Elbrus Explained: A Complete Guide to the Climb

This lecture is by Sergey Baranov, a guide who has worked on Elbrus since 2001 and has made 215 climbs of the mountain. Below is an updated editorial version, followed by the video and the full transcript of the original lecture.

Elbrus is technically more accessible than many peaks of comparable height, which is exactly why people keep underestimating it. The cable car, the shelters and the snowcats make it feel as though nothing stands between you and the summit but a long walk. But at 5642 m the cold, the wind, the thin air, the glacier, poor visibility and the need to turn back in time all still apply. A mountain does not get any lower because Wi-Fi has arrived on it.

This page is here to separate the real difficulties of Elbrus from the scare stories on one side and the equally promotional promises of an easy summit on the other. It covers the routes, acclimatisation, weather, preparation, equipment, what a guide actually does, and the reasons why even a strong climber sometimes has to stop.

Contents

• Why Elbrus is not a walk
• How the routes differ
• Acclimatisation and altitude sickness
• Weather and the decision to set off
• Why Elbrus in winter is a different mountain
• Physical preparation
• Equipment
• The guide, navigation and turning back
• Video and the full transcript

Why Elbrus is not a walk, even though beginners go up it

The ordinary routes on Elbrus do not ask you to be a competitive mountaineer. On the classic southern route you can put crampons on for the first time during the programme itself and learn what you need under a guide’s eye. But “technically straightforward” is not the same as “safe in itself”.

The real difficulty is the combination of altitude, sustained effort and weather. On summit day you have to keep moving for hours through the night and into the morning, stay warm, drink, eat, hold your pace and make decisions when your head is working less well than usual. In poor visibility a familiar broad slope becomes a white blank with no scale and no direction. Another group’s tracks, the route-marking poles and a GPS all help, but not one of them makes the decision for you.

A beginner can climb Elbrus if the programme allows enough time to acclimatise, the equipment suits the conditions, they are fit enough to walk uphill for hours, and they are willing to follow the guide’s decisions – including the unwelcome one to turn back a few hundred metres below the summit.

What people most often overestimate

• Good physical fitness gives no immunity from acute mountain sickness.
• A snowcat cuts out part of the way, but it does not cancel the altitude, the cold or the need to get back down.
• A clear sky in Terskol promises nothing at 5000-5642 m.
• Expensive kit is no help if it is badly chosen, untested, or sitting back at the shelter.
• Reaching the summit does not finish the climb: a large share of accidents happen on the way down.

How the routes on Elbrus differ

Elbrus has two summits – the West at 5642 m and the East at 5621 m. But the summit is not the only thing that decides which programme you want. What matters is which side you start from, where you come down, whether you take one summit or both, and how many days you get for acclimatisation.

The southern route

The south is the best-equipped side of Elbrus: cable cars, mountain shelters, snowcats and comparatively quick logistics between the valley and the high ground. That is why most people choose it for a first climb. It is an advantage in infrastructure, not a discount on the altitude. In bad weather the upper part of the route is still a full high-mountain slope.

For a beginner the nine-day programme usually makes more sense than the seven-day one: the extra days are there for your body, not for the company’s calendar. The seven-day option suits someone with a proven head for altitude, recent acclimatisation or a tight schedule – but it should not be chosen simply because you want to get it over with faster.

The northern route

The north is far more self-contained: no cable car, fewer ways to change the plan at short notice, more stages carrying your own kit, and more riding on the whole group pulling together. The current Mountain Guide programme from the north runs over 10 days and builds in step-by-step acclimatisation on the northern slope. It is not “the south without a snowcat”; it is a different kind of climb and a different kind of daily life.

The west, the traverses, both summits and the “Cross”

The western route is run as an expedition, with tented camps and much more self-sufficiency. A traverse starts on one side of the massif and finishes on the other. The both-summits programme adds the crossing between the West and East summits. The “Cross” combines both summits and a traverse, which is why it needs the longest and steadiest weather window of any commercial programme on Elbrus.

A detailed comparison that does not mix the routes together is in the article “Climbing routes on Elbrus”. All the current programmes are gathered in the section on climbs of Elbrus.

Acclimatisation and altitude sickness

Altitude sickness is not a test of character. The risk comes down above all to the altitude, how fast you gain it and how susceptible you happen to be. A very well-trained marathon runner can cope worse than someone of average fitness. Being fit still matters – it lowers the relative effort and helps you move economically – but it is no substitute for acclimatising.

Your body needs time to adjust as the partial pressure of oxygen drops. In practice that means gaining height gradually, doing acclimatisation outings, dropping back down to sleep lower where the programme allows for it, resting properly and keeping an eye on how you feel from day to day. One good day at altitude proves nothing about the next.

Three rules that matter more than heroics

1. Do not go higher when the symptoms of altitude sickness are increasing.
2. Do not leave a participant with pronounced symptoms on their own.
3. If someone gets worse, go down rather than waiting for the body to “tough it out”.

A headache on its own can have any number of causes, so what you judge is not a single symptom but the combination and how it is developing: weakness, nausea, dizziness, loss of coordination, unusual breathlessness, coughing, changes in behaviour. Diagnosis and preventive medication are for a doctor who knows high-altitude medicine. The small oxygen canisters sold in shops are no substitute for going down, for medical oxygen and for a plan of what to do if things get seriously worse.

In more detail: acclimatisation on Elbrus and insurance for mountaineers.

Weather and the decision to set off

A forecast is a model, not a contract with the mountain. A sun icon in an app is not enough to decide on a climb. A guide cross-checks several forecasts, the wind at different heights, the cloud, the precipitation, the temperature, the state of the snow and what the weather is actually doing. What matters most is not a single figure for the summit but how long the safe window lasts for the way up and the way down.

The weather in the Baksan valley can have almost nothing to do with conditions on the West summit. High up, wind sharply increases heat loss, cloud strips away your reference points, and snow fills in tracks and hides the shape of the ground. Nobody can promise that a change for the worse will always give a group two hours to react, that thunderstorms only come at night, or that there is one right time to set off. The start time is decided each time by the route, the season, the group and that day’s forecast.

A detailed analysis: the weather on Elbrus and the best time for a climb.

Why Elbrus in winter is a different mountain

In winter the daylight is shorter, extreme cold and strong wind are far more likely, snow and ice can completely change a slope you know from the summer, and your margin for error shrinks. The state of the route does not reduce to “in winter it is all ice” or “in winter there is no snow”: it depends on wind-blown snow, precipitation, temperature and the particular section.

A winter climb must not be sold to a beginner as an ordinary Elbrus with a warmer down jacket. It calls for a separate look at your experience, your equipment, your skills and the weather window. Mountain Guide sets this out in detail in the article “Elbrus in winter is a very bad idea”.

Physical preparation: what will really be useful

Elbrus does not ask for a fast time over a short distance; it asks you to keep working steadily for hours on end. Preparation rests on aerobic endurance, hill work, leg and trunk strength, stable joints and getting used gradually to long walks with a rucksack. Intervals are useful once you have a base, but there is no universal rule that “30-40% of training should be sprints”.

Running with a heavy rucksack, and ankle weights, are unnecessary for most people: they load the joints and change how you move. It is far more useful to build up the time you spend walking uphill, on stairs or on an inclined treadmill, and to strengthen your legs separately. Elbrus is not judging your biceps, but there is no need to go out of your way to shed muscle or put on fat either.

Detailed plans are in two articles: preparing for Elbrus and a separate physical training programme.

Equipment: what counts is not the brand names but whether the system works

On Elbrus your boots, the protection for your hands, eyes and face, your warm layer, your waterproof shell and a reliable head torch all matter especially. But no single figure tells you what an item is worth. The weight of a down jacket is not its warmth, the tint category of goggles is not UV protection or side shields, and a torch’s stated battery life says nothing about how it behaves in the cold.

The kit depends on the route. The classic south, the self-sufficient north, the western expedition, a traverse and the helicopter programme all call for different rucksack sizes, different boots and different degrees of self-sufficiency. A one-size-fits-all list copied from a neighbouring tour usually gives its author away faster than a missing pair of crampons.

Before the trip, do more than pack: check how your boots fit with your socks, that your crampons match them, that your torch works with gloves on, that you can reach your warm layers, and that you can eat and drink on the move. There is a detailed section on how to dress and prepare equipment for Elbrus. Anything missing can be sorted out in advance at Rock and Rent.

The guide, navigation and the decision to turn back

A good guide does not “know every crevasse for ever”. The glacier moves. A professional knows the character of the route, keeps track of how it changes, checks the forecast against what is actually happening, manages the pace and makes the call before things become an emergency.

Route-marking poles, a GPS track and other groups‘ tracks are useful, but every one of them can let you down. Poles get buried and snapped, a track can lead you the wrong way, batteries die, and in a white-out it is easy to lose all sense of direction. So navigation means several independent reference points plus experience, not faith in one arrow on a screen.

A guide’s hardest decision often looks to the client like the easiest one: turning a climber, or the whole group, back. People photograph the summit; almost nobody photographs a turnaround. But you see professionalism most clearly at exactly the moment when the safe call is not the one the client wants.

Mountain Guide works as a direct operator, shows its guides and does not replace them with unknown subcontractors after the trip has been paid for. To choose a programme you can also get a personal consultation on Elbrus.

Video and the full transcript of Sergey Baranov’s lecture

The existing video block and the author’s full transcript are kept below. The transcript is preceded by a warning: it reflects the author’s experience and the state of the infrastructure at the time of recording; the mentions of medicines are not a prescription, and current routes, prices and rules should be checked against the pages of the programmes now running.

Authoritative sources and further reading

• CDC Yellow Book: High-Altitude Travel and Altitude Illness
• Wilderness Medical Society: altitude illness guidance, 2024 update
• UIAA Medical Commission
• EMERCOM of Russia: registration of tourist groups

Good evening!

Today I will try to answer all your questions, first as a talk and then directly on whatever you ask.

Since 2001 I have been taking people up Elbrus and up other mountains. In our regular group programmes we work above all on the south and the north. The eastern and western routes are organised for private groups, so the lecture concentrates on the south and the north. At the same time, the east and the west are routes on Elbrus that can hardly be recommended for a first climb. The people who usually go on them do not ask questions any more; they are only interested in the technical details. As for equipment broadly speaking, the east and the west correspond entirely to the climb from the north. But from the north the crevasses and the terrain are “toy”, while from the east and the west they are more like the real thing.

