camp till sort of the alarm went off and it was time to start?

06:55.20
Jon
And then.

07:10.90
Steve
Brewing up and getting ready to go.

07:10.37
Jon
So we got in on the twenty fifth of July with an intention, sorry on the twenty fifth of July. With an intention of potentially to go for the twenty-sixth, which was supposed to be the best summit window it turned out not to be summitable at all so we ended up spending a whole full day sitting at that lower camp 4 which personally I was a bit nervous about.

07:30.79
Steve
Okay.

07:47.38
Jon
Because being without oxygen by now everybody else is on oxygen around me I was a bit worried that as you know you’re not really sleeping more than about ten to fifteen minutes at a time and so all that that extra.

07:58.68
Steve
Yeah, you just deteriorating.

08:04.19
Jon
That extra time spent at you know that extra 24 hours really spent up. Its whatever 7650 meters is really depleting your energy level. So I was a bit nervous about that I don’t think in reflection that.

08:13.64
Steve
Oh yeah, absolutely.

08:23.81
Jon
But I didn’t really experience anything noticeable.

08:26.85
Steve
Yeah, one day was okay, but you can’t spend like your time is limited that you can spend that at seven thousand six hundred plus and and feel okay to do anything other than just go down so that makes tons of sense.

08:44.74
Jon
Yeah, so then the next that the night of the twenty sixth, I set off at 10 pm.

08:53.57
Steve
And when you say you set off like what tell me, you’re just by yourself like are there fixed ropes or are they set? Who are you with? Who’s around you? What does that look like?

09:07.86
Jon
So I was with a sherpa who was with my expedition and he had been assigned to to climb with me for the summit push so we set off there would have been, at that point there were probably 30 people or so would have been ahead of us. But I could only see a few of them. Some people were quite a fair way ahead of us. Um, it was a clear.

09:36.40
Steve
Was it clear, cloudy, windy?

09:42.84
Jon
Fairly clear at that point on the mountain. And it was not windy at all so that was really what we were looking for. That was what we were waiting for with the weather forecast and it was in fact, it was quite relatively speaking. It was quite warm. It was about C which was great for me with the non-oxygen factor. I was a bit I’d had a previous experience on Everest where even in big down mittens and lined gloves and everything I’d still got a sort of I would say a minor level of frost or frost injury. So I was a bit nervous about now being without oxygen and what that might have meant for my ability just to keep my fingers warm. But was certainly a lot warmer than the night I climbed summit at Everest. We basically just got onto the fixed lines. They had been fixed up to camp four the day prior. And then the rope fixing team was now above camp for set fixing ropes to the summit and in effect there was a rope fixing team. And then behind them were a line of climbers and they were all strung out over you know several hours. So from there really we moved, the two of us moved up to camp four I was trying to be very conscious of my effort level and trying to be very aware that this was probably going to be a 20 hour affair from camp back to camp again.

11:49.25
Jon
Appreciating that I needed to be very conservative with that energy. But got up to camp 4 at camp four the actual camp 4 which was not being used this year the terrain sort of flattened out and then it becomes quite gradual up towards the bottleneck and at that point I really was feeling very good I was trying to be very vigilant with getting in sugar and sort of small carbohydrate type snacks and sips of water here and there which was a huge lesson learned from my previous experience on Everest where I ate and drank nothing so I was using these like shot block kind of things so I didn’t, I find the bars at altitude in the cold just too

12:30.11
Steve
Um, what tasted good. What tasted what went down.

12:46.30
Jon
… too much work to be able to to warm them up or to soften them up to be able to chew them digest them. Um, and then I find gels just get too messy. So the shot blocks for me are sort of halfway between that they’re tight you can use them. You can use your gloves and they’re still very rich in carbohydrates. So and just found a flavor of those and was able to buy little bags that I could sort of just tear open one every hour or so.

13:18.52
Steve
Yeah, that’s good that you’re able to get some calories in though. That’s often and one of the big challenges of people just skip behind on their nutrition on a day like that. So that’s a good lesson right? There like just how you were able to to keep that up and how were you drinking? Were you? You said you were able to get frequent sips of of water. How was that? was that with thermos or?

