My travel diaries
Friday 3 August, 2007 - Muztag Ata Base Camp, Xinjiang, China
I'm woken up at 6.15 by the sound of rustling, and look up to see that everyone else in the yurt is up and getting ready, while I rest peacefully on the floor. Apparently the formidable lady owner has been in already to wake us all up and they tell me I'll be in trouble if I ignore her again.
"I think we should get a photo of you with your arm round her before we leave," says Toby.
"I know you're used to taking orders," I reply, "but I think you're scared of her."
I seem to be getting a reputation as a bit of a clown as well as a troublemaker. Some people have been laughing at my bad jokes already, and it usually takes a few days before they decide to start humouring me in this way. This is a pleasant surprise, but I don't expect it to last.
The mountain is beautiful this morning, and I take photograph after photograph after we begin walking at 8. For the first two hours we walk towards it across a flat dry plain. Crossing a river we pass a village of about twenty flat-roofed mud buildings. Camels are grazing on the grass by the river, and the five snow-capped peaks of Kongur are visible to our left. According to a description on the back of my map, one of the peaks is supposed to look like a local Kirghiz felt hat, but I can't for the life of me work out which one.
Father of the Ice Mountains
After two hours the path starts to rise as we begin our ascent to Base Camp. We are now on the foothills of Muztag Ata, and the mountain intermittently vanishes from view and reappears again. Its broken architecture is even more prominent from this angle. From Subash it had a clear dome shape separated by a cleft, but now we are looking straight up the cleft at the dramatic Kmatolja Glacier tumbling towards us. It now appears as two mountains, the larger one on the right, Muztag Ata itself (7546m), which we hope to climb, ending abruptly at a huge vertical wall of rock descending for hundreds of metres to the glacier separating it from its second peak, Kuksay Peak (7184m). The path undulates over brown hills punctuated with rocky outcrops. This is marmot country. Their burrows cover the hillsides, and every so often one of the furry golden creatures strays into view.
There are many mountains containing the word Muztagh in this part of Central Asia. It simply means "ice mountain". The name Muztag Ata can be translated as "Father of the Ice Mountains", possibly due to its enormous height in comparison to surrounding peaks. Sven Hedin relates a legend about the mountain which he heard from the local Kirghiz folk when he attempted to climb it in 1894. Many hundreds of years ago a wise old man climbed it and found a lake on its summit, on the shore of which grazed brilliant white camels. Old men were wandering around in white robes offering him fruit from a plum grove by the lake. When he ate the fruit, the men congratulated him for not having rejected it, as that would have subjected him to a life of eternity on the mountain, like them. All of a sudden, a man on a white horse appeared, lifted him onto the saddle and rushed him down the precipice and back down the mountain. Another story told of a mythical city on the summit called Janaidar, whose inhabitants were completely happy and experienced no cold, suffering or death. It's easy to see how such legends come about. Following his own attempt on the mountain, Hedin then built himself a boat out of horse's hide and lamb's skin and spent several days rowing across Lake Karakul calculating its depth. He later heard that a rumour had spread across the Pamirs about a strange pale man who had leaped up Muztag Ata like a goat and flown across Karakul like a wild goose.
Hedin tried to climb Muztag Ata in the days when very little was known about the effects of high altitude on a person's ability to climb mountains of this size. A year later the highly successful Alpine mountaineer Albert Mummery died on Nanga Parbat after genuinely believing he ought to be able to reach its 8125m summit from a high camp at 6100m in a single day. Hedin's account of his four attempts on Muztag Ata are littered with descriptions of headaches, nausea and retreats due to illness, and it's only after he reaches a height of 6000m that he decides that it might be a good idea to bring a tent next time. Strangely, three of his attempts appear to have been made via Kuksay Peak, and it's unclear how he intended to scale down its walls, cross the glacier and climb the huge cliff up to the main summit. The size of the cleft is so obvious from the walk in that it's confusing that he chose this route. His one attempt directly up to the main summit was driven back at around 6000m,when he encountered the labyrinth of crevasses and ice walls which remain between Camp 1 and Camp 2 to this day, and his yaks kept falling into them.
Base camp camels
We reach Base Camp at midday. It sits in a basin beneath steep scree slopes rising to the summit, now well out of view beyond the horizon, with a small mountain stream trickling through its centre. There are about a hundred tents of various expedition parties spread out across the basin. Geoff and I pitch ours in a pleasant spot of grass and granite rocks underneath a huge mound of moraine, and hidden from the rest of camp behind a dry stone wall. While we are pitching, a train of camels arrive with the rest of our kit. They don't seem to be quite such well-behaved pack animals as mules, donkeys or yaks. One of them refuses to sit down to be unloaded, and whenever anyone approaches it kicks out furiously with its hind legs. Nobody is injured, and they eventually bring it down by winding a rope around its legs.
"It seems to have the hump about something," I murmur, but Geoff isn't listening.
By dinner time we have been joined by two more expedition members, Dave and Ela, who have travelled their way across the former Soviet republics west of Xinjiang and arrived at Base Camp a couple of days ago. Dave tells me Ela won't be trying to reach the summit, but has permitted him to join a mountaineering expedition in exchange for being dragged around mosques for the last few weeks. He seems to be a very experienced ski mountaineer, who has climbed Ama Dablam, a technically difficult mountain close to Everest, and has brought his skis to Muztag Ata intending to carry them up to the top and ski down again. I'm slightly in awe of his experience, but they both seem genial enough, and continue to amaze me by laughing at my jokes right away. This makes things worse for them, as I'm determined to slip a few more in while the going's good.
Mountaineering chat
We discuss Everest, and the record numbers of people reaching the summit this year, a little over five hundred. I tell them about the Iceman, who tried to reach the summit in shorts while I was there in May, and the 17 Chinese climbers who reached the summit on a single day. Back in Kathmandu I saw a documentary on the Discovery Channel about a group of mountaineers who got stuck behind a large party on the summit ridge in 2006. One of them, a New Zealander called Mark Inglis, became the first person with no legs to reach the summit, but in doing so got frostbite in his stumps that made it painful to put on his prosthetics, and he ended up being carried part of the way down in sleeping bags dragged by yaks. David tells us about the mountaineers Conrad Anker and Leo Houlding who ascended the mountain this year wearing replicas of the clothing George Mallory and Sandy Irvine wore in 1924.
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