Here you can see the route on Elbrus from the south. The straight line is the cable car. They have now built the cable car further, it reaches this point now. And the same straight line. There is a lot of discussion: should a real sportsman use the cable car or not? Let everyone answer that for themselves. I will not get into the ethics of climbing, everyone has their own. But it is worth pointing out that if you say that using a snowcat is unsporting while you did half the mountain on the cable car, then there is a question about your honesty with yourself. In principle the routes at acclimatisation altitudes are absolutely similar. The last shelter on the south is a little higher, and on the north there is Camp 3800 – that is a row of shelters. It used to be one, but over the last two years a great deal has grown up and been built there. On the south most teams also start from the same height, the point called “Garabashi” – 3750 metres. On this picture that is accurate. The notorious, famous “Barrels” are at 3720 metres, not 3800 as many people write. And it is very strange for commercial companies – this inaccurate assessment of altitudes, because it can affect your acclimatisation. The errors are quite large. For example, “Priyut 11” as you see is 4050 metres, although many people give it from the old Soviet General Staff maps from the 30s of the 20th century as 4020 m. Pastukhov Rocks are usually called 4800, but everyone gets taken to the lower point, and the lower point is exactly 4550 m. The start of the diagonal traverse is reckoned at five thousand (5000) metres, whereas for 4 years now it has been 5100 metres. The snowcats try to take people higher and higher, and the diagonal traverse changes its angle. You can see the diagonal traverse here: from here to this point – to the exit onto the saddle. Its angle. It is constantly at a different angle. A trail gets trodden. And it all depends on who went first after the snowfall. And it can change quite noticeably over a summer. Of course, in recent years, with the Red Fox Elbrus Race festival being held, all the ways are considered fairly well marked out, but in practice the trail deviates up to 100 metres from them as it is trodden. You always see the poles far below and you have no desire to follow them, except of course in bad weather when you cannot see anything at all.

The logistics of getting there for independent climbers, for non-commercial ones. Commercial groups usually have transport included. On your own you can get to Nalchik and from there by minibus to Terskol. How you get to Nalchik and from where depends on where you live. Mind you, the last bus leaves in the first half of the day, probably. Also for those who want to do Elbrus cheaply and independently. A number of campsites have been set up in the Elbrus region; I know of three large ones, and some people try to run campsites near the hotels as well. So you can live in a tent like a real sportsman and maybe even do 500 metres a day, the way it is done in classic acclimatisation, crawling up the slope like a snail; true, construction “Urals” will be driving past finishing the cable car, but you can walk at night. Once – and there is a man here who will not let me lie about it – we often go up to the “Barrels” on foot at night, because in the daytime we have our own business and we have to work with clients. Usually the assistant guide does that. When I was going up on one of those nights, jackals started hunting me; incidentally, jackals hunted Brad a year later too, most likely the same ones. There was fog all round, it was dark, I threw stones at them, it was a very unpleasant business.

I think many of you know that you can rent a flat in Terskol. It is a very cheap alternative to a hotel, the average price is 300 roubles a night at the moment.

The shelters.

In recent years the shelters, as I have already said, have grown out from “Garabashi”. A concrete hotel has been built here a little below the “Barrels”, for about 70 people probably. Higher up this rocky ridge there are now huts, huts, huts. And even a road now runs to the end of the new cable car. The cable car is running; it was already working in winter . Then there is the LeapRus shelter – the most expensive shelter on the mountain, made like a European refuge and brought in from Italy. “Resorts of the North Caucasus” is a state organisation, it can afford a great deal. But bear in mind that they made more than fifty helicopter flights to bring in three barrels. Three barrels for 12 or 18 people depending on whether you sleep in two rows or three. “Priyut 11” is here – which is no more than a place, because the shelter burned down in 1997 and nobody has rebuilt it since; the land was bought and a foundation laid. The former diesel station has now been fitted out as “Priyut 11”. The “diesel station” (the new shelter in place of “Priyut 11”) is also two storeys high, quite roomy and already perfectly comfortable. And a few more cabins above that. So you can plan your acclimatisation here in various ways too, because the difference between the lowest and the highest is about 500 metres.

Let us look at the seasons when it is best to climb Elbrus. Of course, most working people like the May holidays. But remember that May sits between winter and summer, and closer to winter. In May there is often bare ice above Pastukhov Rocks, and sometimes below them too. From this point, incidentally – you can see it quite well in the photograph – all these dark patches you can see are bare ice. It can be bare as far as this point. Fixing ropes on all of that… We were discussing this two weeks ago: in recent history teams have fixed ropes three times. One of them was our “K2 team”, a non-commercial team in training, in 2007; then our commercial team fixed ropes in 2010 or 2011. And this winter I think “Alpindustria” or somebody else fixed them, clubbing together. Probably “Alpindustria”. Otherwise everyone goes largely at their own risk. Or they rope up. A storm… they put in an intermediate ice screw and move together, but for that you need a good partner. If someone falls, various outcomes are still possible, because if you are on one 50-metre rope with one screw, the depth of the fall can be 50 metres, tumbling down winter ice at not much less than free fall. There have been quite a few accidents where people flew out onto Pastukhov Rocks precisely because they neglected belaying. If you start giving belaying more time, which is sensible, then you fall behind in the short winter daylight and either fail to get up the mountain or end up spending the night on it – which is probably still better than a flight down the ice, but in winter that also ends badly for most people. It is rare for someone to survive a night out in winter.

(10:02) This is the traverse route.

As you can see, the northern and southern huts are marked here. I did not know why the lads wound the route round like that; I “stole” a nice picture from a German site. This route is for people who do not want technical difficulties and want to see the south and the north at once, which are completely different. I will now tell you how they differ from each other. You can test yourself. You can also go up from the north without a snowcat and descend quickly to the south through civilisation, although on the north you can no longer say there is no civilisation. The south differs from the north in that on the south you have the mountains of the Main Caucasus Range. Elbrus is not in the Main Caucasus Range but off to the side, as a volcano. (11:08)

These are the landscapes you will see from the south. On the right you can see cabins; those are the rescuers‘ cabins, they are usually empty, and you can spend the night in them for nothing. They are the only cabins on Elbrus where you can sleep for nothing. Practically everything you see is Georgia. These are Pastukhov Rocks; these are usually exactly the colours you see. A commercial photographer runs around you working for everybody at once, and then tries to find you down below and sell you the photographs. He gives you a nicely printed packet with a disc. But we have not seen a photographer on the summit for about 7 years, I think. Our photographer puts skis on at 5000 metres and leaves after sunrise. The most desperate ones spend the night on Pastukhov Rocks. For a couple of years now there has been a very convenient hire shop and a huge platform rolled flat by the snowcats there, and it is often used to spite the snowcat drivers. Incidentally, our toughest footage from the film about K2 was shot in winter on Pastukhov Rocks, not in Pakistan at all.

(12:45) As for the seasons. There are so few people in the photograph because it is early June. In terms of climate that is no longer the May holidays at all, a little colder than in August, but in June there are no thunderstorms, not yet. Over recent years, even over the last 7 or so, I see a big difference, let alone over fifteen. In 2003 I remember three snowfalls of a metre a night over the summer; I had things happen to me personally connected with that, and the whole team was breaking trail there, including even the strong clients, because it was quite deep. And now a snowfall up to mid-calf is considered heavy. In August you can multiply this number of people by 100, so come in June – it is clean snow, and what is more, in August everything that some climbers left behind in May melts out. It all smells simply fantastic, and you notice it especially when you sleep in tents around “Priyut 11”; perhaps that is why many people avoid the south. There was a military Elbrusiada there, with three hundred soldiers. They lived there for a week. And twice as many independent people, who also lived there for a week. And on top of what had decomposed over the summer, they also left mountains of plastic bags full of rubbish. We spent a long time looking for “who did it?”, whether there had ever been a boy at all; well, nobody was to blame of course – everyone had taken their own rubbish away. The clearing up fell on the shoulders of the owners of the nearby cabins.

(14:40) This is the view from the exit onto the saddle. From this point the photographer still has about 2 km horizontally to the two people you can see below. Usually the ones who set off very early on the climb sit and rest there, where the big group of five people is. Because there is shade from the East summit there, and it moves gradually lower and lower as the sun rises. Anyone who ran up there at 7 in the morning has to get out to the middle of the slope so as not to rest in the cold, because the cold there is “cosmic”. I do not think it is right ever to set off before 4 in the morning, except of course on projects with, for instance, a person with a disability and other particular cases. I will show you about people like that today too.

Even if you are walking up from the “Barrels”, 3 in the morning is the most sensible limit, because you will get home at 12 midday or 2 in the afternoon anyway. Although in recent years an early start has become more relevant, because in the afternoon clouds start rolling in and that is no longer an occasional thing as it used to be but a regular event. Plus in July and August there are regular thunderstorms. I would say there are more days with storms than without. Even if they disperse and at 10 in the morning you see a mountain like this, it is already too late to start, and a storm can finish at 8. About the latest start. I fell out with the local EMERCOM quite badly over this. My latest start was at 07:30 in the morning with clients, but we went by snowcat. I was provoked into it because there had been hard weather all night; I made the “you’re crazy” gesture at everyone and went to sleep, and they went off to show their clients an attempt. Some of the EMERCOM people work as guides too. My clients looked at me: “How can this be?” I was still young and hot-headed; nowadays other people’s opinions barely interest me, but back then they interested me a great deal – I was proving myself. I went out, looked, everything had iced over, and I had to take them up the mountain. But we did not know, because we had gone to bed, we did not know that all those people had already come back, that all of them were already inside the barrels. Nobody had got up – they set off at 2 and came back at 4 or 5. We were sleeping peacefully. At 06:00 I went out, looked at the weather and “sounded” reveille. We made breakfast and ate. Never go up the mountain without breakfast! Because the “fuel” will run out and you will be sitting in the middle of the slope begging for chocolate bars. And in the end I was then accused of going out in bad weather, although the day was like this. (17:39) The photographs are stored somewhere. Anyway, it all worked out for us. It was a big group. In turn, all the other guides‘ clients took offence.

(17:52) This is the summit plateau, another kilometre horizontally. Here people, as one of my clients put it well, and I have often met the same comparison on the internet, “walk like zombies”. Here people can already see the summit ahead – it is a little mound at the end, ten or fifteen metres above the plateau – and they walk without taking their eyes off it, without stopping. In 155 climbs I have never seen anyone rest here before the summit, only after it. Before the summit, nobody, ever. This is the summit; people bring marble plaques up here, and kettlebells, and barbells, all sorts of things. You can read all about the barbell on the internet yourselves, we wrote it all up.