13:42.96
Jon
So I had two half liter nalgenes which I had in my sort of breast pocket inside my down jacket. So the down suits have a they all seemed to have a nice little pocket on the inside.

13:57.82
Jon
That fits a half litre nalgene and the advantage of that of course being that your body’s keeping it from freezing and then yeah, it’s accessible without having to take your pack off because as soon as you have to start taking your pack off and taking your gloves off you just you’re a lot less likely to drink and whereas when I just knew that I just could stop and unzip my downsuit a few inches pull out this bottle and have a sip and be back moving again within a minute that really incentivized me, let’s say to drink probably more rather than less which helped.

14:37.51
Steve
Yep.

14:46.56
Steve
And question on the pacing. How did that work for you with regards to the pacing that you needed as someone who is climbing without supplemental Oxygen versus the climbers around you were all using bottle Oxygen? Was there a conflict there because my experience with you know, climbing without supplemental oxygen is you’re more start and stop. You’ve got to catch your breath or was this not a factor yet at this altitude and at this incline because you were still kind of down in the balcony where it’s not so steep or how did that work out.

15:19.25
Jon
Yeah, right? So I was probably so strung out at that early stage of the night that I wasn’t really surrounded by people but I could see that people on oxygen were typically going about the same speed as me or a little bit faster. There was a couple of people who passed me, but I would say that I wasn’t a lot slower and I didn’t feel like I needed to go any slower at that altitude. That all changed once we got above the traverse and in the last couple of hours but certainly at this point in the first say three, four hours of the summit night I felt like I was moving with a fairly low perceived exertion. And still keeping pretty good pace with the people around me I had told myself, I’d prepared myself to not let the ego get in the way and let people go and don’t be concerned with other people’s pace. And I did do that but I was probably a bit pleasantly surprised that my pace wasn’t as slow as relative to people on oxygen as I might have expected it would.

16:37.75
Steve
Interesting. So then you walk us through the next step. The bottleneck is obviously often talked about when people talk about summiting K2 from the Abbruzi. Was there. Did you have a lot of dread about it? Was it looking intimidating that big serac looking scary people had not been through there yet this year obviously, what was going through your mind?

17:08.13
Jon
So I think I was trying not to I’d had months and perhaps even years to visualize this moment and so I think it’s in enough photos of it that it didn’t look any different. Let’s say to. How I was expecting it obviously it still is intimidating. It’s still something a feature you wouldn’t normally climb underneath. At least in my own experience and so I think. You know like we really just moved in some ways I could probably say I was actually looking forward to experiencing such an iconic piece of terrain in the world of mountaineering and I think I was excited about that.

18:05.30
Jon
We started moving up and its an interesting one because it sort of goes from very gradual steepness and it’s really just like a concave kind of slope that just slowly ramps up and up and up until you’re in a quite steep section when it turns left onto the traverse. And at that point there were a few sort of you’d say slides that were coming down.

18:40.45
Jon
There were some slides that were coming directly down through the bottleneck so they were effectively just flowing past your ankles flowing past your knees. They were a little bit intimidating but to be honest, they were not the first but you know similar sort of slides on the mountain that we’d experienced in the preceding few weeks. But certainly, nothing that would have knocked you off your feet or anything like that. I think when I got sort of probably most of the, I would say well passed halfway up the bottleneck so where the terrain had got quite steep. There was quite a significant slide that came off the sort of Rock Buttress across to the left and I’d never seen anything that big quite that close and you could even hear people letting out all sorts of cry screams and just their reaction to seeing this amount of this volume of snow coming barreling off these cliffs. I would say I was fortunate at that point I was already quite high on the bottleneck and it flowed down to my left.

20:11.80
Jon
But it did then I could turn around and I could see that it had flowed down onto the trail where we had sort of been an hour or so before so suspected at that point that some people had basically been up to their knees or waist. I think that was probably what led to a number of people that were behind us making a decision to turn around certainly would have been very intimidating from where they were standing and then at that point really we stopped the line. It’s notoriously a congestion point I guess perhaps that’s why they call it the bottleneck and I was expecting that we were going to be moving very slowly or stopped for periods of time.

