A day to remember! This was my 7th attempt at the speed record and my first successful trip to the summit. See splits below for detailed splits from my Garmin.
Excellent weather with very little wind and summit temperatures around -20F and mostly clear skies.
I left EBC from the SST stupa just after 7pm and made good time through the ice fall, arriving at C1 around 9:20pm and putting on O2 there. Felt great and continued completely alone through the Western Cwm on a beautiful nearly-full moon night to C2 in just over an hour. Continued up to the Bergschrund around 6800m and changed from micro-spikes to crampons there and then made good time up to C3 where I picked up water and some gels.
Felt great going up to C4 and arrived after 6h47 and took the longest break of the day there to put on my two-piece down suit, overboots, and eat some noodle soup. It was another 2h43 to the summit, topping out in 9h55 and meeting my good friend Sonam Sherpa at the summit, who had gone up from C4 about 7 hours ahead of me.
A beautiful but fairly cold pre-sunrise on the summit, which resulted in some minor frost nip on some fingertips, but otherwise, a dreams-become-reality kind of day.
Back down safely to EBC with a stop at C4 and C2 for a round-trip time of 16h32.
Splits:
ASCENT
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
DESCENT
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|