Home/The Twelve Steps/Step 05

A climber in an orange down jacket ascending fixed ropes on a steep blue-ice headwall before dawn, lit only by their own head torch.

Island Peak

Be terrified and go anyway

Country
NepalImja Valley, Khumbu, Nepal
Duration
16–19 daysSeason Three
Grade
Technical 3BGet High scale
Max altitude
6,189 m20,305 ft
Daily activity
Approx 6–9 hours, 15 on summit day
Season
Oct–Nov, Apr–May
Skill required
Ice technique, jumar, abseil
Months on the plan
Two monthsof 24 planned

Step 05Island Peak6,189 m / 20,305 ft

Altitude profile: 12 steps, 1,400 m to 8,849 m at Mount EverestA line chart of every step in order. Step 1, 12 Days of Silence, is the lowest at 1,400 m / 4,593 ft, Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. Every step is higher than the one before it, up to step 12, Mount Everest, 8,849 m / 29,032 ft. Everything above 8,000 m is the death zone, marked in red: step 11, Cho Oyu; step 12, Mount Everest. Each point is a link to that step. You are on step 5, Island Peak, 6,189 m / 20,305 ft.

You spent a decade chasing a feeling and paying a fortune for a much worse version of the one that is about to arrive, free, at twenty thousand feet.

What you are walking into

The walk in is gentle and then abruptly it is not. Above high camp the headwall is 100 to 150 metres of steep snow and ice on fixed lines, sometimes with an aluminium ladder laid across the bergschrund at the bottom of it, finishing on a ridge narrow enough to see down both sides at once.

Sunrise on that ridge puts three thousand metres of the south face of Lhotse directly in front of you, close enough that it stops reading as scenery and starts reading as weather.

What it takes out of you

Here is the part nobody will say to your face: you are not frightened of the ice. You are frightened of finding out, in front of witnesses, that you cannot do it. You have organised an entire life around never being in that position.

So slow the breath down. Shorten the stride. Three points of contact. Clip the line. That is what asking for help looks like when it is not a statement through a representative — and it works, and afterwards you will have done a thing that cannot be bought, gifted, delegated or spun.

The logistics

Duration
16–19 days
Skill required
Ice technique, jumar, abseil
Season
Oct–Nov, Apr–May

The climb profile

Left, elevation only: no horizontal axis, so its width means nothing. Right, air: bar length is the one thing here that does.

Climb profile: Pareshaya Gyab base camp at 5,087 m to Summit at 6,189 m, 1,102 metres of verticalA vertical elevation chart with no horizontal axis. The scale runs from 4,750 m at the foot to 6,500 m at the top. Pareshaya Gyab base camp is marked at 5,087 m and Summit at 6,189 m, a difference of 1,102 metres. Between them, by elevation: High Camp at 5,600 m. Each is drawn as a rule straight across the chart, because where it sits along the route is not sourced. The elevation part of the chart has no horizontal axis because the horizontal distance from Pareshaya Gyab base camp to Summit is not published by any source we could find. Its width carries no meaning. Cumulative ascent over the route is not sourced and is not shown. To the right, a bar hangs off each of those elevations and its length is that altitude's share of the air at sea level, which a dashed bar across the full track marks as 100%: Pareshaya Gyab base camp 55%; High Camp 51%; Summit 47%. The bars shorten as the elevation rises.
Base camp
Pareshaya Gyab base camp, 5,087 msource
Summit
Summit, 6,189 msource
Vertical, base camp to summit
1,102 mthe difference of the two elevations above, nothing more
Horizontal distance
Not yet sourcedNo operator route description, alpine club record or mountaineering reference we could find states it for this route. It is not estimated here.
Cumulative ascent
Not yet sourcedThe up-and-down of the whole route, which is more than the vertical above. Nobody publishes it for any of the twelve.

Camps, by elevation: High Camp 5,600 m source. Where each one sits along the route is not sourced, so each is drawn as a rule across the chart rather than placed on it.

6,189 m is the operator and permit figure; Wikipedia uses 6,165 m throughout. Both are in wide use. Two sourced legs exist — 2 km base camp to high camp and 3 km high camp to summit — but adding them would be our arithmetic, so no distance is shown.

The highest camp is High Camp, 5,600 m, where the air is 51% of what it is at sea level. The tent was carried up there. The air was not.

The part we will not lie about

Island Peak has a reputation as an easy 6,000er and that reputation puts people in helicopters. The headwall is real ice climbing at altitude, at the end of a long night, when you are already finished.

Two gloved hands on a fixed rope at the bottom of the frame, a head-torch cone lighting steep ice a metre ahead, blackness beyond.
Four in the morning. The lit part is all there is.

Who you do it with

Four in the morning on a headwall in the dark, and every excuse you have ever used arrives at once, in your own voice. You can pay a guide to keep walking. Nobody has ever bought the part where you decide.

What the word means, and where it came from

$2,400,000 at the plan's pace — $100,000 a month, charged monthly, for as long as it takes. All twelve steps. One client at a time.

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A white helicopter crossing above a still grey-turquoise glacial lake beneath an immense rock and ice wall.
A moraine-dammed lake, and the wall that stands out of the far shore.
The snow and ice summit pyramid of Island Peak rising above its crevassed glacier basin at first light.
Crampon front points bitten into blue glacial ice beside the frayed sheath of a fixed rope.

All twelve steps

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