On that fine note we move smoothly to the most important question – the safety of the climb. That goes especially for people who are not planning commercial trips but are going independently.

(18:50) This is one and the same day, one and the same group. I deliberately took that whole group as the basis; I have a lot of wonderful photographs from other groups, but it is better to follow the same people. Everything you see on the right is the north of Elbrus; on the right we see no cloud at all. Over there in the distance (19:20) a cyclone is starting to form, but there is no need to be afraid – in recent years not every cloud ends in a storm, not every one at all. It used to be that a lenticular cloud hung between the summits of Elbrus and you had exactly twenty-four hours to get up the mountain; now that rule means nothing. It can hang, go away, hang again. There are wonderful time lapses; I filmed a lenticular cloud forming, then dissolving, then forming again. Here little clouds are starting from the south, which is a regular thing and also not to be feared, but here you can already see that it is all getting really serious – about an hour and a half passed from this moment. And here we see that from a clear sky it is now all over the saddle, because of the difference in height; the saddle is not 5200 as people write, but 5350, and there everything is completely closed in, everything below the summits is closed in. These are the last bright shots on the summit. It is drifting over by the time we had come down to the saddle… Do you see how deep in the snow we are standing? By the time we had come down to the saddle, from the moment of the sunny summit, 40 cm of snow had fallen. In an hour, maybe less (20:45). Of these people one is my assistant guide, 5 are clients, and all the rest we found on the slope, in the blizzard, 2 groups of 3 people. They even wrote about it to “Iskra”. (21:00) Thanking us.

To be honest, you can tag along with commercial groups and there is nothing terrible or unethical about it. You have to remember one thing: nobody starts to feel obliged. They will help you, of course, but exactly up to the point where the clients need the help. And again, you can fall behind; nobody is going to watch who has attached themselves at the back, who has dropped behind at the back – that is, guide in front, guide behind, and it is all firm, everybody has run on. We had a very strong group here, incidentally. It worked out well – it was 9 May. And two of the six people we found had broken crampons as well, one crampon each. When we were going up we fixed several rope lengths, 5 or 6, and on the descent it was all covered in snow accordingly. And you could no longer see where there was ice and where there was hard firn (22:03), which was what we had been walking on. After that we were catching ourselves at random of course, but thank God, the front from the sea was fairly damp, you see, and the snow had stuck to the ice more or less, so we were not flying about on winter ice covered with snow.

Unfortunately I will not show you photographs of an avalanche on the saddle today. Elbrus is considered an avalanche-free zone here, but I know of 3 cases. Once our commercial photographer did go up to the summit, many years ago, and he was caught in an avalanche completely; they only just managed to dig him out. That was on the descent from the summit to the saddle. It is this section. The next 2 cases were in the same summer. I come up onto the saddle – and on the same day, in fact, to be precise. I come onto the saddle with the first group; there were many groups, but no, not the first, somebody had already been trampling about there, but nobody had gone up. From here – you can picture the scale – from these people to those people the difference in height is about 250 metres. From here there was an avalanche release zone like this. Here it lay, a big one with the track of the release. Its thickness… we estimated it at about 5 metres. Nobody had expected it, everyone was surprised, everyone photographed it from every angle, and nobody climbed that day. The day was just as sunny. However, they let us out as some of the most experienced people present, the others were still coming up. We had managed to rest and off we went with the clients.

In recent years there has been an unconventional, good alternative route trodden out, where the people are (24:20). Very calmly and carefully you come in here, and up a gentle slope you climb to this point. In principle it is not difficult in terms of route-finding either, and the terrain is simpler than here. Here we have been fixing a rope for several years now. Some years the companies clubbed together; last year we fixed it ourselves. From this point somebody fixed a rope during the Red Fox race up to here. Our own rope was just slightly too short. We had 330 metres cut in half, that is, a fixed rope for the ascent and one for the descent. We fixed them from somewhere around here to exactly this break of slope (25:00). And without that rope there would have been many more casualties. I was involved in 2004 in one of the toughest situations I have had on Elbrus, when I went straight from the first acclimatisation outing of the season onto a climb, dressed for a summer day around the shelter, and went up to the saddle. I flew past these rocks, and a Swede came flying down here. (25:25) His friend had passed him. There was deep snow at the end by then, and the friend passed him twenty metres away. The man was lying face down in the snow, and half his head was gone. So when we see people without an ice axe on Elbrus, nobody is going to hit them or tell them off, of course, but nobody will say anything good either. We dislike you in advance as guides if we see you without an ice axe on this section. All the other sections in summer can in principle be walked freely (26:03) with a pole, but it also depends on your condition of course. Sometimes it is no bad thing to descend the whole diagonal traverse with an ice axe. Likewise when the firn is hard, and even from 5000 down to Pastukhov. A rope is a good thing of course, but it is absolutely useless until you have a harness on. Soloists, all these lone climbers, remember that they could have used a rope only when they see one. And they remember they would need a harness only then too. Plus you may be a steady, tough climber, but there are crowds of people moving around you. Also, some guides like to tie people into rope teams, and any one of those teams, slipping just slightly, can knock you over, regardless of the fact that you are acclimatised, steady and feel at home. So a belay is never superfluous. But now there are two lines, and someone falling on one line does not reach the other. The trail is narrow and it is impossible to overtake anyone there, so you stand and wait. If someone on your rope falls at that moment ahead of you, it is better to be clipped in to it. (27:10) I flew with a client from here to here. It is one of the few cases where I tied a client to myself; usually that is only children or a person with a disability. The client was not entirely with it. I self-arrested on that section 4 times. And all four times he pulled me off, because of course my main mistake, and mine alone, was that I was holding coils in my hands, because there was a group ahead of us and we had caught them up. The client was walking below me so that I would see when he fell and have time to react.

In my youth I gathered the coils carelessly like that; the date was 06.06.06. The client and I have been very good friends ever since. He has not once forgotten to wish me Merry Christmas, their Catholic one. Even though he is an atheist. Then we got out again with great difficulty. The second group was from our company too. On top of that a guide got lost that evening. He worked for a while afterwards at “Alpindustria”, a well-known figure, we will not name him. And coming down from the summit off that little mound, literally 5 minutes from the summit, I meet him with a client. The situation is this: I have one private client of my own, and he is an assistant, an assistant guide with a big group just bringing along a straggler. I ask him: “Have you got a radio and batteries in your GPS?”, because the weather was changing really fast. He says: “Me! I’m like that! I know everything!”, and I say to him: “Sure you do.” I had not managed to reach the end of that horizontal flat plateau that we saw together in the photographs, and I met him roughly speaking where the photo was taken (29:05) – the summit is a hundred metres away at most, even closer behind. I got to here with my client, we walked and walked for maybe 10 minutes. And over the radio, which is permanently on receive: “I’m lost…” And then I walked that whole plateau in zigzags to find him. I whistled constantly on my whistle and the radio kept asking whether he could hear me. Anyway, that tactic got us nowhere; in the end I ran into him completely by chance. The moral is: do not tie into a rope team if you have no intermediate belay points. The rope is anchored to an elephant, ours will hold 20 people hanging off it easily. Up at the top and at the intermediate points there are metre and metre-and-a-half steel anchors driven in, which unfortunately we were no longer able to get out after the first year. All you can do is dig out the very top and that is that.

(30:14) This is the north. 2011 was a very hard year for the guides, because there was practically no work at all; Elbrus was closed because of terrorists and we all worked here. We lived in tents, and meanwhile the military were recovering their crashed helicopter. The pilot decided to have his photograph taken and caught the rock with the tail, then walked down in his shoes from 4800 m to the EMERCOM base at 3600 m, across the glacier, across the crevasses – there is a crevasse on the north. Everyone was very surprised. In the end it took 2 years to recover the helicopter. They dismantled it into pieces that our biggest helicopter, the Mi-26, could carry out. This road is now asphalt, this photograph is already out of date (31:07). Views like this. It is the most beautiful view I have seen from the north. All the rest is flat plain. The north of Elbrus is where Pyatigorsk and Mineralnye Vody are, that is, you see the whole plain. This is the Mi-26 arriving (31:26), bringing food. And a trail like this. This place is the notorious airfield. According to legend German bombers landed on this spot in the Great Patriotic War – although I have heard an authoritative opinion that it is all legend and nothing more – but I could never work out why. Since you cannot bring fuel up there, there is no road to it at all. There is not much worth bombing nearby either; you would have to fly over Elbrus to head towards Pyatigorsk, and they had airfields in other, more comfortable places. And up a trail like this you climb to the shelter in 2-3 hours. This is our respected friend (32:11) Sedoy standing with his yak. He helped a great many people that year, for money of course.

(32:23) The route is clearer here. There are 2 routes. So this is the West summit, this is the East. The East summit is lower, in case anyone does not know. The route goes higher, you can even faintly see the trail. And from this point you can go straight across here diagonally; it only looks gentle, in fact it is quite steadily uphill the whole time. From this point (33:02) you can go straight to the saddle and from there to the West. Or from this point you can go up to the top of the rocks; that is usually safer when the route is in suitable condition. Whereas here there are crevasses, and you absolutely have to be roped up. And roped up with people who know what to do. From here most people go to the East, because it is simply a straight even slope. Some who want the West, usually foreigners, traverse to the saddle and climb from there, because for them it is usually a point of honour to get 21 metres higher, whereas for a Russian the East is the East and the West is the West, and 21 metres of difference does not matter. This section is shorter, but it also has big crevasses; what is more, the obershtunds are here (33:50) – those are the biggest crevasses there are on this slope at all. They are like these ones, only they are covered over. There was a group from Ulyanovsk, and half of them were found in this bergschrund; they froze, I think over the May holidays.

