Camp 1

Hi folks,

Another eventful day here at “club la broad peak”
After a cheeky alpine start at 03:00 Pete and I enjoyed chilli infused omelet for breakfast, thank goodness we had primed a tactical coffee ready for the boil when we met in the mess tent. Obviously we were all waiting to see if Pete had been eaten by his pet snow leopard and with minutes he bound into the tent with sadly nothing to report, perhaps tonight he’ll try another food source.

We set off at a good pace across the frozen ice field and made it to the start of the climb for real, and to my amazement it had not been roped, nothing, nothing was worked just snow and ice with a dabble of rock.

Obviously we hadn’t needed it to be worked so we just set about climbing with our HAPs. Pete with Bashar and myself with Mohammed.
What the Pakistani mountaineers lack in technical ability they more than make up for in physicality and motivation. They clearly take more risks than us Brits do but soon fell into our way of climbing, Alpine style.

It was a funny ascent really, the ice was rock hard, and the snow was delicate slab, which made for some great teaching opportunities and also 1 or 2 cheeky clenchy moments.

After a couple of hours we made it to the camp site, well when I say camp site it’s really small, almost as small as camp 1 on K2, about big enough for 2-3 very small tents with quite a drop off the back.

All 4 of us set about creating a bigger space for the tent to be pitched, using axes and our shovel we dug into the ice and made a base that would just fit in out tent, we pitched it and filled it with our stashed gear and made a speedy retreat as we could see a front coming in loaded with snow.

The descent was less traumatic than I had thought given that we would be literally triggering the snow slab, although Pete did get covered in what must have felt to be a 1 sided ice ball fight, thankfully  no one really slipped.

We made it back to camp in time for some warming garlic soup, which today had a rather inventive green product in, I can only assume it was a herb or at least at some point did grow. Neither Pete nor I was convinced it was purposely meant to be in the soup but it did add that additional something……
We also enjoyed a cold, sugar loaded, coke which tasted absolutely amazing.

Although neither of us were that tired the front moved into our camp snow and wind shook the mess tent so we went and rested before our evening meal.