Graham Cooper rejoices after reaching the summit of Mount Everest.
(Alpenglow Expeditions)
Sleeping with your head in a bag works.
Graham Cooper and Adrian Ballinger, California mountaineers whose Mount Everest acclimatization included sleeping at home with their heads in hypoxic tents meant to mimic the agonies of extreme altitude, reached the world's highest summit on Wednesday.
The pioneering acclimatization technique helped reduce the expedition time by approximately half, from about two months to less than one. They also ascended the much less traveled northern route, starting in Tibet rather than Nepal, to avoid the treacherous crowding and chaos on the more popular southern route.
A week ago on the southern route, a harrowing human traffic jam left dozens of climbers shuffling in single file along a narrow ridge just below the summit, a crash that turned deadly when a ledge of snow It collapsed under his feet.
Six climbers plummeted toward a nearly vertical rock wall 11,000 feet below. Four survived because they were correctly attached to a fixed rope. Two others, apparently not, slid helplessly into the abyss as the crowd watched in horror.
The growing crowds, dirt and danger on the southern route prompted Ballinger, founder of the Olympic Valley-based Alpenglow Expeditions guide service, to begin taking his clients to the north side of the mountain.
“It's colder, the route is more difficult, and the bureaucracy of dealing with China and getting permits is a complete nightmare,” Ballinger told the Times in an interview before the trip. “But despite those things, the Chinese are trying to regulate, so once you get to the mountain, it's safer, cleaner and much less busy.”
Ballinger, who has been climbing and guiding on Mount Everest since 2009, stuck to his principles and suspended his Everest trips after the Chinese government closed his side of the mountain in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The May expedition was the first time he had returned since then.
On Wednesday, under a perfectly blue sky with snow-capped peaks stretching to the horizon in every direction, he stood at the top yelling above the wind: “It's been amazing!”
In total, 23 climbers, guides and Sherpas from the Alpenglow team reached the summit on Tuesday and Wednesday.
But there were many obstacles along the way.
First, the Chinese government made a last-minute change to their permits, forcing a tense dance with bureaucracy and causing a week-long delay in entering the country. The start date mattered, because there is only a short period each year, usually late May, when the weather is good enough to attempt to climb Everest's 29,032-foot summit. Expeditions must be planned meticulously and any delay can jeopardize the entire enterprise.
The team also had to battle dangerous winds.
On Monday, as they broke into the “death zone” above 26,000 feet, where most human bodies begin to fatally decompose without supplemental oxygen, Ballinger posted about the conditions on Instagram. With the wind howling and the bright white summit looming over her right shoulder in the distance, she lowered her oxygen mask and told the camera: “The wind is a little more reasonable now.”
“However, it is very close,” he added, “on the verge of not having the [safety] margin I want.”
In the end, the weather cooperated, ending a five-year wait for Ballinger to return to the highest point on Earth. It was the ninth time he had climbed to the summit.
For Cooper, 54, a biotech executive from Oakland with an impressive resume in endurance sports, it was the physical test of a lifetime. And that's a lot coming from a man who has competed in the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii 11 times and won the legendary Western States Endurance Run, a 100-mile ultramarathon in California's Sierra Nevada.
The four-day effort to the summit was like running four Ironmans in a row, Cooper said during a phone interview from Everest Base Camp on Friday morning.
He coughed throughout the call and his exhaustion was palpable as he described the worst: a sudden case of acute kidney failure during the descent.
“I peed on a bottle full of what looked like Peet's coffee,” he said. Ballinger was trying to organize a helicopter rescue when, to everyone's relief, Cooper began “to urinate clearly again,” he said.
As part of his preparation for the Mount Everest expedition, Graham Cooper spent months sleeping in a hypoxic tent that slowly reduces the oxygen level to mimic extreme altitude conditions.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
Because of the permit issue, which meant fewer days to acclimatize on the mountain itself, the trip would have been a bust without the weeks of acclimatization sleeping with your head in those bags at home, Cooper said.
“Without that, I would have been absolutely devastated,” Cooper said.
During the last night in the tent before attempting the summit, Cooper said he had serious doubts about whether they would make it. They had climbed through 30 mph winds to get to that point, and the forecast called for more of the same the next day. If things got worse, they would have to turn around.
But the weather cooperated and, climbing from the north side, the Alpenglow team gloriously had the mountain to themselves.
“It definitely lived up to” the expectations, Cooper said. “It was an epic adventure.”
