Mountain Madness

Turn­arounds on Ama Dablam are rarely the result of a sin­gle bad moment.

The idea of a 1:1 Sher­pa ratio is often explained in logis­ti­cal terms. One Sher­pa per climber. More sup­port. More attention.

Ama Dablam has a way of cut­ting through assumptions.

Most climbers arrive hav­ing trained hard. They’ve put in the hours, logged the ele­va­tion, and maybe done a few peaks at alti­tude. They feel ready. And by most mea­sures, they are.

But Ama Dablam does­n’t ask whether you’re ready. It asks whether you’re precise.

The dis­tinc­tion mat­ters. Readi­ness is about capac­i­ty: how fit you are, how much alti­tude expe­ri­ence you have, and how strong your sys­tems look on paper. Читать дальше...

Ama Dablam has a way of being hon­est with climbers.

It doesn’t rely on alti­tude alone to cre­ate dif­fi­cul­ty. Instead, it asks for pre­ci­sion. Move­ment has to be delib­er­ate. Tran­si­tions have to be clean. There is very lit­tle room to be tentative.

For many climbers, this is where things start to come into focus.

You real­ize quick­ly whether your sys­tems are dialed or whether you’ve been get­ting by on strength and fit­ness. On steep ter­rain, espe­cial­ly at alti­tude, there is no way to fake effi­cien­cy. Читать дальше...

From the out­side, it is easy to assume that most Ever­est turn­arounds come down to weath­er or bad luck. Storms roll in, con­di­tions dete­ri­o­rate, and plans change.

Climbers often ask for a train­ing plan for Ever­est, usu­al­ly framed in weeks or months. The real­i­ty is that Ever­est prepa­ra­tion doesn’t fit neat­ly into a sched­ule like that. What mat­ters is not just how much you train, but how your approach evolves over time.

The wind was howl­ing so hard at 17,000 feet that I was­n’t sure our tents would hold. It was day three at high camp, and we’d just got­ten the weath­er report: still too windy to sum­mit. Day four brought the same news. Then day five. Day six.

Mark Gun­log­son recounts his 31 years of ​“Mad­ness” as a guide and own­er of the moun­taineer­ing, trekking and back­coun­try ski­ing com­pa­ny start­ed by Scott Fis­ch­er – a wild and amaz­ing jour­ney! The next chap­ter starts now with Lisa Thomp­son at the helm.

What does the North Ridge of Mount Bak­er, moun­taineer­ing on the Eas­t­on Glac­i­er of Mount Bak­er, and Ouray ice climb­ing have in com­mon? First, all involve some form of frozen water. Sec­ond, you need sharp pointy things, like your ice axe and cram­pons. The dif­fer­ences diverge quite a bit from there.

Some updat­ed fea­tures to our Nepal pro­gram — includ­ing a low­er price, new and improved itin­er­aries, and more