21:05.25
Steve
And so wait just for the audience that isn’t familiar. Can you just explain the bottlenecks at what altitude? What does it look like? What is the weather around you? What are you taking in from your senses like just paint a visual picture for us of where you are and what you’re feeling.

21:26.16
Jon
So the altitude.

21:26.19
Martin
Yes I would like to I would like to ask also was this past sunrise or was it still dark or could you actually see what’s coming at you the avalanches and stuff?

21:37.44
Jon
So this was at about I would say about 2 or 3 am so no well before sunrise but the moonlight and obviously your eyes have adjusted and what not so we had a clear enough night that you could certainly see the avalanches across to your left. You could see the line of torches headlights ahead and you could see the hanging seracs and make out where the route was sort of going to progress across the traverse. As you move up the bottleneck, probably the angle I’m guessing here probably reaches 55 degrees maybe and keeping in mind as well that probably at this point at about eight thousand four hundred meters eight thousand three hundred meters and that’s just a guess but that’s probably about what I would imagine.

22:51.27
Jon
I think it’s not the first time I’ve climbed through the night at altitude and I’m quite glad I had similar experiences before because the nights do feel quite long and all you really want is for the sun to come up and to feel warm again and to feel your brain to start sending all those chemicals around that make you feel awake and happy and all of that sort of thing again because the night can drag on a bit when you’re cold and especially at that altitude in such a sort of foreign environment. And then of course the line stops and there’s now a lot of even more sort of concern kind of creeps in you know you’re like why? Why are we stopped? How long are we going to be stopped for? My toes are getting cold, I know I’d I’d experienced colder temperatures. But now it was cold and not moving for an unknown amount of time and so that certainly leads you to and there’s no one you can talk to. It’s not like you can yell ahead you know, how long are we waiting for or what’s going on or I mean everyone’s got masks on everyone’s focused, in their little world and it’s a surreal experience and anyone perhaps who’s been to above eight thousand meters on these mountains you really do feel. Although there are people around you do feel quite alone. You don’t have that you can’t see people’s faces. You can’t look at people in the eye or anything like that and you typically feel like you do feel quite alone.

24:55.24
Steve
I think that’s a really good observation John and also I think that it’s something that I often like to point out when I have these conversations with people is if you haven’t been above eight thousand meters yourself it’s really hard to understand what it’s actually like it is really I’d say just a strange experience for lack of a better adjective. It’s just you feel like you’re on the moon or something right? You’re just in another world literally. You know it’s really hard to breathe. It’s really hard to stay warm. You’re probably so swinging your arms swinging your leg. You’re probably trying to eat or something with the time. Um, you’re probably looking at your clock you’re looking at the skyline wondering if it’s starting to get light out there in the east yet. You’re looking off you know at the slope above you seeing if there’s like wind picking up because that could turn you around. Ah you know there’s a lot going on just in terms of your animal instinct of survival right? That’s pretty all, at least for me, that’s always been pretty all consuming at that kind of altitude. So I think that’s worth kind of pointing out that you know everybody like you said everybody’s in their own world and their own world is survival.

26:28.63
Jon
Yeah, absolutely and I mean on another aspect for me was sort of being the only one at least around in the area I was without Oxygen you felt like you couldn’t necessarily sort of look at other people and say well we’re in this together. I felt like I was sort of potentially could suddenly you know I could be experiencing this and it was differently to people around me and you know it was almost like there was no one I could sort of say oh well, we’re in this together. I think one of the concerns that I definitely had was having not been to that altitude without Oxygen before was I going to become cerebral or was I going to suddenly have one of these awful altitude related illnesses and would I know if it was going to, would I recognize the signs would I see it coming. So I think, probably something that was occupying a lot of my mind certainly for the second half of the summit night was you know I would be trying to list off famous people’s names or play little games in my head just to try sort of almost reassure myself that my mind was still working and that I was still able to think in a way that was a little bit reassuring because I think I felt I was expecting to feel.

28:07.45
Steve
Yeah, you’re checking in on yourself, you know.

