moments on a mountain
Climbing my first summit, Mount Kazbek.
I recently climbed my first ever mountain with alpine equipment. Perched on the border between Georgia and Russia, Mount Kazbek stands at 5054m above sea level—200m taller than Mont Blanc. Since I was traipsing around the Pamirs in Tajikistan a week before, I didn’t bother with acclimatisation days, so I climbed the mountain in 2 days instead of the usual 5. It was the most intense, almost harrowing, experience of my life. Here are some moments:
2am summit push, the pinhole white circle of illumination from our headlamps combing over an unforgiving landscape, searching fervently for a cairn to show us the way up the mountain; our silent guideposts shining in a roving spotlight.
Deciding not to summit 20 metres below, my first taste of the famed alpine-restraint. Waiting alone on the ridge of Kazbek, the ground and the sky merging together to form one white monolithic non-space, gravity fading in a crushing solitude.
Tethered to strangers by the hips with butterfly knots, making sure we keep a distance from one another, that the rope that connects us remains untangled, so that should one fall into a black glacier crevasse or slide down the face of the mountain, the others can pull them back to life.
Iron bear claw traps attached to the soles of my feet biting down hard hard hard into the mountain ground, on black ice and powder snow.
The bone-chilling sound of rockfalls echoing through the valley in the dark, not knowing exactly it starts and where it might end.
The still, eerie predawn twilight blue on unsullied snow, 5000m in the sky.
