Tibet – Himalaya, Cho Oyu, 2007
The International expedition to the 6th highest mountain in the World „The Tourqoise Godess“ Cho Oyu (8 201 m) began on September 6th in Kathmandu in Nepal. From Kathmandu we travelled by jeeps over the Nepal-Tibet border to Zhangmu, continued to Nyalam and Tingri. We made a two days acclimatization stop in Tingri (4 365 m), then drove on to Chinese base camp (4 890 m). The approach continued by a two days trek to Intermediate BC (5 380 m) and to Advanced BC (5 745 m) above Nagpa La, the col, which forms a natural gate between Tibet and Nepal.
Cho Oyu, also called „The Tourqoise Godess“ due to the colour of its glaciers, is considered to be one of the „easier“ eight thousand meter peaks. This is the reason why there are many expeditions including the very commercial ones organised every year to attempt summiting Cho Oyu. We have chosen to climb expedition style the normal North-West route without bottled oxygen. Our expedition had seven climbing members from various countries all over the World, we had a support kitchen team in ABC and 2 Sherpas on the mountain.
We set up our ABC on September 17th, continued to build high camps the following days. We put up our tents in C1 (6 400 m) on an exposed ridge just above the snow line. The weather was very unfavourable, immediately after putting up tents in C2 (7 200 m) we had to descend back to ABC and were unable to move on the mountain for several days due to a snow storm. This storm with a strong wind damaged or even completely destroyed half of the tents in C1 and C2. Some expeditions lost their tents including all equipment in them, we were the lucky ones: one of our tents was torn and two slightly damaged in C1, one damaged tent in C2, but all our equipment, which we carried up to both high camps, survived.
The weather improved during the first days of October. We started with changing the torn tent in C1 and repairing the damaged tents in C1 and C2. We had little time left for the summit attempt. In order to move faster, our expedition leader made a strategically bad decission – we did not put up any tents in C3 (7 600 m). Two expedition members attempted one summit push, they left C2 before midnight, but returned after reaching 200 meters above C2 due to strong wind and extremely cold temperature.
We spent 20 days in ABC and on the mountain, all of us reached 7 200 m, two climbers even higher – up to 7 400 m, but the summit was still 1 000 meters above us. We left ABC on October 8th being one of the last expeditions there. From Chinese BC we returned along the same way back to Kathmandu.