28:19.56
Jon
A lot more sort of brain fog or that I would have got a lot more sort of sluggish in my thoughts as I climbed and I was expecting that and I was going to be okay with a level of that but I was happy that I still felt like I was very aware of what I was doing and very capable of thinking certain thoughts and as I said listing famous people’s names that I would do at sea level. Um, so that helped me a lot I just feel confident that although I couldn’t look at somebody else around me and say oh well, he’s okay, I’m okay, we’re in this together I could say to myself. Well I’m still able to do this, my mind still feels active and and healthy and everything.

29:15.38
Steve
I can also add to that from my own experiences like being up above eight thousand meters with another person and even without all this not being on a fixed line or you know and not having masks and so on you’re still not talking to one another like talking takes breath and it’s just like that’s far too precious so there’s more like hand signals and looks are the way you and those only work with people you know really intimately. Well so I can understand how you must be really isolated up there. So to bring us back to the spot. Then time where your stop. You’ve been stopped for now I don’t know half hour, forty five minutes and how long were you stopped before you started moving again and what happened next?

30:06.17
Jon
So I think it was about 90 minutes which felt I mean it felt like 12 hours it felt much much longer than that and I was as I said felt quite concerned that my toes were..

30:09.52
Steve
Wow one and a half hours, that’s a big time.

30:25.76
Jon
Very cold and I was so doing a lot of stomping of my feet and kicking of my feet to try to keep that blood there I luckily had sized up my boots quite probably bigger than they needed to be which I probably paid the price lower on the mountain with sort of the agility on crampons. But at that point on them when we were stationary and I was getting very cold toes I was really able to to clench my toes and keep clenching them and releasing them and clenching them release and I could you know pull them right almost completely underneath themselves and that range of motion that I could get with my toes I think was really helpful. As I said I was grateful that I was was probably a size or 2 above what I would have preferred lower on the mountain. But anyway once we got going, I think at that point we were just starting to see a bit of light and that was off to our right side. Then moved up onto the traverse. And it was at that point that we that I saw the fallen climber of Muhammad, and I think there’s obviously a lot of confusion. We’re aware that there were bodies up high on K2. But I don’t think anyone was expecting there was going to be a body in this position. Everyone was climbing. Unfortunately that involved stepping over Muhammad when I got to him there was there was somebody there with him. He had his parka hood his down hood had been pulled over his face and and cinched around his neck sort of in the way that you would for a deceased person.

32:39.35
Jon
Sort of as a respectful measure so that passing people don’t see his face. And so you know like everybody else we carried on climbing and moved.

32:57.44
Steve
You didn’t know anything about whether or not this individual Muhammad had been there for like an hour or been there for a year at this point I’m guessing you just.

32:57.47
Jon
Right? The way through the traverse.

33:13.31
Steve
He’d like it was kind of a surprise and it was just sort of unclear.

33:17.23
Jon
Well, there was a person with him when I got there and that person certainly was, I can’t even really recall what that person was doing. But they were sort of squatting next to next to him and so it was apparent that this was an accident that had happened this night or it actually to be honest, it wasn’t really apparent that there was an accident or he’d just suffered from some sort of health issue or what it was but certainly the fact that he was lying so motionless on the snow and somebody had obviously put his, whoever had been involved with the rescue or had been involved with as a first responder, had had taken the step of pulling his parka jacket over his face. There were 2 other deceased bodies on the mountain this year and they were from previous years and both of them had sort of similar measures taken. Just to preserve bit of the the integrity for the climber. Um.

34:40.69
Steve
And this is now at the on the traverse or it’s past the traverse?

34:48.84
Jon
So that was on the traverse that was probably ten, twenty meters into the the traverse itself.

35:08.50
Jon
Yeah, it’s one of those unfortunate things you don’t know how you’re going to react. We’re all I guess everybody’s aware of it high on everest and these mountains there are dead people and people who died during the season that you’re on and I don’t think I did see some so had similar sort of experiences on Everest and you know I was quite emotionally shaken I would say at that moment. Then again on this occasion as well. It’s certainly something I don’t think you can quite prepare yourself for.

