Climbing Extreme

During the last few weeks I’ve been writing an article about climbing in real mountain conditions as opposed to average Finnish ice climbing conditions. As a part of this process I just started to memorize all the stupid things I’ve done on the mountains. Trust me, there have been plenty of those, many of which such that could have ended with deadly consequences. Fortunately I’m still here. My stupidities have ranged from getting up there with almost no clothing (i.e. just shorts and thin layer of Gore-Tex) in to climbing up a sand stone wall, just to see what’s in there, without not really thinking about it, until I’ve ended far too high and with no anchoring what so ever.

While the other article is still in the making (should be out fairly soon though), I thought to list the top three stupid things, I’ve done on the mountains. I’ve (luckily) learned something out of each, I hope you’ll either enjoy or learn from these three small stories as well.

Top three stupid things I’ve done on the mountains:

Number one was the large stone on top of a glacier formed stone ridge close to Annapurna base camp in Nepal. Well, not really the stone, but the fact that I had to climb on top of it. In 1996 we were hiking there with my friend. The last part of the path to the base camp goes on the side of a kind of stony ridge, there it was, right from our trail, a HUGE stone on top of the ridge hanging half out over about 200-300 meters high cliff, not exactly vertical, but steep enough to result deadly fall. Obviously I had to climb and get myself photographed (too bad, I couldn’t find the photo anymore) there. Once I was coming down from the stone I felt how the stone moved slightly. It was a scary moment. I’ve been avoiding such stones ever since.

On the same trip we did quite a few other stupidities as well. Like walked just in few days to the base camp (4130 meters above the sea level) and we didn’t stop there, we went about 700-800 above it without any acclimatization what so ever –> we were lucky and we didn’t get any serious mountain illness. Besides providing few opportunities for danger Annapurna is extremely beautiful spot, there is several over 7000 meter peaks around the base camp and there’s probably no other place such as this in the World. And if you’ll just do it like guide book says, it’s pretty easy to get there as well.

Number two I did while my first trip to Kebnekaise, Sweden. It was late on the summer. We were going up the east side route with my girl friend. She’s slightly afraid of heights and at some point we were so in so steep and high spot that she didn’t want to go further, especially because the next portion would have been on the glacier. Luckily there was another pair coming up straight behind us and one of them agreed to continue with me to the glacier. So we put on the crampons and all the other gear tied the rope (wrong way) and started ascending on the glacier. Neither one of us had any experience on glaciers nor red anything about them. Eventually I fell in to crevasse, which luckily wasn’t too wide. I managed to grab both sides of it with my hands and pull myself up from there.

Though on those first two I didn’t suffer any damage what so ever, the number three got nominated because I got some (though small) damage while being stupid. It’s the sliding incident that happened at the Hourglass fall, where I slid (and rumbled) down several hundred meters on a steep snow slope. If you’re interested, read the full article.