Meru South Pillar

The granite slabs that lay before me are covered with about 25cm of powder snow. I desperately shovel the snow away with my pick, trying to find the cracks that must be there. I finally place a nut, a solid piece of protection. I look upwards. It seems endless. All hope of crossing this part of the wall that appeared like a snow field from below, fast and easy to climb, is gone. And once again there is no suitable spot for a bivy in sight. A much needed bivy at that. None of us want a second night of not getting any sleep! Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a proper ledge last night where we could have gotten some much needed rest. After climbing up and down for several hours, looking for a bivy spot, we had no choice in the dark other than to place two ice screws in the frozen terrain and wait for the night to end. Sitting there in the long, cold darkness. The most uncomfortable thing wasn’t even the minus 20 degrees though. It was the wind, snowfall, and the resulting spindrifts that kept hitting us.

Every suffering as an end though. Even a sitting bivy at 6200 meters. The first rays of sun slowly put life back into our half-frozen bodies, like in a science fiction novel. Sean screams towards the sun that this was his „coldest and hardest bivy ever,” laughing hard! He just loves suffering from time to time. None of us is hungry but we still try to eat something or at least have some hot tea. It’s the fourth day we’ve been on the wall. Last night cost us a lot of energy, physically and mentally. But we won’t give up that easy. Our new plan is to quickly climb over the rocky ledge that seems small from below to reach the above lying snow or ice field early to set up a good bivy there so we can catch up on some sleep there. We wanted to load up on new energy for summit day.

The rock ledge is higher and more difficult than we had expected. Bad conditions additionally prohibit any fast climbing. We reach the upper end of the vertical rock wall with lots of effort in the late afternoon. It started snowing again! We all feel that things aren’t going as planned. Mémé has the courage to say what we all know once we reach the bivy but Sean and I aren’t willing to accept it just yet.

Conditions are crap, everything is much more challenging than it looks from below and again there’s no prospective bivy in sight. In addition, we increased our risk level when we decided to climb up the steep pass that lies right before the foot of the wall with the amount of fresh snow and the resulting avalanche danger. It’s the same pass that we decided not to climb up three days before our current attempt because the risk of avalanches was too high. We descended back to base camp just a few meters before our materials depot then! No one would even think about mountaineering in conditions like these back home in the Alps.

Our gut instinct says to turn around! It’s so damn difficult though and it really doesn’t look that far to the summit anymore. I continue none the less! I hope that the snow on the granite slabs before us may be packed. After digging around for a while in the white powder and slipping and sliding off the below lying granite slabs I also give in and abseil back to the belay to Sean and Mémé on the last piece of pro.

It was incredibly hard to give up. We were so sure somehow that we would climb that wall! We’re a great team, everybody was in shape and at home in this type of terrain. It’s the type of climbing and adventure that we all love and feel confident in. When we arrived at the foot of the wall for the first time three weeks ago, we even had the feeling that it wouldn’t be challenging enough. Everything just felt so good and viable. We could have done it three weeks ago when we arrived at the foot of the wall for the first time with our gear. We set up our bivy and decided that if everyone felt well in the morning we would start climbing. Unfortunately, we received a message from the weather service that conditions would get bad within the course of the day. So, we descended with the idea to come back a few days later. None of us thought we’d be hit by bad weather and snowfall for three weeks!

That’s why it hurts so damn much to pull the rope to belay from our bivy up here at 6300m. We are all at a loss for words. Our heads hang low and our mood hit rock bottom. It feels so unfair because we didn’t even get a real chance to really climb through the wall. We were never able to prove our climbing abilities!

Looking back, we shouldn’t have let Mémé  convince us that we needed to find a good place to bivy. It’s why we left the Russian hammock at the bergschrund so we could be faster. The Russian hammock is a mat you use to catch the snow and ice you chop from the ice wall to eventually have a platform where you can bivy. They saying goes „ If you live, you learn.” And it is how it is.

We spend half the night abseiling. The snow keeps falling and the spots we cleared free of snow to build a belay are dumped full again every half minute by the spin drift! We abseil one last time in the middle of the night over the bergschrund, completely wasted. We’re finally back safe and sound!

There is so much snow in the meantime and we’re so dehydrated that we barely have the strength to pound through the few meters through hip-deep snow to retrieve our poles and Russian hammock that are only about 200 meters away. But Sean’s patient shoveling is finally rewarded. We continue to descend and divide the gear from camp 1 to our already heavy backpacks.

The deep snow does have the advantage that we finally start getting warm again on our way to ABC. Temperatures around minus 20 degrees Celsius, the wind, our fatigue, and being dehydrated has gotten us close to hypothermia. I also have a bad feeling that the snowed in, steep slope could start sliding on our way to ABC. We finally reach the plane glacier and return to safety. Now everything is just a mental game. We need to fight our way back across the long glacier and loose rocks to ABC seriously fatigued, disappointed, and with heavy packs.