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Solar Powered Hike En Route to East Ridge Mustagh Ata Base Camp - Wednesday, July 5, 2000
Well, we made it to our destination, nearly. We hiked and hiked yesterday on the horrible moraines of the Kuksay Glacier, headed for the base of the East Ridge. The Kuksay Glacier is a rock glacier, its many meters thick with ice and covered with boulders. This reminds me of three points to be observed when hiking on a rock glacier: 1) Remember that you don't need to hike up and down all of the terrain features on the glacier. Often, staying low is best, even if it means winding a bit more. 2) A glacier has a pattern, and you are like an ant walking through a Persian carpet. It's hard to find the pattern, but if you do, you could be enabled to travel faster, avoiding bad ripples, and riding smooth tongues of hardened gravel. 3) Stay off of the glacier whenever possible; real earth is nearly always easier to walk upon. We followed lesson number three and found an ancient side moraine, littered with grassy meadows, strewn with flowers, and dotted with tiny lakes and streams. Lakpa spotted a few tawny Marco Polo sheep high on the cliffs above. The smell of flowers was intoxicating, albeit in a subtle, fragrant way. The ripping sound of marmots, "chirrup, chirrup, chirrup," guarding their warrens, broke the din of silence. The walking was a joy, even though our sacks were a bit heavy, topping 30 kilos. I had the large aluminum solar panel perched above my sack, and it was wired into the laptop, inside my sack. The charge light would flip off about every 30 minutes or so. However, I had learned to just disconnect and reconnect the male-female cigarette lighter adapter, and in that way, the computer was thinking it was receiving fresh power from the mains, and it would be happy and begin charging. Thus, by the end of the day, though I must have looked like some kind of electronic fool, the computer had reached a 98% charge! At 1700 hours, we topped a grassy knoll beside the Kuksay Glacier, and the altimeter read 4600 meters, and we heard a shout, and there was Walter, a tiny dot out in the glacier, waving his arms. We asked him to turn on his radio so we could communicate more easily, but it was not possible, we were to learn, because the radio had apparently been dropped. Eventually, Walter reached us and explained that everyone was alright. They were camped on a luxurious grassy knoll on the other side of the glacier and the loads were not all carried up to where they were camped. Our Chinese member, Yang Li Cun (Xiao Yang, for short), had fallen on the first day and sprained his ankle. Apparently, he was now camped at the base of the icefall, waiting for us. We had, however, walked right past him as we had never seen him. I envisioned a horrible stretcher rescue back to the highway. We caught our first glimpses of the Mustagh Ata East Ridge, and it looked vicious and difficult, thrusting through the mists, caked with snow and dotted with rocks. The wind howled around us and a snowstorm broke out, and we were enveloped in uncertainty.
— Dan Mazur, MountainZone.com Correspondent |
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