“We descend, we descend, we descend!”: Climbers trapped in a mountain in Nepal managed to descend

Weather reports announced a miracle and it happened on Saturday at the agreed time. There was the blue sky, the sun, the centrifuge of the wind caused by Cyclone Yaas finally extinguished and without snow precipitation, Czech mountaineers Marek Holeck and Radoslav Groh took advantage of the last breath of their satellite phone battery to announce, like a desperate cry, the long-awaited news: “We are going down, we are going down, we are going down!”

Nine days after the start of the opening of the first road on the northwest wall of Baruntse (7129 meters, Nepal), the couple managed to survive, the real price, the only one that matters to a climber. It will not be a descent, it will be to open the lid of the coffin and flee. Three days ago, Holecek and Groh passed over the summit as exhausted as they were in despair at the scale of the storm which crept over their heads, two specters in a mousetrap: no photos were taken, there were no expressions of joy and immediately we continued to descend whatever the hellish weather allowed us. We will sleep in a completely wet bag ”. It was his first night captured at 7,000 meters.

They would suffer another two days stranded, without food and with very little gas to melt snow and hydrate at an altitude that devours organisms, atrophies them and exposes them terribly to pulmonary or cerebral edema. Two days ago, they sent the following message: “We survived another hellish night under a real hurricane and heavy snowfall. We had to constantly dig so that the snow did not bury our tent. All prayers are set for Saturday ”.

The Czech couple clung to life thanks to two factors combined: his great experience and the possibility of receiving weather reports to know how to wait and activate at the right time, to resist the promise of a happy ending indicated on Saturday. They didn’t use their satellite phones to demand senseless ransoms or demand chimeras: it was an exemplary demonstration of serenity, experience and self-control. They were there because that’s how they approach mountaineering, because that’s how they assume the commitment to freely decide to climb a mountain according to ethical principles that admit of no doubts, d ‘mistakes or regrets.

The telephone has been her umbilical cord, a piece of wood on the high seas, but also a buoy for the waiting family. Marek Holacek usually teams up with his friend Zdenek Hak, with whom he has won two gold ice axes, the highest honor bestowed by the mountaineering world. By receiving the second, in 2019, Hak made it clear that they both share the same feeling about mountaineering: “It’s very important in our lives, but it’s less important than our families, who come first. Third, our work as mountain guides ”.

Before being stranded in 2017 to sign two of the most successful mountaineering sites of the past decade, Holacek and Hak had never climbed together: “I had to call him because no Czech acquaintances wanted to climb with me. The first one would laugh. . The same happened with Groh in 2019, when Holacek needed a partner to travel to Peru: he called the young man (32) with whom he immediately befriended.

El último día del mes de mayo de 1970, un seísmo golpeó la region del Huascarán, montaña perseguida por una numerosa expedición checa: 14 de sus integrantes perecieron sepultados por masas de roca y hielo y abajo, en las aldeas, 70,000 inhabitants disaparecieron forever. Half a century later, Holecek and Groh opened a new road in the north of Huandoy, in tribute to all the victims. The documentary Boys 1970 collect your whole trip.

The two have now undergone one of the most epic episodes in recent Himalayan history, on a remote mountain near Everest, in a lonely place where helicopters don’t fly, there are no fixed ropes, no oxygen cylinders, no Sherpas doing the job, no wi-fi at base camp, no parties, no coronavirus … just the intimate and firm desire to offer yourself an authentic adventure.

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