Climbing Elbrus really doesn’t work if you move in fits and starts. What it calls for is a calm, almost meditative frame of mind. You could compare the climb to walking up to the top floor of a sixteen-storey building — except here you’re climbing the equivalent of forty-three such buildings, one after another. If you’ve ever actually climbed that high before, you’ll know just how hard that is on the legs. But this final push is the culmination, and nothing about it is impossible. At some point during a climb like this, every climber notices they’ve stopped counting steps and metres and are simply watching their own breathing — and that really matters. At that point it can feel as if there’s nothing in the world but your breath. Only once you can breathe rhythmically and stay fully in control of your body do you move confidently towards your goal. All you really have is your breathing and your goal. It’s a genuinely extraordinary feeling, one that’s impossible to put into simple words — you have to live through it. And if you’ve never meditated before, the mountains will teach you how. So on we climbed, slowly, higher and higher. To the left you could clearly see the Mikelchiran Glacier itself, and to the right a spot whose shape strongly resembles a crater, with a small lake visible further on. As the air warms and the glaciers melt, that crater fills with clear meltwater. After overheating slightly to keep up with the group’s pace, my body would gradually settle back into its own normal breathing rhythm and its own climbing speed. I remember that at those moments my mind felt slightly detached from reality, and the urge would come to walk purely at my own pace. On the less technically demanding stretches, that’s exactly what I chose to do — I tried to listen to my own body and kept going at my own rhythm, which was far more comfortable and kept fatigue at bay. Even so, that rhythm wasn’t perfectly even either; it was governed, more than anything, by the laws of physiology.
I’ll say this feeling reminded me somewhat of long-distance running, of the times I’d run twenty or thirty kilometres in a kind of meditative state. I’d switch off every unnecessary thought and feeling and try to forget about distance and time altogether. At first I’d focus on my breathing, and once it settled into the right rhythm I would more or less stop thinking about anything at all. Of course some thoughts still drifted through my head, but they were genuinely calm ones, and above all free of anything negative. It’s hard for me now to recall exactly what I was thinking about during those long stretches. As for the second climb up to high camp, it felt noticeably easier than the first, despite the heavy packs — acclimatisation was clearly doing its job. The weather that day really was on our side: the sun was out often and for long stretches, and above all it wasn’t cold to walk in, though a little rain fell a couple of times — not enough to make me put on extra layers. I found genuinely comfortable clothing for this climb: shorts, a T-shirt and thermal base layers. Thermal underwear really does protect against temperature swings, and up there they can happen almost every five minutes; more importantly, clothing like that still lets your skin breathe. From up there we could see the weather over Dzhily-Su was much worse than at our altitude — clouds hung low, and you could even make out storm clouds, though every so often the sun broke through onto those patches too.
Overall the climb went smoothly, calmly and evenly. We’d allowed six hours for the route and made it within that time. As soon as we reached the moraine I got straight to pitching my tent, mainly as insurance against bad weather, so we’d have somewhere to shelter. A few hailstones fell from the sky just then. To keep the inside of the tent dry I laid it out flat on the ground and covered it with the flysheet. We noticed that wind-break walls built from stone were already standing on the moraine — we’d picked our tent spots the day before, while carrying up our supply cache, so now all we had to do was set up camp and enjoy ourselves. I’ll say the weather at that altitude really is extremely changeable: within a single hour it can swing from cold to hot and back. The clouds clear and the heat arrives; the moment clouds roll in and a wind starts blowing off the glacier, it’s cold again straight away. That said, on the whole the weather on the moraine was noticeably more stable than down in Dzhily-Su. When there’s no fog the air up there is genuinely very dry — wonderfully convenient for drying gear on sun-warmed rocks, and just as pleasant simply to sit and warm yourself. At night, though, it gets properly cold, though that’s no problem at all with the right sleeping bag and tent. Interestingly, at our altitude the clouds were constantly performing some kind of transformation — sometimes partly hiding the view, sometimes just veiling it lightly. You get used to looking down and knowing that somewhere below there’s fog and rain, while up where you are it’s sunny and dry — even if not for the whole day. As soon as the evening light appeared, the surrounding landscape changed remarkably, the clouds shifting shape every five minutes or so, lit up in different colours, appearing and disappearing by turns. As for the wind in the mountains, it really can clear away even the thickest cloud cover and reveal a perfectly clear, starry sky.
I’ll say all our tents were pitched inside stone enclosures by then, which really helped us at night whenever the wind picked up. After the tents went up, we finished building out the walls further. Physical activity really is very useful for acclimatisation — if you keep moving and doing physical work, your body adapts to the demands of high altitude far faster, which makes the climb ahead noticeably easier. Not everyone appreciated that advice at the time, but strangely enough I really wanted to keep moving, hauling rocks and staying busy, which is essentially what I did. As a result the wall around my tent ended up substantially reinforced, and I moved its entrance round to the side sheltered from the wind.
