Iñaki Ochoa de Olza summits true summit!
My Sincere Congratulations to him! Iñaki has now climbed 11 of the worlds 14 8000m peaks
Extract by Jamie from Project Himalaya web site:
"Briefly, 1am Iñaki left our Camp 1 heading up alone. By morning he was at Camp 3 (no tents there) and called down to say that again the ridge looked too dangerous and he was turning back. Half an hour later he radioed saying that he saw a line he liked. He dropped out of Camp 3 and crossed an area of recent serac collapse then climbed near a rock ridge up to the main east-west ridge to the true summit. Iñaki radioed again from a little below the summit saying it would be too windy to call from there, and then battled the last distance in waist deep drifts to the summit. This was just before 2pm Nepal time (yes, the mountain is entirely in Tibet, China, but we work on the more sensible Nepal time...) He had been climbing over 12 hours, from 6400m to 8027m/8046m (depending on which height you believe).
In what looks as though it could be the only summit (true main summit)
Photo, of course by Iñaki
The following is from Iñaki's web site - note that the translation is not correct but I feel that even though it contains errors, the essence of his experience comes through...in fact I think the translation might add a little!“ Does not give shame you? to your years and opening new routes? ”… To the other side of the world, the telephone voice loaded of irony of my friend Oscar Gogorza gives back abruptly to the reality, nothing else to arrive at the field bases. I am so happy that more than to walk, flight, or I slide a handspan over the ground. I am completely dry, burst and fused after the hardest and dangerous, clean and magical ascent as i myself it had not imagined not even in my better dreams. I finish making the best scaling of my life. When leaving the frozen glacier and arriving at the “mainland” I have not been able to make another thing that to collapse to me exhausted, crying like a boy.
Them story a secret? Only i myself it believed to have a 1 percent of possibilities. Nobody bet nothing by me more, here on the field it bases, and with good reasons. Day 30 i myself had raised until the 7,700 meters and the conditions were infames, with extreme avalanche danger. And in addition the wind did not stop, beating with desire from the southwest. Thus the call “normal route” had defeated or to most of the aspirings, and more than 100 climbers, many accompanied by sherpas and artificial oxygen, they had lined up or towards Katmandú. Well-known clienta of a commercial expedition assured to me categorical before releasing itself that, according to its guides, this year the main top “impossible” era. That yes, had received him 12,000 dollars by such advice…
Therefore, attempt to rest day 1, concentrated in finding the forces and the mental balance necessary for which only I know that she is approached. The old classes come to me at the top from Latin. And to the aim to the end I decide me destalentado that one, Julio Caesar I suppose, that she said the one that “the fortune smiles to the audacious ones”. And audacious and arrogant it is without a doubt to think that it can raise a ochomil, the one that it is, by where nobody has raised before, and in addition to do it in solitaire and without installing height fields, in which ascent is called “express”.
That I have seted out, neither the more nor the less, and I have not trusted it to anybody.
I start up to in the morning, from the 6,350 meters of field 1. I leave like a howitzer. Soon encounter my better rate and I devour the meters with quickness, without needing shutdowns to recover when the snow is not soft. To the dawn I am to 7,400 meters, still in the normal route, that already by my experience of the past day 30 that is not in conditions. Here the wind is unbearable. I pay attention to the northeast face and I see that there it does not make air, so very instinctively I go towards its base. I cannot be thought that it has not been happened to him to anybody before to me. I have to lose 200 meters of height, so hard ascended, and to happen underneath a truely dangerous hanging glacier, but to 8 in the morning I am in its base. The crack that gives to entrance to the route the business with care, that stops that I am only, and immediately my two pioléts find the land in which better they develop, lofty ice and snow.
6 hours later a beautiful trench is opened behind me. I am in the highest edge, the same one which those climb that comes from the South face, the same one that my friend Jorge Egocheaga had defined as “peculiar” after his ascent the last year. The mountain climbers, what race, we called thus to which in fact he is dangerous, jodido and difficult.
To the 14 and 8 minutes nepalí hour I call by radio my girl and him story that I am doing photos to me to the defense of the wind, 5 meters under the top. When I cross the last meters out of breath, I realize without doubts that I have made something special. It lodges an infinite hope to me.
The most violent and terrible wind than I have seen evacuates to me of the own top after passing a pair of seconds in her. But he does not matter to me. He is already behind schedule, and I have to march towards house.
Iñaki Ochoa de Olza.
http://www.navarra8000.com/