In fact groups have died on Elbrus fairly regularly. And here is another aspect of you attaching yourself to commercial groups as a trailer: there was an unpleasant case when 11 people died at once on Elbrus. You may have read about it? Over the May holidays two groups were going up – Muscovites and Ukrainians. One group thought the others knew the way, the others thought that lot did. They kept looking at each other. In the end, when the time came – I was walking with clients, unfortunately, before everything left of them had been cleared away. The clients asked me a lot of questions about the belongings and ice axes scattered about there. The bodies had thankfully already been brought down, although commercial groups who went up before us had seen it all, and some groups had even managed to go up a couple of days ahead of EMERCOM. It was quite a sad sight; one person was saved. One man came down through all the icefalls by a miracle to Terskol, going straight past all the shelters, past everything. To Terskol at 2000 metres. That is, the man descended 4.5 kilometres in twenty-four hours. And he crossed the glacier that lies to the side of the “Barrels” and opens up nicely in August, where it is impossible not to fall into a crevasse if you cannot see any of it, if you are walking blind – it is simply unreal not to fall in. The man was truly born lucky. Otherwise, sadly, the man who was leading them had five climbs of Elbrus behind him and was considered one of the more experienced in the company. In our day, when we were starting out – and now I do not know how or who counts it, views have got more serious – fewer than 40 times did not count as a serious guide, that was one of the indicators, and so was that guide who got lost on the summit.

(35:56) This is the camp and the start of the route. There are now 2 big huts in this spot, another one behind and two to the side. And the route to Lenz Rocks. Lenz Rocks are 4600 m, which is generally almost the same as the bottom of Pastukhov Rocks on the south. This is our climb with a person with a disability. There he is sitting. Here I mainly wanted to show the route; we will get to the person with a disability later. This is the top of Lenz Rocks, and here we are traversing off. This is another example of bad weather, of the kind you get. Here you see people, half of whom (36:43) are independent. I keep meaning to ask: what exactly are they confident about? Because I have been on mountains where I was on my own, and the mountains were more serious, and at the slightest breath of wind I did not like I turned round and left, because I plan to go to the mountains for many decades. Sadly, the higher you go in mountaineering, the more often you lose friends. These are our clients (37:17). This is summer, mid-July. You ask me about May? In May it is all worse. In February we built walls of stones on Pastukhov Rocks for the tents; any bricks, of any size, got blown away. I do not agree with claims that it gets to -50 C on Elbrus even in winter; anyone who says that is like the man who wrote the book “-250 Fahrenheit” after climbing McKinley. Taking the wind chill factor into account, when the wind was blowing at 130 km/h, the actual temperature there was twice as warm; as it was, he measured -80 there and climbed to the summit at that temperature.

The humidity is very high, because the sea is 90 km from Elbrus as the crow flies. However, the weather does not change with lightning speed, as people say. And everyone who tells you they did not manage to run from the bad weather is lying. They simply were not paying attention to their surroundings and were hoping to slip through. You always have a minimum of 2 hours. From the moment you notice any serious clouds to the moment when something starts directly above you, provided you have started to descend of course. The only trap can be on the saddle: if you are coming from the south, then as you climb onto the saddle, cloud that you have not seen for the whole climb covers you from the north. The reverse situation practically never happens; 90% of the cloud forms on the north, strangely enough, and all the night thunderstorms happen in Georgia, in those mountains you can see to the south. But a storm flashing away in the distance at night should not worry you, because it often has nothing to do with what is happening on Elbrus. On Elbrus, if it starts, it is already there.

(39:10) This is what the Red Fox route-marking poles look like, 1.5 metres high. They use mop handles. This is what they look like after the first decent snowfall of 10 cm, maybe 20 cm. So you cannot rely on the poles either; I have had several climbs where the poles I went up past were completely buried, tips and all, by the time I came down. That is me (39:35). If you see this jacket, that is me.

(39:41) The huts. How to save yourself on Elbrus if you do get caught out. They built a hut like this (39:52); it took a long time to build. Rubbish is still melting out of it in great heaps, including abandoned broken tents, very large pieces of assorted synthetics. But the hut stood from 1 September, when it was opened, until the beginning of December, probably of 2010. The hut came to look like this (40:20). By May, when the main flow of climbers arrived, practically nothing was left of it. Now you will not find it; now it lies literally right on the trail, but it is completely invisible – buried up to the roof.

The strongest hut of all time (40:41) was built in the USSR, in the 30s or 40s of the 20th century, using horses, without any high technology or helicopters. This hut (40:49) was dropped onto the East summit by helicopter, landed in several loads, and then lowered from the East summit to the saddle. It stood on the saddle. This one (41:00) also stands on the saddle opposite, but you will not see it either, because it too has been completely buried, roof and all, in recent years. It only broke because somebody once forgot to shut the door. Otherwise the hut served faithfully. Somewhere on the internet I came across a long account of how many thousands of nails they used on the roof alone. And I used to do pull-ups on those brackets. This is a very old photograph (41:30); by 2001 those bits of iron were practically gone. The guides and I used to do pull-ups on this beam above the door. But the hut was a good landmark for finding the fumarole. A fumarole is a fissure formed by warm volcanic gases. People often ask about it; in principle it is perfectly visible in good weather, but in bad weather you already have to know where it is, otherwise there is no chance of finding you. The fumarole is exactly 19 metres away; I measured it with a ski pole, accurate to the centimetre. Exactly 19 metres behind that hut – not directly behind, but diagonally in this direction; if you face the hut, then diagonally to the left. The saddle and the trail are to your right of that hut, and by a fair distance at that. These are the rocks (42:15) that come down from the West summit to the saddle. So the fumarole is at the bottom of these rocks (42:35). But it is advisable to approach the fumarole from right below, as it were from here (42:43). Because a fumarole is a fissure of varying depth, and if you fall through the roof in the part nearer the rocks, you will drop about 10 metres and land on dry stones at the bottom, which is hardly likely to improve your chances of getting off Elbrus alive in bad weather. As for hydrogen sulphide – none was noticed. Some friends of mine lived in it once when they were hauling a Land Rover up there; they had their kitchen in there, in the fumarole, and they used it for a week. Strangely enough, that one never smelled of hydrogen sulphide. At least, I have not heard of any such cases. Other fumaroles on Elbrus smell to high heaven. But the others are vertical and you cannot shelter in them, they are simply fissures.

(43:36) As for winter climbs. For people going to the mountains for the first time, which is often promoted, all of that can of course be done, but with a long acclimatisation programme and only with very reliable and technically prepared guides. Because it is entertainment of a completely different level. Elbrus in winter… what could I compare it to? I have been on McKinley twice; I would probably say that Elbrus in winter is tougher in terms of conditions.

(44:46) Here I have set out three acclimatisation programmes which are the most popular on the commercial market and which independent climbers take as their starting point. Out of my 150-odd climbs, I have led more than a hundred on the right-hand programme, the short one. And many people say that going up Elbrus on the fifth day is wrong and that it is all very bad. That said, the company I worked for always calculated my summit percentage, and it was never less than 93% of the people who came on my trips. So I think that with a sound and attentive approach it is all perfectly calm and possible. Given that the guide ratio on a commercial trip is usually 1:3 – I am making excuses now. We can deal with quite a wide range of transport tasks. People do of course demand to be dragged fairly regularly, but that fits into a working week, plus for foreigners the journey is included in it too. In my career I have worked 90% with foreigners.

In the far left column is a programme that I also led for a while, but you could fit not 22 of them into a season, as I managed with the 8-day one, but only about 15. We always worked from the beginning of May, from the first days, from a Friday, always in my 8-day programmes, until the bosses‘ birthdays at the end of September. The guides joked me to death for several years that if I was on the mountain it must be Tuesday. Because every Tuesday I went up the mountain, 22 times a season, except in the years when I went off to K2, to Lenin Peak and so on. I am happy to send the files to anyone who wants them; I am easy to find on the internet.

(46:58) Now let us go back to our main slide show. Equipment, like acclimatisation, is a very contentious subject that people love to argue about and shout “I did it in trainers”, “it was all fine for me”. There are people who go up Elbrus on the 3rd day. We have had clients like that who were not acclimatised, and it all turned out fine. It is just that they are very well-prepared people who tolerate altitude very well. I try never to go on anything shorter than an 8-day programme myself. I am a morally weak person and I do not like having a headache or feeling sick, so I try to avoid it. If you go on the third day with no acclimatisation, then without mitts like these (47:48) you will most likely get frostbite. Because frostbite is not only about the air temperature around you but also about your acclimatisation, because if you have little oxygen in your blood then glucose is not oxidised enough and you stop producing heat. Once I got up onto the saddle of “Broad Peak”, that is 7850, and I was shivering in a down jacket of the heaviest class there is, and underneath it was another down jacket, like the one hanging in front of you (48:17). Fairly thick too. But I was shivering and simply could not get warm, because my body was not warming itself. That can be offset with stick-on disposable heat pads, which are now sold in abundance in shops and chemists. I have tried it – it helps, but at that time I had no heat pads. But even if you are not going on the third day… and on top of that at that altitude you are dehydrated and you drink little, then the risk of frostbite rises noticeably, because the blood starts circulating very badly in the extremities. I recommend having Trental in every pocket of your clothing. In every one, because you should not have to think about whether it is convenient to get into that pocket right now or not. The tablets get cut into ones and twos and stuffed into all of them, all of them. This is what guides walk about in (49:12), people who are acclimatised, who are hardened, whose blood oxygen is fine. You rarely see guides in gloves, and even then he certainly has mitts in his rucksack; however, even…

— Canvas ones!

Yes, I have also seen people climbing Elbrus in canvas mitts. That works too of course, the main thing is to get the thickness of the layer right. But the first 4 pairs of mitts like that I probably sewed myself. Two of them I wore out on Khan Tengri when I was abseiling down ropes; they simply rubbed, and I wore out 2 pairs in a few hours.

This is a face mask (49:52). I am not going to run through the whole equipment list for you – it is boring and the internet is full of it anyway. Your face must always be covered; that greatly improves your grasp of reality, because when snow packs into your airways you start thrashing about, panic sets in and you lose your line to the next pole. In a good blizzard you never see the next pole from the one you are standing at; you keep to a direction. If you start turning about, then there is not much chance after that. When I take clients, I never turn round to face them, that is, I try to walk slowly, I put an assistant behind me if I have enough of them, one at the back, and the assistants work with the group, or tell me: “Slow down.” I look ahead constantly when the situation is really hard, because that is the only way I can find the way without a mistake. The poles get plastered with snow in a good blizzard, when the front is damp. Have you seen how people get plastered with snow? Later I will show you how a pole gets plastered. Poles sometimes fold up within an hour, whatever their strength; steel reinforcing bar would probably be great.