35:55.14
Steve
Yeah I understand it’s I think since you brought it up and since it’s part of the story I think it is. Something that again is for people who have not been at these altitudes. It’s really hard to understand because as you say you don’t even know how you’re going to react when you’re so at home and then when you get there. The whole scenario is so different and you’re so just like barely kind of alive yourself that it’s bound to surprise you what your reactions are and also I think that the other thing is people tend to judge these situations from the perspective of being at home in your living room and like oh yeah I would, I don’t know do something or whatever and that’s nice to think about but I honestly think that’s more about the people making those judgments and statements and then comforting themselves that they’re somehow good and a judgment against. And it comes off as a judgment against other people but I would also say like you just don’t know and like you know there is so little you can do for someone there like you didn’t even know when this had happened and it’s just a difference. It’s just a different world up there.

37:27.74
Jon
Yeah I think. Yeah, I’m entirely confident that if we’d got to or anybody had got to Muhammad and had felt that there was any chance of saving him. If we’d been able to move him across to the bottleneck and start lowering down the bottleneck people would have done it. People there are very numerous very strong.

37:55.66
Steve
Yeah, you would have done so you would have helped and done that. Yeah.

38:10.77
Jon
People, sherpas, people on Oxygen there was people that were around that assessed the situation and unfortunately it was an incredibly precarious position too that he was in. A pulley system would have had to have been set up to be even able to move him across to the bottleneck. So yeah I mean there’s unfortunately not a lot more I can add other than it was certainly an emotional experience.

38:49.63
Steve
Yeah, and it definitely is a part of this story right? Like of this season and we could talk about this at length I guess I just wanted to include it as it did happen and I don’t want to pass judgment but I do want to just sort of caution people about making judgments when they’re at low altitude about what one may or may not be able to do when they’re above eight thousand meters and presented with you know, very um, very difficult information that’s very difficult to interpret and understand, maybe I didn’t plan on going here. But I’ve had experiences where one particular experience where we were sort of called upon on Makalu to try to rescue someone who had gone to the summit of Makalu and come back down to high camp and we got there and like we couldn’t tell if they were alive or not like it sounds funny, right? But like we really could not tell, you couldn’t know. Yeah, this is something that would never happen at home and we’re just like well its just they weren’t responding. It’s super super cold. You can’t like take a pulse. You can’t like detect any respiration.

40:15.94
Steve
You’re trying to figure this out like you’re yelling at them and this was this person was in a tent. Like out at camp and there was a bunch of people there and none of us knew what to do because we couldn’t actually tell like eventually we determined the person was not. They were deceased.

40:35.79
Steve
We went on with our, we went back down actually and and that person as far as I know remains there to this day but, it’s just it is so hard. These are such hard situations. So I can only imagine how emotionally that would affect you especially on the way up to the summit on your summit day. So the line starts moving, you pass Muhammad and his friend this person that’s with him. Everyone else’s moving along you go up there. What is t the summit day like how do you feel specifically like in terms of once you get back in the rhythm of the climbing. How is your body responding? What’s it like to breathe up there?

41:21.89
Jon
So yeah, now getting to the end of the traverse the route kicks right and uphill, again and at that point because of the amount of wait, that 90 minutes of waiting at the bottleneck pretty much the entire group now is all in almost like a conga line. There’s about a hundred people, but about eighty had turned around for various reasons lower around the bottleneck.

41:56.47
Jon
And there was about a hundred of us moving moving along and at this point as I said when the sun’s up now and the sun was actually over the horizon. It really lifts you up and I started to feel I probably hadn’t done quite enough homework I would say on on what the route does above the serac. I think everyone gets so focused on those sort of iconic features lower on the mountain. And I didn’t really know what was to come I knew there was a snow ramp but I didn’t really know much more than that and we were moving along and I was actually quite I think if we weren’t in this sort of line I probably even without Oxygen would have been moving quicker than we were so that you know to put it another way the line was moving slower than I feel like my non Supplemental Oxygen body probably could have gone.

43:05.67
Steve
Yeah, you’re forced to go the pace of the slowest person at that point because everybody’s just like in lockstep. There’s no way to pass someone because you don’t have the power to get out into the deep snow and go around. You know one person let alone a hundred.

