Within 8hrs of the top of the world
It’s been a month since Trent Thorne’s return from an attempt to reach the summit of Mt Everest. Oli sits down with him to reflect on his incredible journey. Below is an exert of the final days of Trents’ expedition:
“The final day before “Summit Days”, you're basically starting at 7300m, you're just starting oxygen and that is the final climb up the Lhotse Face. So we had about 700m of face to cover that day. And when I looked at my Garmin at the end of the day, I basically covered 1.3km’s, so there's a little bit of traversing up top.
So it's not a big day when you look at it like 1.3km’s, but it took us 10 hours to cover that. So you're basically doing about 100m an hour.
And that's because the Lhotse Face is like an ice ladder. So, it's not vertical, but it's near on vertical.
And all day, all you're doing is just literally step after step, just going up this vertical face, and there's really no place to stop, there's really no place to rest.
You've got people, whilst there's no big queues or traffic jams up there, there's other climbers who are behind you. So you've got the pressure to just keep on going, even though you're going at that incredibly slow rate that's as quick as you can really go.
It's a big day, what I'm trying to say is just a huge, huge day. We started at 4am and it's freezing cold when we started, but we did that deliberately so if there was going to be a queue with the head of it. Most other teams started at 6am.
So we got in, after that 10 hours, we got into the high camp at 2pm in the afternoon, with a view to 10pm that night heading off to the Summit.
I hadn't really really noticed how fatigued I was at that point. All I wanted to do was get a bit of food and get some fluid into me… It's very hard… I found all the way up the mountain above camp that eating and drinking just becomes hard. And I think the way to try and explain that is that because it's such a low oxygen environment, the body doesn't feel like it needs it.
Even though it's something as obvious as water, even just taking a gulp of water becomes hard.
So you're forcing yourself to drink every gulp of water every mouthful of food. But you know, you need that for the energy stores for what's going to happen the next day. So you're constantly conscious that I need to be pushing this food into me this drink into me.
So I got into my tent because it’s freezing cold and started doing a few things and then that's when I started noticing, I suppose because I started to cool down a bit… My calves just really became like lead bricks, they didn't freeze up on me but they were just like a rock.
And after a couple of hours of me just trying to get them moving in the sleeping bag because you just there's no point being out of sleeping bag, it’s too cold, I fairly quickly realised that the timeframe between 2pm and 10pm was not gonna be enough to get my calves working again.
So I made the call probably by about 6pm. I knew my body well enough and there was no way I could do what I was about to try and do.
And the decision was a relatively easy decision to make. I knew that if I go up there, I'm gonna put myself in danger. I was going to put my Sherpa in danger. I just wasn't prepared to do that.
I like my fingers, I like my toes, and there'd been a lot of frostbite on the mountain, it was actually, it's been the worst year for frostbite than ever.
The mountain was actually colder this year, which manifested itself and people were firstly taking more time and they obviously suffered more frostbite injuries.
So I just made the call. I just knew that I could go up the mountain, I knew I could probably get to a certain point, I knew I could get to the top. And I thought, what's the point?
That's just, that's irrational… I'm better off staying here. Hopefully my legs come good and I can try Lhotse tomorrow. That was the way I rationalised it to myself.
I just knew it was right… It was the right decision.
But it still immediately stung for the obvious reasons…
Because I knew that my one shot was gone.
We talked about it being one and done. And that's still my intention.
I have no plans to ever go back.”
-Trent Thorne
Some stats from Mt Everest:
2023 is one of the most deadly years on the mountain, with 17 people having died as of July 2023
As of July 2022, only 6,098 people have ever made it to the top of Mt Everest