A mask like this (51:02) is slightly worse, because everything ices up from your breathing, right in front of your face, very quickly. When the fabric is really wet it is very hard to breathe through it. And since you are unlikely to be going up there in your 4th week of acclimatisation, breathing will not be entirely comfortable anyway, so a mask like this (51:19) together with ski goggles gives you absolute comfort. People often ask me: “Ski goggles or sunglasses?” My answer is: both ski goggles and sunglasses. Sunglasses so that they do not steam up, ski goggles when it is hot and sunny, and ski goggles so that snow does not pack into your eyes when there is a blizzard around. At the same time the two items back each other up. If you happen to lose your sunglasses (51:47), you can get down after a fashion in steamed-up goggles, but without the goggles it is really hopeless.

(51:55) This is a down jacket. I prepared some slides; I was not promised any equipment hanging up, but here you can all feel it. A down jacket of a class weighing at least 800 grams; all these down sweaters are not enough. There is no need to buy Himalayan class either, there is no point. So, a mid-range down jacket, like the one hanging there – that is Sivera hanging there, I think? Not the model in the photograph? But it is quite decent; Sivera is slightly warmer than the model in the photograph. Not long ago I was helping a client buy equipment, and we chose this down jacket for his son, who was nine at the time. We have already done several mountains of the Elbrus format with him, and the boy has never once been cold.

(52:46) Tents. If you are going to live in tents, one like this is better. As I have already said, living in tents like these (52:54) we built walls out of stones, and the wall had to be half a metre higher than the tent. The tent is a metre high. A metre and a half of stones, and the wind does not blow from one direction, so apparently you have to build 2 walls, and that is a job of many hours for two fit men. This is the same tent with the flysheet and without (53:11). Or here (53:15) is a not exactly cheap alternative from a Russian manufacturer; it costs as much as an aeroplane now.

— What is the difference? (53:28)

Tents differ in the number of poles in the frame. Here there are four. Do you see? (53:33) Not counting this flysheet pole. That is just a vestibule, it carries no structural function. That is one pole, that is the second pole, that is the third pole, that is the fourth. They cross once, twice, three times and so on. The more crossing points there are, the more stable the tent, regardless of how many poles there actually are. Here… how many crossing points? (53:58) One. Plus the number of guy points is hard to overrate; here there is one and it is fixed simply to the fabric (54:06), nothing is fixed to the frame at all; you can tie into these little loops as well. When life bears down on you, you will tie to anything at all. We even stretched a rope across, through this hole (54:16), to tie the tents down; they were sponsors‘ tents, there was no choice. Whereas on this tent (54:26) you can tie more than 30 guys into the proper points designed for it.

When people ask about boots, about footwear, then of course – one man was talking to me today – you can run up in nice Gore-Tex trainers like these. I run up to Pastukhov in trainers, training, but I run in the thinnest of base layers and everything is fine. These boots (54:51) will not do for you on some days even to go up to Pastukhov. On some days, when you go on an acclimatisation outing in bad weather and it is genuinely cold in summer in July, you can genuinely freeze your feet in them. My clients have waved it away and come back in the middle of the acclimatisation in boots like these. You can try; it all depends on the speed and the company you are in, I am not saying a firm “no”.

(55:14) Boots like these will stand up to a little more; they only look more serious, it is all essentially the same if you look closely.

(55:22) At some hire shops on Elbrus, both on the north and the south, they will assure you that boots like these will be more than enough. First, the first problem is that after acclimatisation outings you will never dry them out completely. In double boots you can put the inner into your sleeping bag, but these will stay as damp as they were. Any moisture will freeze through, and you will start losing toes very rapidly; if they are even slightly damp their properties drop several times over. In principle you can walk in them too, but you need to be careful, plus of course if you are not by nature someone who feels the cold, if you are hardened and you are hot in a fleece in Moscow right now, then this is your choice. But if you were cold outside today, then you should look at something heavier. I used to recommend this model before it became the cheapest boot in its class; now it has become expensive, and this model costs less than that one (the previous one). It is understood that plastic is not as comfortable, but most of the mountaineers you have heard of all started in plastic and not in anything as pretty and comfortable as this. We bought whatever we could get, because in the nineties they were such a rarity. And plastics of which you were the 18th owner were your good fortune.

(56:56) If money is no object, then of course these boots will feel like trainers compared with plastic ones. At the same time, in your training you can also allow for the fact that an average pair of boots, the most expensive and lightest, weighs 2.5 kg at best, crampons weigh another 1 kg, and with all of that you will have to do at least 20,000 steps in a day. So you can buy athletics weights, or make your own out of shot and little bags – it will be very effective training.

(57:32) And for the seriously well off, or for people who want a winter Elbrus even though they are not well off. You will have to sell your car and your flat. If you are going for a winter Elbrus, then buy boots like these, because the slightest problem even in boots like these can cost you your toes. New toes do not grow. Or wait for spring and go in simpler boots.

— Are double boots needed in summer too? (58:03)

I walk in the second pair from me, not triples but doubles. I have triples too, but I consider them overkill; you get hot in them on acclimatisation of course. In winter you do not get hot. In winter, in triple boots – the ones nearer to me, boots like these are called triples, then 2 pairs of doubles, and the rest are all single-layer – in triple boots in winter you go to the toilet. From the shelter to the toilet, 50 metres or 20 m. And sometimes the conditions are even such that in winter… Yes, Tolik was on Elbrus in winter, we met many years ago in winter, Fred was on Elbrus in winter, I think some others here too – Grisha was as well. And sometimes you even put on this mask (58:49) and this mask (58:50) to go to the toilet.

Now I will quickly run through and see whether I have missed anything.

As for the ethics of snowcats, I think you understood from the introduction; everyone chooses for themselves, there is nothing good or bad about it, that is, it makes summit day considerably easier, but there is absolutely no obligation to use one; on some 10-day programme you will get up quite calmly without a snowcat. On an 8-day one there are questions of course, about your physical fitness.

As for training, one second… before the training…

As for weather forecasts. Only yesterday a very well-known international guide asked me – he is Russian, but he is certified by the European school and is a very serious technical mountaineer in Russia – he asked me: “Which site do I trust most at the moment?” To which I wrote him a short text message: “None.” There are the sites www.weather-forecast.com, mountain-forecast.com and www.snowforecast.com. They all show the same thing plus or minus 10% every time. Because with the collapse of the Union all the meteorological stations round about were destroyed to the ground. Our nearest weather station is 50-60 km from Elbrus, in Georgia, which is hardly likely to share our meteorological data with Gismeteo. My statistics are still small but personally checked: cyclone maps have proved themselves well. I found them on Gismeteo; they are a bit awkward there, you have to hunt for them a bit, but they do cover Elbrus. All the times, over 5 or 6 climbs, I checked, it all worked excellently. But you do not need to carry poles with you, because we now watch their placement very carefully. Last year after Red Fox we brought up another 500. I think there will always be poles there at the right spacing, not like 10 years ago.

(1:01:05) Satellite navigation. If you are going upwards by navigator, then you are a foolish person. A navigator should only be got out in order to save yourself; if the weather is such that you already have to get the navigator out, then you should not be going up at all. Even many guides follow that rule, because it means things are really bad. On choosing a navigator. There are big questions about navigators with no external aerial – all the cheap eTrex ones, all of them. Now, with a new generation coming out, a large number of the 60CX series have been thrown onto the market – those are navigators with a big external aerial and they pick up a signal in any weather. There was a case when 3 guides were standing… I do not know, were you involved then?… 3 guides were standing with eTrexes looking at each other and not one of them was showing a position. So there you are…

(1:02:03) — You should have seen the clients‘ faces…

Yes. I remember the clients‘ faces from when I did not yet have a satellite navigator. In 2003 I was leading two Spaniards, and some other group attached themselves to us. I got completely lost on the saddle, I simply did not know, I just had to go and find the slope, and from the slope I would have understood where we were. And off I went. That is, I say: “You stand still so that I have some kind of reference point.” A big group – you can see it in a blizzard in principle. I turned round precisely, you only have to go a hundred metres or so, and visibility was about ten metres. I needed to find the rocks; I assumed they were over there and I had to test the theory, and it was hard to do that with the clients. I went, did not find the rocks, went in another direction, and just went off to the side and found the rocks. I understood where I was, went back to the clients – and I had left the clients by a pole, so as to know for certain that I had left them on the trail and not in the middle of nowhere, because there is nothing there. But from the pole I simply could not work out which way to go next. The clients were already thinking I had gone for good. Afterwards they said, when we had come down, that they drank all evening because I came back to them. But I do not know, I was very young and did not inspire much confidence, I was twenty. But I found it very funny that people had so little faith in me – why did they set off with me in that weather at all, then? And there was also a Sherpa with us. Alexander Abramov’s “7 Summits” company has Mingma working permanently on Everest (1:03:40). At the time we met he had 5 climbs of Everest behind him. And once we were walking in weather like the photographs. When we were coming down, he had said to me first on the way up: “Sergey, people don’t go out in weather like this”, visibility was probably 200 or 300 metres, you could see the whole terrain perfectly well. I say: “All right, Mingma. But you’re the assistant here, so assist. Get in the line at the back and walk.” Then he runs up again: “They don’t go out, Sergey, they don’t go out.” I say: “Mingma, leave me alone.” In the end I really let rip at him: “We have a dictatorship here, not a democracy, so get to the back.” Then the clients told me in the bar after the climb with that group that on the descent he was prodding the last client in the backside with a pole under his rucksack and saying: “Faster, faster…” The man has probably got more than 10 climbs of Everest now.

(1:04:38) EMERCOM. You should undoubtedly register with EMERCOM. The lads have started working far more professionally in recent years and you can genuinely rely on them nowadays, and they work tirelessly. Unfortunately, this winter I know of at least three deaths in the last 2 months on Elbrus, and all of them through plain foolishness, no real objective causes. One slipped, one just got tired and sat down, and so on. There was a case 2 or 3 years ago when they could not even get to a man in a sports group, a first-grade mountaineer, who slipped. One of the group went for help, and a girl stayed with him in some crevasse somewhere, because his leg was broken and they could not move him with their own strength. But after a day or two the girl left too, and in the end the story ended sadly – the lad was recovered cold.