43:24.50
Jon
That’s right and there was the rope fixing team obviously right at the beginning so you’re at the mercy of the speed of the rope fixing team but on top of that there was at least one feature I don’t know if it’s got a name but it was it was like a blue ice section where it pitched up a couple of meters and so everyone was obviously having to tackle that one at a time and at that altitude it is quite challenging sort of front pointing at eight thousand five hundred meters or something is certainly quite challenging. And all the while on the snow ramp to our left now there are slides going off.

44:00.90
Steve
Yeah, the sun is warming up the snow and the snow is probably starting to you know slab up and avalanche off.

44:11.32
Jon
Yeah, but we were probably I was feeling quite comfortable with the fact that we were at the rightmost point that we could have been effectively sort of against the side of the serac and we felt like we were out of the danger zone if you just really tried at that point to really stay focused because obviously we’d had this, a few you know these things lower down on the summit day which had really taken a lot of focus and now I was really trying to bring myself back to recognizing that there are probably still quite a number of hours to the top and I needed to really try to find a rhythm. I was obviously now starting to get fatigued been on the go now for sort of I guess six or seven hours and really just trying to find a rhythm with my breathing and with my steps that would be sustainable and then I could hope to get the next whatever it turned out to be six, seven hours done and I think really above where the mountain where there’s a snow ramp and where that sort of reaches a saddle before the final 2 hours to the peak, to the summit at that saddle. That’s where I was really feeling like I was now in a very different game to people around me because I would take 2 steps and then I’d have to stop and I would take twenty breaths.

46:08.92
Steve
Yeah, that’s my experience. It’s about 1 to 10 if you’re lucky if you’re moving well.

46:19.96
Jon
I tried to find a system where I wouldn’t stop and try to get my breathing down to a comfortable level because if I did than my progress up the mountain would have been too slow. What I tried to do was to take those 2 steps then I would breathe until I could just and usually there’d be a bit of a delay with my breathing rate coming up so I’d take the 2 steps and then I’d stop and then a few so couple of seconds later suddenly my breathing rate had gone right up and then just when I started to notice it just starting to come down I would move again.

46:43.17
Steve
Yeah.

46:59.15
Jon
I just found that it was forever uncomfortable but it was manageable and really just carried on like that right to the top.

47:15.15
Steve
What was it like? Tell me about that like tell me about those last meters to the summit I mean K2 is more of a gradual summit. It’s pretty roomy up there. How did that go for you? What were you feeling? What were you seeing?

47:34.19
Jon
So at that point unfortunately there was quite a lot of cloud around I wouldn’t say it was socked to the point where it was probably three hundred metres visibility so enough that you could see where you were going and where you come from. But unfortunately we didn’t get that iconic view of all the peaks of the kara below. But stepped onto the top and there was probably about maybe 15 or 20 other people on the top.

48:12.47
Jon
I always find it interesting on the top of these summits. You don’t feel well, I don’t feel a sense of elation because I feel like I genuinely feel a sense of the job’s only half done and that is a real cliche but you really feel like right now I’m as far from safety and everything as I possibly could be and I had experienced in the past that feeling of adrenaline flowing out of you at the summit and then suddenly feeling incredibly tired the moment you take a step down the mountain and I was aware that was probably going to happen and it definitely did but it being you without oxygen I really recognized that I probably only had a few minutes on the top and then I really needed to start thinking about coming down.

49:08.69
Jon
If there was a hundred people who summited that day I was probably in the maybe around sixtieth or something like that. So there were quite a lot of people who’d already turned around and were already heading down. I really felt like I didn’t have the luxury of spending 30 minutes on the top or anything like that. It was 11 about Eleven o’clock so yeah.

49:27.74
Steve
What time was it roughly?

49:34.78
Martin
How did you feel, you experienced some health issues. So when did you start feeling those the lungs and the eye problem?

49:42.15
Jon
Actually I didn’t feel those until I was back down at camp 4 or at our lower camp four. So obviously I was breathing heavily the entire summit push.

50:01.34
Jon
It wasn’t really until I got back to the tent that I started coughing and having, unpleasant pieces of lung and whatnot actually coming out. Up until that point it was really just heavy breathing.

