At the moment Alex Txikon may feel on Mount Everest a bit like Edmund Hillary. Like the first ascender from New Zealand and his companions in 1953, the Basque must play an active part in finding a way through the dangerous Khumbu Icefall above Base Camp and in carrying material needed to secure the route. For example aluminium ladders to cross the deep crevasses in the Icefall. With a weight of about five kilograms, such a ladder is not too heavy but bloody bulky while climbing through the ice. Real back-breaking work, as the video shows which the 35-year-old sent today from Everest Base Camp:

As reported, Alex, along with his Spanish countryman Carlos Rubio, wants to scale Mount Everest in winter, for the first time since 1993 – without bottled oxygen. The two climbers and nine Sherpas first have to make their way through the dangerous Icefall. Txikon has estimated this work for up to four weeks.

Pretty exclusive experience

As in Hillary’s days, the Spanish expedition is currently the only one on the highest mountain on earth. What a contrast to spring, when year after year several hundred mountaineers from dozens of commercial expeditions turn the Base Camp into a small tent town!

When the clients arrive there at an altitude of 5,300 meters in April, usually the so-called “Icefall Doctors” have already prepared and secured the way through the Icefall. This team of eight Sherpas also ensures that the route remains accessible throughout the climbing season until its end early June. The highly specialized Sherpas are selected and paid by the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC), an organization that originally only cared about the environmental protection in the National Park around Mount Everest. Since 2000, the SPCC has also been responsible for the route through the Khumbu Icefall on behalf of the Government of Nepal. In spring 2014, 16 Nepalese climbers were killed in an avalanche in the Icefall.

Even if it turns out that Alex Txikon is not able to reach the summit at 8,850 meters this winter – his experience of working as a non-Sherpa as Icefall Doctor is pretty exclusive.

The Base Camps on both sides of Mount Everest have got empty eleven days after the devastating earthquake in Nepal. The climbers are on their way back. What about their permits, after they could not even make a single attempt to climb the highest mountain on earth? In Nepal, the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC) has requested the government to extend this year’s permits until 2016.

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Apparently, the new route through the Khumbu Icefall is more than a little course correction. That is indicated by the images that the US guide Garrett Madison has published in his blog. Expedition members of his Madison Mountaineering team had flown over the icefall above Everest Base Camp by helicopter and had looked from the air where the so-called “Icefall Doctors” set up the route for this spring season. The images show that the route leads – seen from below – much further to the right side of the ice labyrinth than expected. Closer to Nuptse, further away from the West Shoulder of Everest, from where an ice avalanche had released on 18 April 2014 that had killed 16 Nepalis. “It appears that climbers will have to negotiate broken ice as before, and perhaps more vertical ladders”, Garrett wrote adding that there was at least one section that had four vertical ladders tied together to ascend up a very large ice cliff.

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