(1:05:43) Huts… huts… huts… There is now a small hut on the saddle, but quite a long way from the trail, about three hundred (300) metres, where that snowdrift is, in this place, built to replace all the ruined ones. It was built with very small resources there, literally in 3 helicopter flights; you can sit out bad weather in it, 6-8 people fit quite comfortably. They wanted to put partitions in it so that people who wanted to use the summit… the shelter… as a summit camp could not sleep there. I do not know how it ended; apart from the first time out of curiosity I have not been in it. Although when the huts stood along the trail by the saddle it was far more convenient; we used to sit out bad weather in them with clients. It is practically impossible to drink tea in a blizzard, you have to hold an ordinary cup up to each client’s lips, and that is the biggest problem, apart from going to the toilet. (1:06:48) Yes… the girls should not be laughing at all, they should just be crying. And incidentally, a Czech froze to death. On one occasion, picking up everybody along the way there, I brought a group of Czechs down, and then at the “Barrels” they came up and said that a friend of theirs had been left up there. Their friend was found alive, he sat it out until morning, the guides set off. The company I worked for… I do not know whether you were involved there too or not… you did not go? The people who were up there at that moment went and brought the Czech down. And a day later – I was going with one group as leader and with another as assistant. So a day later I was going as assistant, and in exactly the same situation we also failed to pick somebody up, and the man froze to death 50 metres away from us. We simply did not see him. I was walking about there whistling on a whistle. Another very big problem on Elbrus, which I think has been the death of most people, is that when it is drifting you cannot see the terrain at all. Not just which way to go, but whether to go anywhere at all, that is, you cannot see whether it is up or down under your feet. And you get lost and that is that. And on the saddle the wind swirls, that is, the familiar wind direction that you assume it has been blowing from all the way, that it will be blowing from there too – that is not so. On the saddle it has a completely different direction almost always, and everybody gets lost on the saddle.

(1:08:13) The fumarole. In principle I will not even advise descending by the rocks, because unfortunately everyone, even the guides, is spoilt now and uses the poles; few people know how to get down by the rocks without them, it is a long time since that was last used in practice. And also, however tired you are, never move downhill on a snowmobile; it is simply an uncontrollable projectile, they simply cannot stop, there is no such function, because the slope is too steep. On a snowcat by all means, on a snowmobile never.

(1:08:47) Training. I consider running to be the best training, but I am biased. I am a former professional 400 metres runner; then I moved into mountaineering and immediately started running 10 km. In running there is no point simply clocking up kilometres, because I know many people, even ultra-marathon runners, who run marathons twice a week to train. An ultra-marathon is from 100 km upwards. They run an ordinary 40-kilometre marathon every 3 days to prepare, and those people sometimes never got above the saddle with me. Aeromen, incidentally, titled ones, who have earned the title of “Aeroman” in competition – the criteria for the title are quite tough. I do not swim well enough to get across, I could probably manage the running with the cycling, but the swimming… I am probably not even 1/20th of an Aeroman. And I consider that a minimum of 40% of your training should be sprint running, and you can alternate. Someone recently took me firmly by the hand: “Write me a programme.” I dodged it for a long time and did not publish it on the site, because we always have more important things to do. In the end it came out as 2 programmes, which I am also happy to send to anyone who wants them, because I do not think we will get round to publishing them any time soon, we are all too lazy. It all comes down to running hundred-metre sprints, for example, 100 metres fast, 100 metres slow. First you warm up for 2 km of course, get warm, stretch – you will all decide for yourselves what suits you best. But you need to work yourself well before sprint distances, because the risk of injury is high. Then, say, 8 hundred-metre sprints, alternating with eight slow ones; that comes out as quite a hard session. You run the hundred metres at 100% of your power. If you cannot run 8 hundreds and can only do 4, and then your results start to fall off, then there is no point, do 4, work at your maximum result, better to train more often. The next stage after hundred-metre sprints is hills. 100 metres, 200 m, 300 m, 400 m – that is an average hill, which for an average person will do perfectly well for training for Elbrus. Alternate the hills the same way, 100 m fast, 100 metres slow, 200 m fast, 200 m slow, that is, in order to run the short distance really well you have to run as slowly as possible in between. I ran at speeds down to 2 km/h; it is running almost on the spot, but it is running. Because I need to recover so that my pulse drops below some threshold value, let us say I like below 120. Anyway, in case anyone uses this for comparison later, my working pulse is 155; if I start going uphill or running round a track faster than that, I burn out quickly. I am not a professional coach at all, and not a coach at all, but I do not recommend running at a higher pulse and training at a pulse above 160. It is very easy to overstrain the heart, especially when there are snowy mountains ahead, romance and all the rest of it. And you descend the hill as well; a hill always has two slopes, that is, you climb up to 400 metres, then descend back to 100 m. If you consider yourself tough and the hill comes easily to you, then you run it up to 600 metres. If you add up the whole distance of climbing the hill up to 600 metres and back down to 100 m, in total you get more than 8.5 km, of which you are running half in a sprint; and you should not try to run at 100% of what you can do – try to run these longer distances at 70-80%. Your aim is to finish the session, not to post some time. On the other hand, when you run 10 km – 10 years ago I set up a fairly large mountaineering club in Krasnodar, and it is very noticeable that if a man cannot get under 50 minutes, and I am talking about the men, cannot get under 50 minutes for 10 km, then he is fairly weak; if he can get under 45 min he is already very well prepared; if he gets under 40 min, then he is usually one of the best trail-breakers (1:13:36) in snow in the group, and so on. For example, when I was training like that and getting under 40 min, I carried a man of 90 kg on Lenin Peak – and I weigh 70 – I carried him on me between crevasses for probably 400 metres, and all of it above 5 km altitude. Because there was no other way of belaying, they held us with ropes from all sides, but we could not drag him there technically, because there was a narrow bridge, running parallel to the slope alongside the crevasses; I was in good shape. And why exactly are sprint distances needed in all of this? Because it is precisely in preparing for altitude that sprint distances make your muscles get used to a low oxygen content, and only that, because anaerobic work is the only thing you really need. Of course, overall you also need to walk for 12 hours that whole day, and that is exactly why you need to run 10 km – to be able to walk for 12 hours without stopping. But to be comfortable in your muscles while doing it you have to be good at sprint distances. And that is covered practically nowhere; however, let me boast again about Broad Peak (1:14:56), when we started at 7500 m and in our team I alone broke trail up to the saddle, that is 350 metres of height, almost to 8000 m without any oxygen, through snow above the knee the whole way. There is a photograph to confirm it, where my two companions are standing, one 10 metres behind and the second 70. And at the same time I was carrying a rope of 4 kg, 1.5 kg of sponsors‘ flags, on top of my personal flask, and the weight of the rucksack itself, so I think I was carrying 10 kg of rucksack. Which at that altitude is for some reason already considered quite a serious weight.

(1:15:29) And I will amuse you a little before the questions with some interesting odds and ends. To make you believe in yourselves more – well, this is just lyricism, it got into the shot by accident (1:15:40), the military were climbing, so that I would not take this shot, our future army jeep (1:15:46), they were all testing military vehicles on Elbrus. Last year with the quad bikes? The year before? These are the quad bikes I worked with, they invited me. Generally on a voluntary basis for the publicity, as was the case with the Russian man with a disability whom I will also show you now. But he did give me some sort of tip in the end, but the project was non-commercial. They gave me a tip here too (1:16:17). This is another of our military developments, and here I think an old Soviet “Ural” is towing it. The lava grit there is very slippery, yes, they were spinning their wheels there, and I do not think any of them got up there under their own power.

— ******** (1:16:36)

This one, yes?

— Yes.

For me that was very strange indeed. I especially like this one (1:16:45), but it weighs about 5 or 6 tonnes, unbelievable, it is armoured all round. They even dragged a sledge along with them (1:16:58). The lads are two-time Russian champions in quad-bike sport; we did not get up, we drove to 5200 m and won a Russian record, we were entered in the Russian book of records, we tried to submit it to Guinness, but that was just when our military friction with Ukraine began and Guinness simply told everyone in plain language where to go. But the project will continue, I think we will end up somewhere in the end. That is me (1:17:33). In half an hour we drove to Pastukhov and then in another 3 days another 500 metres higher. Here they were roaring along splendidly (1:17:43), but then we got bogged down in the snow. The snow was frozen through.

Incidentally, avalanche danger. Avalanche training. Professionals give a separate lecture on that. When the frost is not very hard, and when a temperature above zero or around zero forms near the ground, the snow freezes through and the underlying layer becomes hollow, a completely empty layer. And then an avalanche happens like that, when everything settles and starts to… that impulse is enough for the snow to go. And here it consisted of exactly that sort of powder, not the lower layers – here everything is very heavily compacted by the wind – but all the snow was frozen through like flour, or like dry sand, probably. Here it is frozen solid behind the snowcat, because the snowcat had driven over it, but we went on further with winches. Here are the wheels (1:18:36) – they fitted metal ones with no rubber at all. Nothing helped. And this lad (1:18:43) just went and drove up there on his own. But we were higher in the end. He has a big problem with the diagonal traverse. This is the snowcat platform at 5100 m; this is the view at 5100 m. From here you can see the shadow of Elbrus (1:18:57); the sunrise was photographed somewhere here, the one we looked at earlier. This is us with the EMERCOM people (1:19:06) who were assigned to support us, having our photograph taken. The lads worked splendidly, but unfortunately the project finished early. And then we just went up anyway (1:19:14), so as not to be sad. And this is the boy (1:19:18) I was talking about, in the grey Sivera down jacket. There is the boy (1:19:26)

— And from what age did the boy go?

Eleven, but my youngest one taken to the top is 10, and my youngest one not taken to the top is 8. I was the assistant, there were 3 of us guides and 3 clients: a father and two sons. I went down with the 8-year-old then, and they went and got up with the 10-year-old. And I took the 10-year-old separately afterwards. All foreigners. And these are Russians.