50:16.46
Steve
That’s the worst like even just describing that to you to now I like I have almost a physical reaction because it’s for me, that would be so bad and then you would often kind of gag on it and then maybe like start to vomit just like it was so uncomfortable.

50:37.11
Jon
That’s right? Yeah I mean I have to say at that point I was sort of worried like this what pulmonary edema feels like or is it I certainly was a bit concerned but look at the same time I recognized that I was back in a tent I was able to breathe, I didn’t feel like I was getting worse I was able to stay calm. I had an understanding of a few of the pulmonary edema symptoms an I didn’t feel like I was having those, so I just think obviously you don’t have anybody you can really reach out to for medical Advice. So you’re sort of trying to think about my own previous experiences and there was actually ironically another guy on our expedition who had pulmonary edema before and I’d spent the last few weeks chatting with him about his experience and so I think in some ways that gave me a bit of comfort when I was back in the tent that probably I just had a very exhausted set of lungs that were now.

52:02.38
Steve
Yeah, they had been highly stressed and for those of the listeners that are not familiar pulmonary edema is one of the two main altitude illnesses and it’s essentially a leaking of the fluid of the plasma from the blood into the lungs and your lungs sort of fill up with plasma and one of the the hallmark symptoms is that you cannot catch your breath at rest. You know if it’s just altitude.

52:35.91
Steve
Like normal high altitude you stop and your breathing rate comes down when you have pulmonary edema that never happens because your lung capacity is getting less and less and less as the fluid kind of fills and I’ve had it as well. Very scary and very uncomfortable. That’s another story. But so you you got down. Let’s fast forward a little bit. You and Martin were in the Karakoram at the same time and unfortunately I don’t believe you managed to meet there especially since you climbed K2 after Martin had already headed out. It was a tough season. There was a lot of snow. We’re going to have some other podcasts about some of these other expeditions and what they experienced in terms of the weather and conditions this year and how is that reentry process and what went through your mind and what was your emotional journey like.

53:45.25
Jon
In terms of the, sorry reentry in terms of like?

53:48.78
Steve
Let’s reentry into life and coming back to base camp coming out from the expedition coming home.

53:54.98
Jon
So look I think I always try to preserve that feeling of success being achieved until I’m back in base camp and so I did feel really when I got back into basecamp that was when it was quite an emotional return back to the base camp as well because I felt like I now genuinely am out of harm’s way. You can descend the Abruzzi spur and at the end completely distracted by your own success and potentially have an accident. You’ve got nothing to celebrate and feel until you’re back at Basecamp. So then it all felt very real at that point and obviously we wanted to wait until our other teammates were down as well. Before we could really call it a success. But that was really something. I mean to climb K2 was an ultimate dream of mine and then to do it without oxygen which was really meaningful for me. It was beyond my wildest dreams I mean I wouldn’t have imagined this was something that I was capable of doing and really to be able to to do it just gave me this very overwhelming sense of achievement that. You know a month has gone by now it feels exactly the same I don’t know if that will change. It’s a feeling I’ve not had after climbing other mountains or had other successes.

55:38.23
Steve
Yeah, well, it’s a great feeling in that. No one can ever take that away from you right? Like you own that experience forever and you put in a lot of work, like as your coach I can attest to that. Yeah, you can obviously attest that personally since you actually did the work and you went up and climbed and it was great. I think that it’s one of the reasons why we love mountaineering so much is because the climb itself is such a perfect sort of story like it’s a classic. It’s a classic story right? You have sort of the working in isolation day after day week after week month after month, for an unknown sort of reward and you work really hard. You put it all out there. A lot is left up to chance. There’s a lot of risk. There’s a lot of danger. There’s a lot of other people and personalities and influences and you’re literally living in a novel almost like it feels like and then you know the novel has a conclusion which is obviously coming home but I don’t think it really ends there because you always carry that with you. It truly becomes part of you and part of your story and part of how you know yourself and I think that’s part of what makes mountaineering such a beautiful thing.

57:12.79
Jon
Yeah, absolutely it really felt like such a combination of puzzle pieces that all came together and then combined that with a lot of things that I couldn’t control at all or went my way or went our way as well.