I also want to note that if you do nothing in the mountains, the will to do anything at all tends to evaporate — you just want to lie down and sleep. So it’s best to shake yourself out of that lazy state and find something to occupy yourself with, ideally some physical work. I also can’t fail to mention that cloud sitting on Lenz Rocks is something of an Elbrus tradition in itself; certain air currents at around four thousand six hundred metres tend to hang over climbers there. And there, already, was the Eastern Summit itself — in two days’ time we’d be climbing it. Just then the sun lit up our future route: the clouds gradually parted and we could see, in its full glory, the summit — our goal and our dream. It looked genuinely close and within reach, though that impression is very deceptive, as we’d go on to discover. After sunset we had a good dinner and slept soundly. I can’t imagine how anyone could possibly stay awake at that altitude, especially after an active day so full of events.
As we climbed, our guide kept coaching us on the right technique for moving across the glacier in crampons, which meant the route took even more of our energy than it otherwise would have. On top of that, the unfamiliar altitude and the thin air didn’t make the climb any easier. At one point our guide told us we were at four thousand three hundred metres, when in fact we were at four thousand six hundred — though none of us held it against him in the slightest. We all came back down fairly exhausted. My own boots, meanwhile, really weren’t well suited to the climb, and they’d got soaked through. The task ahead of me was drying them out — but how, when we were due to head for the summit that very night?
That evening we were told the summit push would happen not that night but the following one, since the weather then looked more likely to be favourable for climbing. We were glad of the news, since it meant a rest day ahead — no need to go anywhere or push through anything, just our own business and some recovery. The weather cooperated too, improving noticeably, with far more colourful sunsets and sunrises and a properly star-filled night sky. I spent my rest day reinforcing the stone wall around my tent, and that day I also had a lot of washing and drying to do — clothes and gear alike.
Given our pace on the climb to Lenz Rocks, we decided to set off at four in the morning. I’ll admit that all evening doubts kept nagging at me, the way they do before some decisive competition, and that night I slept very lightly indeed. I sometimes dreamed I heard the order to get up and would actually start rising from my sleeping bag — so when the real call came, it took me almost no time at all to get up and dressed. Naturally, on that tense evening before setting off, I’d laid everything out so I could be ready to start quickly and without any fuss. As it turned out, thanks to preparing so far in advance, I ended up with some spare time on my hands, so I made the most of it and took a few interesting photos to remember the moment by.
And so our climb to the Eastern Summit of Elbrus began. Since the glacier was still frozen solid at that hour, we decided to set off unroped, though we stuck to our earlier plan of moving as three groups of three to four people. We left at half past four in the morning. As we made our way towards Lenz Rocks, the first rays of dawn touched the mountain summits and washed our slope in an extraordinarily beautiful shade of pink. Since dawn was breaking, we decided to switch off our head torches fairly soon — we could carry on without them. At first the going was hard, still feeling the effects of the early wake-up and a restless night, but I later noticed this always happens in the mountains: at the very start your legs feel sluggish and your breathing goes ragged, but the moment you pull yourself together and settle into a rhythm, everything quickly falls into place, and suddenly the walking feels lighter and even enjoyable. We settled into one unhurried, shared rhythm and kept going without stopping or pausing, trying not to disturb our breathing while keeping a close eye on our stepping pace. After a while it became noticeably easier for me, and I even moved out ahead of the rest of the group to take photos of everyone. We all reached Lenz Rocks genuinely easily, almost without noticing the effort — and I made the most of every good moment along the way to go ahead and photograph the members of the group.
I’ll say that up to a height of five thousand one hundred metres I walked along thinking there really was nothing too difficult about climbing at all — you simply keep moving steadily, step after step. By five thousand one hundred metres, though, the urge came to stop and rest a little, and another two hundred metres on my positive mood had vanished somewhere. That’s roughly where Lenz Rocks itself comes to an end and what many climbers call the ‘Eternal Dome’ begins. It’s shaped, essentially, like a dome, and at first glance looks small, creating the illusion that the summit is a mere fifteen minutes away, no more. In reality those fifteen minutes stretch into a full three hours, and the dome seems to go on forever. This is the altitude where real oxygen deprivation starts to bite: the muscles lose their reserves and simply refuse to keep moving, so you end up taking small steps and pausing briefly every so often. I’ll say a strong wind stayed with us the whole way up, and at times it seemed to carry a faint smell of salt. It was strong enough to lift grains of ice and snow off the surface and hurl them mercilessly into our faces — though I should say it wasn’t a cold wind; if anything it was fairly warm. Had a wind of exactly that strength been cold as well, our climb would very likely not have succeeded. As it was, it wore us down and sapped our strength without chilling us. We’d hoped it might die down by midday, but it never did. At four thousand eight hundred metres we were lucky enough to run into some climbers coming down from the upper part of Lenz Rocks. They told us they’d made it to five thousand metres but had decided to turn back because of the strong wind. The weather was kinder to us, though: once we reached five thousand metres ourselves, we judged the wind manageable enough to keep climbing.