— Is 10 not too young for a child on Elbrus? (1:19:52)

Eleven is too young as well; I would not advise it under 14 at all, and better still under 16. A child’s body is still forming, after all. You know, let me ask you a question and answer yours straight away. At what age would you let your child drink a full glass of vodka? … That is when you can start on Elbrus. Because brain cells die from hypoxia in the one case as in the other. The hangover you feel in the morning if you drank something poor quality is precisely nothing other than a lack of oxygen, because alcohol takes a great deal of oxygen out of your blood in order to be metabolised. Although at altitude we always drank. Both in Pakistan, especially at 7500 m – you simply cannot get to sleep without it – and on McKinley there was not one evening when I did not drink. It was always about 50-70 grams of rum, but without it it was simply impossible: first, the endless daylight on McKinley in particular, that is Alaska; second, you drag a sledge weighing 50 kg all day, and then you have to get to sleep somehow. Everything hurts, everything is unpleasant. So alcohol in the mountains in small doses is quite justified; what is more, we conduct numerous experiments on our clients. We started running an experiment on Aconcagua (1:21:16), we simply brought a case of red wine up Aconcagua on mules and started dispensing it, but as it happened half of them there were vegetarians and very correct people. They refused. We did not force anyone, we finished the lot ourselves. Anyway, the difference between those who drank and those who did not was enormous. On Aconcagua it was especially noticeable. On Elbrus it is blurred, because the programme is short, but on all the days up to acclimatisation we try to pour a client a glass a day at dinner. You sleep well, you acclimatise, because the haemoglobin you produce is first and foremost iron; if you are short of iron then you can acclimatise there for 30 months and nothing will happen, if you are anaemic, because a haemoglobin molecule has to contain an iron atom. You can eat apples, you can take tablets, everyone chooses for themselves there, but we still lean towards red wine. The boy did not drink (1:22:15).

— Do you use Mildronate on climbs?

You know, let me tell you a long story, about 5 minutes‘ worth. In 2004 I came to a seven-thousander for the first time, went abroad for the first time, to Khan Tengri (1:22:33). I drew up an ordinary programme for myself there, 2 outings. Eleven people had died in an avalanche just before I arrived, right in the middle of the route there is a well-known avalanche that sweeps across. A lot of well-known climbers have died in it over the years. I simply did not want to go up there twice, and I decided to try to go up the mountain and, if anything happened, to come back and count it as acclimatisation. I was exactly 21 then, I was on my own and very afraid of everything and very much did not want to stay up there. I went and did it, got up the mountain and that was that. And they gave me… (1:23:12) what is all this leading to… The well-known lads from the Kazakh national team gave me a Mildronate tablet before the outing and said that we do not go up the mountain without Mildronate. So I thought that they had given me this tablet, and probably it was… For anyone who does not know, Mildronate enhances cellular oxygen metabolism. And on that tablet I… well, I consulted high-altitude climbers afterwards and went up higher mountains. Anyway, the secret was not in that but in the fact that I had come from a season on Elbrus. I do not know, I take Mildronate, it seems to me it increases physical endurance. In terms of acclimatisation I do not think it has any positive effect, but there is no clinical evidence base, I am simply not competent, I cannot say anything.

This is Vadim (1:23:59). Vadim is from Nevinnomyssk. This year Vadim asked me to take him up from the north. He had done the south. This is the summit, buried in snow. He says: “I lay fireplaces, I’ll save up. How much does a private expedition cost?”; anyway, I say: “Come at the end of the season, when we do not have to be distracted from the rest, and we will take you up as it is.” It is only 300 km from Nevinnomyssk. And we had an excellent climb, although there were big questions about the weather at night, and in the end it was a day like this (1:24:36). Why I took this photograph at all is not clear. But it is the view to the north, so that you understand what you see on the north. Sometimes with the right angle of the sun you see the roofs of Kislovodsk and Pyatigorsk glinting.

This is how a pole gets plastered (1:24:50). A more or less fresh one has been stuck in at the side, and this one is either a plastered pole or something that has fallen off it. That is, a pole is about as thick as a mop handle, so you can judge the thickness of the snow – about half a metre, probably. A metre high, 30-40 cm wide for certain.

Here we see northern landscapes (1:25:20) and an Indonesian man with a disability. The Indonesian went from the north; our man from Nevinnomyssk did the south with a snowcat. The Indonesian is simply an animal. This man rode 800 km across the desert in 7 days on a bicycle, with clipless pedals. Yes, but unfortunately we had to drag him with another guide as well. Just as well Kasik is so strong. We had to drag him practically the whole way, practically down to the shelter, it was simply fantastic. And on top of that, it is the only group in my whole history that came with no reserve days at all; they said: “It is Indonesian Independence Day – we have to go up”, and that was that. But the weather was such that I even spent a night in the crashed helicopter on Lenz, the one the military spent 2 years dismantling; back then it was still great to sleep in the fuselage. We were wondering whether to turn back as we came up to it or not, because the weather was hard, but it was already much closer to get there with a person with a disability than, in terms of time, to descend to the shelter with him, so we were lucky by a narrow margin, and the next day it suddenly cleared up. Anyway, it all worked out well. This is good weather (1:26:35), this is just spindrift. And incidentally sometimes with spindrift after fresh snow has fallen, in a strong wind, 3 metres above the ground you see the sun above you, but you absolutely cannot see where to go. Your visibility is 10 metres, although it is a sunny day like this. Just slightly more wind and slightly more fresh snow. There is Kasik behind waving his ice axe (1:26:56) and the Indonesian guide; incidentally, we dragged the guide down as well. Sobar is of course a subordinate; they were recently trying for Aconcagua, sounding me out about it. At the last webinar on Lenin Peak I said that we were planning to go. In the end they chose a different operator. I bet that they would not get above 6500, and they did not. They wrote and promised for next year, but as for believing it, I do not know, I usually do not believe people a second time. But Sobar and I chat away pleasantly through Google Translate of course; Indonesian through Google Translate is simply utter hell, but we say hello and goodbye to each other regularly once a week. That was the eleventh year. (1:27:47) Regularly ever since. When I am in touch, of course. That is all from me.

(1:28:04) And one last thing about records and a remark about equipment. More about Elbrus: there is no such information anywhere on the internet, but I have a file of old magazines at home which say that people even went up Elbrus on horses. But for some reason everyone usually rushes to set records on the East. Plus they drove up with dog teams. On huskies, they drove up; the huskies went empty of course, just with the harness and no person, he walked alongside. On the subject of age, many people say: “It’s too late for me to take that up now, it’s all young people here of course.” Our oldest guide in the company is 76 years old. That is Uncle Kolya “the black”, and he took part in the first climb of Everest with the Soviet national team, and generally the first Russians on Everest in 1982, the year I was born. But they climbed in May and I was born in December. Uncle Kolya still goes out, guiding on Elbrus. And at that, one of our partners is a very serious outfit, they have business on Everest and everywhere, and every season they ask for him specifically, for him alone, as the head guide.

On equipment, one more very important final remark: you have to eat constantly and drink constantly, especially – if you cannot even force food into yourself, then you can always drink, and it is better if it is strong sweet black tea. Because coffee is great, but it is a diuretic, and the problems you start getting are not illusory: first with the technical process, second with dehydration, because the more you drink the more you want. Black tea also has caffeine and is also a diuretic, but the effect is less pronounced and the stimulant effect is greater than with coffee. Plus half a glass of hot tea is often enough for someone who is already refusing to walk and saying “I’ll stay here and die” – hot tea specifically – and the person gets up and walks. And it is not even about the glucose but about the body getting a sharp signal. For anyone who does not know physiology: in our bodies, if you eat something it does not enter the bloodstream straight away, it is digested over several hours; even the fastest thing enters the blood in an hour. Sugar faster of course, but most of your food takes more than an hour. When you eat, ATP is released, pure energy is released into the blood which has already been stored up in advance, and it is precisely that tea which gives the body the signal that it can give up a little more of that stored ATP, so that the legs straighten and the person walks. And then you have lost height and been saved by a miracle; so do not neglect it. You need good flasks that will still be giving you hot tea 12 hours later. A flask cools down very quickly when it is half full rather than full. And a minimum of 1 litre, and for beginners I would recommend a litre and a half, because all those 700 grams… Brad and I do not drink on the mountain at all, that is, we carry flasks, we have everything, but it usually all goes to other people. Sometimes a cup for company, when we are on the saddle. When the sun is out on the saddle we usually have a very long rest there, about half an hour. Never take Snickers bars, never take Mars bars.

— An orange.

An orange, yes. But not everyone digests it, Brad. Because of insufficient acclimatisation, fibre (1:31:32) is hard going. Yes, you can eat an orange with the peel on in a good hard frost. Take what will not freeze on you. You cannot break a Snickers over your knee. We were once going up a technical face in winter, and we simply “did not stress about it”, we bought two boxes of Snickers in the shop. It was -30 C the whole time, it was a north face in the Caucasus. Then for 3 days those Snickers… the things we did to warm them up, the things we did with them – they are impossible to eat. Plus you may be feeling slightly sick, say, if you speeded up somewhere to catch a friend up twenty metres away – never do that. You speed up for twenty metres and you can burn more oxygen than you would have needed, say, to walk 2 hours to the saddle, on that one burst. And at anything like half-finished acclimatisation it is practically impossible to recover fully on the spot. I have got distracted, what was I saying?

— Snickers (1:32:24)

About Snickers. Twix and Milky Way bars go down well. These are also things that do not freeze, for example raisins, dried apricots, nuts. It is a matter of taste; nuts will not be digested and will not give you any energy. Forgive the detail, but nuts are what most often makes clients vomit onto the snow in front of me. So I cannot recommend nuts. Something that is absorbed quickly, right down to lumps of sugar. I like biscuits; biscuits are just quick, they are simple, you can eat them in any state, even when you feel unwell. But unfortunately I cannot describe any state objectively; I said at the beginning that I do not like walking when I feel sick, and I do not walk then – I can allow myself that. So I can only collect statistics from clients, on who was sick and on what, and I have seen that more than two hundred times in my life.

I am ready to answer your questions.

— (1:33:23) About rope teams, do you have to rope up or not?

If you are climbing from the south, nobody ropes up and nobody carries anything for it. However, a hundred metres in any direction off the trail and there will be crevasses where all of that is already needed. In particular… better if I show you on a photograph. You can walk between the rocky ridges, but if you go beyond them, then people often get lost there, disappear. There are a great many people on Elbrus who have still not been found. They all went off that way, off to the side. However, some lad came down, as I described, and got through by luck. Snowboarders often ride out here (1:34:01). That is, “Priyut 11” is here in this spot; from here the snowboarders set off and ride down to “Mir”, cutting out the two upper cable cars. And there the crevasses are simply mind-boggling, and even on the classic way from the south, below “Priyut 11” somewhere at 3900 m before the last steepening, there are crevasses that a whole snowcat fits into. And everyone walks over them. In some years they melt out and you can see them, and in others not.

(1:34:33) Do you have to walk roped up on climbs from the south?