57:16.27
Steve
So.

57:32.72
Jon
It certainly felt very fortunate.

Steve
You know you talked about like waiting for all the other folks to come down and feeling celebratory and coming home. We talked about the journey of mountaineering and all of that. You were able to yeah take us through that.

59:41.40
Jon
So yeah, so coming down. I mean leaving base camp I really could feel then that my lungs were not what they normally would be and even just the most mildest of sections of the trail that pitched up hill I would lose my breath and so instantly. There was a lot of coughing and all of that sort of thing. So the three days hike back out was much more challenging than the seven days hiking up to basecamp and just obviously elated with the success and the fact that I was heading home and all of that but certainly found it very challenging. There were sections in the first day where I would walk ten meters and then I’d have to stop in a coughing fit and then another ten meters and there’d be sipping water and all sorts of things just trying to be able to keep it under control.

01:00:54.40
Steve
Yeah I mean I don’t think we should gloss over that because it speaks to how wrecked you are after these events. I remember just walking from Nanga Parbat base camp back down to the trailhead which is literally like a 3 hour walk and it took us all day and it was like walking up the final moraine that separates the Valley from the road. That was like its own summit. It felt like forever but its only like 50 vertical meters. But just exhausted. You’re so depleted. It really kind of brings it home. You know when you experience that for me, it really brings home just how hard these things are to do.

01:01:29.18
Jon
Yeah.

01:01:47.98
Steve
And how much it takes out of you and what it’s actually like to be up there and know if you could magically teleport yourself from one hundred meters below the summit and put yourself down on the trail, the task only you would probably feel just as bad, right? Like that’s where you’re operating from and you’re operating at above eight thousand meters so I don’t think it’s something to just gloss over. It’s a real thing and you get home and get to that thick air and you get to that nutritious food that tastes good again and you get to those beds and the showers and all of those things and you just have this deep deep fatigue that you can almost kind of finally let yourself sink into it right?

01:02:35.96
Jon
That’s right, and I think as this said earlier as well I allowed myself to enjoy it the whole summit outcome at that point whereas I sort of hadn’t prior to that.

01:02:44.95
Steve
As you should.

01:02:53.79
Jon
And then as you said just we had it. It was very long, it’s a hundred kilometer hike back to Askole and it’s not a well-defined trail by any means a lot of it is on that moraine. You’re constantly losing the trail you find yourself slipping and sliding all over uneven rocks and whatnot. It is a challenging hundred kilometers certainly and then to do that in three days.

01:03:31.65
Jon
We all had to to dig quite deep for but then getting down, finally, you can. I, just as a personal preference, I don’t really have meat during when I’m at altitude and just although I love meat. Normally I just choose not to have that and when I’m sort of trying to acclimatize to altitude. So really back in Askole was where I first got back to having meat again and it was just I mean the food you have on these expeditions is I sympathize with the task of trying to cater for people up there because every piece of food has come in by donkey from Askole. Nothing’s come in by helicopter. There’s no private aviation that’s bringing in anything like the sort of food you expect at everest base camp so it was good but to be back having fresh food, fresh fruits, fresh vegetables those sort of things probably missed a lot so getting back to those was great and then really we were so keen to get to Skardu that we got a jeep that night so we did that sort of notorious or quite well-known drive between Askole and Skardu we did that in the dark which has probably made it even more confronting. But then got back to a proper bed in a hotel Skardu so that felt great. Because it sort of felt like okay at this point there’s not going to be any more human powered you know movement.

01:05:29.72
Steve
Yeah, sure feels good to sit in a jeep after you’ve been on two feet for a couple of months now

01:05:40.86
Jon
Suddenly yeah.

01:05:45.47
Steve
Well I think we’re going to wrap it up here for today and we’re going to come back in another episode and talk about the training both in 2016 and 2017 when I helped you prepare for climbing Everest. As well as the specific training, physically all the things we did in terms of your specific workouts and the hypoxic protocols we use that Martin helped direct and all of that we’ll get into that in a whole another episode. So look for that everyone and thank you Jon, thank you Martin for your input and time today. It’s just not one but a community together. We’re uphill athlete.