Good question. Now there will be a good, memorable story, I like telling it. Once a boy and a girl went snowmobiling near the “Barrels”, and there, literally 200-300 metres from the “Barrels”, they went into a crevasse on the snowmobile. The boy fell into one crevasse, the girl into another. The boy 3 metres, the girl 17 m. The boy “jumped” out of his, and then some tourists came running and threw a loop over the girl’s arm, and what followed was not for the faint-hearted. I worked with the rescuers for my first three years on Elbrus, and worked with them on all the groups. They told me all these stories briefly, and how they then cut the girl out and the rescuers themselves had to recover from the sight, because… the girl of course died immediately of shock. So you do not have to rope up on the south, but on the north you absolutely do. But on the south you have to be careful, because the crevasses are simply everywhere there. And as for the way, that is, here (1:35:46) this is an unfortunate photograph, it needs to be lower. “Priyut 11” is on the left and below it a big plateau, and all these crevasses are on that plateau. There are a lot of them there, the snowcat tries to drive across them. At the end of the season, in August, we try to go directly from the “Barrels”, but when you get onto the ground you will understand what I mean. Just remember the words. We keep further left towards the rocks, where you can see bare ice. Where there is bare ice you can never go wrong, because you see the crevasses, they run along, they narrow and close up by that time, and you walk along the line where they have closed, very calmly. There will be no poles marking it there, that is for certain, because nobody needs it. But it is all obvious there. Frightening?

(1:36:33) Please show us where the “corpse collector” is there…

The “corpse collector” is a well-known subject, you were bound to ask. Yes, Tolik, thank you. So the snowboarders ride off from here, to here (1:36:54). Like that, going round here along the slope; there are very big crevasses along the slope here and we have many times seen a snowboarder lying on his board and trying to paddle with his hands, because it is very frightening to stand on it. Although it is not clear – you are standing on a snowboard or standing, the area of support is the same either way. And the “corpse collector” is a network of crevasses here (1:37:15) and a great many people who come off the saddle, the route is drawn higher up, and who go off the saddle – the crevasses are already here. If you have gone below the diagonal traverse, simply having missed it, then you end up in these crevasses, and there I talked with cavers (1:37:28), and it is about 150-170 metres down, and an average climbing rope is 50 m, 60 m maximum, and so… The rescuers will climb around after you of course, the lads work, but… they are unlikely to find you. They melt out. Some employees of our firm, the previous firm I worked for, found a man there somewhere in this place (1:37:59), from 20 years before. It was simply a warm year. Recently things have been melting out there. Second World War soldiers are melting out there.

— On the route? (1:38:07)

No, not right on the route, off to the side at the ice base, you can go there on acclimatisation to the ice base via the observatory. And there in the icefall, at some point, 70 of our young NKVD men whom they cut down with a machine gun from “Priyut 11”. Some were brought down, some not. Brad was involved. Quite simply, a climber’s most important organ is the brain. There is nothing frightening about it. If you see that somebody has crashed on the ring road, bloodied and dead, you carry on driving, don’t you; you do not get out of the car and continue on foot because somebody crashed at the wheel. It is the same here: somebody died in the mountains, and why he died is none of your business. You have built your tactics, you have chosen your equipment, you have done everything not to slip, not to fall into a crevasse.

— Do avalanches happen often? (1:38:58)

Avalanches, no. Incidentally, I did not finish – when there was that big avalanche, that day we cut two more avalanches loose and turned back down on a bright sunny day, because everything was simply sliding before our eyes, lumps of snow like this. And we simply turned round and went, and only climbed a day later, when the snow had settled, not the next day, although the clients were strong and everything was fine. We went from below as well; I digressed when I was talking about the alternative route from the saddle – yes, we tried that and we tried the classic, but there was a lot of snow. I know of three, and a fourth case: an avalanche came down onto Pastukhov and carried a group away with it. One of them was sent to hospital, the rest were all right, there was not very much snow. But as for avalanches, I do not think you should fixate on that at all. Statistically it is unlikely.

— What should be in the first-aid kit? (1:39:50)

Everything you might need.

— Are any special medicines needed?

Well, people ask me constantly about acclimatisation, about medicines. The best medicine is oxygen. Not the sort for asthmatics, those 17 breaths, but a 4 kg cylinder that lasts 4-8 hours depending on the flow. Acclimatise properly – why put your liver and kidneys under strain? The most harmless preparations do not bring you health. You can take a course of schisandra. You know how doctors say: it will not make things worse, but not better either.

— Do you take anything? (1:40:30)

No, I do not take anything. Only vitamins.

— Another question about seasons. So in June it is cold, and in July and August there are thunderstorms?

In June it is not that cold, but on average it is 5 degrees colder in June than in July. It seems to me that is not remotely critical.

— Better anyway (1:40:53)

The colder it is, the more stable the weather.

— So in May or June, then?????

May is still winter, too much precipitation still falls. Accordingly the chance of losing visibility is too great; precipitation not in the sense of depth, it mostly gets blown away in winter. There is no snow at all. In winter there is bare ice. And not only on Elbrus, but generally, in Pakistan too. I like June.

— June?

Yes, June is clean snow, like in the pictures, it is all very fine. In August it is all different – the slope is black. In August everything below Pastukhov is simply black. Plus things melt out.

— Tell us about snowshoes, please.

What do you want them for? It is hard there.

— From the north too?

From the north too.

— So they will not be needed at all?

When the snow is knee-deep, it is not worth my while using snowshoes. I am a bit wary of snowshoes generally. I walked on McKinley in snowshoes without ever taking them off. But the thing is that when snowshoes are needed, there are already very big questions about avalanche danger. That is, if you have a choice, then it is simpler to wait a couple of days and then go without snowshoes, and the snow will settle and no avalanche will come down. Otherwise, maybe once or twice I have wanted to have snowshoes on Elbrus. Do you use snowshoes? You have never used them?

— No.

It is not as simple as you think. They rid you of a number of problems but add a number of others, quite substantial ones at that. Especially on all the traverses like the ones on Elbrus, on this terrain they are good for walking straight up, on a gentle slope or in a straight line, on the flat. But to traverse a slope the snow has to be genuinely good and deep; if you catch a patch of firn somewhere then you have to take them off and change into crampons. We break trail in crampons even where it is waist-deep. Simply so as not to have any doubts.

— What are the particular features of mid-July, mid-August?

In mid-July there is still a chance that it will be more or less clean, but the snow will not be as white as in the photographs. (1:43:05) No other difference in August. I do not know, Brad may correct me, maybe slightly more thunderstorms in August. Warmer and more thunderstorms. The warmer it is, the more thunderstorms. They happen in winter too, but at completely different altitudes, down below in the Caucasus Mineral Waters. The warmer it is, the higher they rise. A thunderstorm is frightening. In life I am afraid of only two things in the mountains – thunderstorms and avalanches. Avalanches, as we have already decided, need not be discussed any further. But thunderstorms are very much a live issue on Elbrus. We have run down many times there; you are walking along in a bit of mist and everything is fine, and then static electricity starts hitting you very painfully. And you tie everything the group has to a 30-metre rope and run down. My clients have run. Once I was leading four Scandinavians and, it happened, the groups were mixed, and all the Scandinavians did not know each other either. They were not friends, but they were all as if picked out, two metres tall, and there was one poor Japanese man, probably 1 m 60 cm. Visibility was poor, it was night, but we were walking in the hope that it would clear and then we would climb higher up, and meanwhile we were practically looking for the snowcat track. And something alerted me, I thought I saw a flash. When somebody sweeps a torch across the driving snow in front of you, you also see a flash, because it happens instantaneously. And I say: “Right, everyone sit down, we wait 5 minutes; if it happens again, we go down. If it does not happen again, then…” I needed to understand whether it was lightning or not. We sit down, and then thunder and lightning strike somewhere simultaneously. A second’s difference between the sound and the light is 300-330 m. And here they struck simultaneously; I do not even know where they were striking, because we were standing a long way from any rocks. Anyway, I jumped up, but when the lightning has discharged you can run and you understand the frequency, lightning strikes often, say once a minute. You run, counting to 50, and then you sit down so as not to be the highest point on the slope as far as possible and wait until the air discharges. The static builds up in you more and more, it literally buzzes, you hear that sound. Once it discharges, there is no static, the lightning has struck, and then it is all fine again. And I jumped up shouting: “Come on, let’s run down.” Visibility was about 50 metres, I could see only the tracks and the Japanese man and that was all. And the slope is quite steep and the steps are three metres, that is, every 3 metres; you can run there and 5 m too, the slope lets you jump like that, and you only have to land properly of course. But the snow was soft and they were moving fast. I get out my whistle, snatch it out – and it was in the lid of my rucksack, not hanging round my neck – and start whistling so that they did not scatter over the slope, or you would never find them afterwards. The Japanese man was so wretched and we all waited for him, and we navigated by the Japanese man. I caught them up after about 150 metres, they waited for me, and I say: the Japanese man behind me, you behind him. Afterwards the lads were so taken with that story that three of the four Scandinavians went to Lenin with me. Fantastic statistics. Usually it is 10%, and here it was 75%.

(1:46:22) Is it better to climb in August after all?

August has its advantages: if you are going on your own especially, there will be so many people that you will not need the poles. That is, 300 people a day on the slope at once is not unusual there.

— (1:46:48) A question from the internet: please say again how you can be found and tell us your name.

Mountainguide.ru — Sergey Baranov.

— (1:46:50) Can you get up Elbrus on a ski tour?

On a ski tour. I will answer that now. People use ski touring on Elbrus in a very particular way. Several groups come to us every year; those who have decided after all not to look after their knees carry on working as guides on ski touring gear. Ski touring, incidentally, is much more expensive but much more effective than snowshoes. With ski touring you can either go along the valleys and climb Elbrus in crampons, or walk the valleys in trainers and then climb Elbrus on skis, because the snow season below and above practically never coincides these days. Either there is ice above and snow below, and you can ski tour. Or there is snow above, and rocks below by then, and accordingly you can only ski tour up high.

— (1:47:39) I wanted to ask how and where to book, how is it worked out?

In what sense?

— Well, for example “Priyut Odinnadtsati”.

For that you look for telephone numbers on the internet. On booking.com, some of them are even there, serious people. And all the rest on the internet, there are enough contacts in principle. You can get in touch with me, I will find you whatever you want there.

— (1:48:05) If you have a tent, do you have to watch out for the snowcat?

Yes, basically there are no problems; the problem is that the snowcat should not run you over at night, that is what you think about. Here on the rocky ridges there are a billion places for tents. Here are the huts, they will move you on there and it stinks here (1:48:20), for the mass melt-out reasons already mentioned. And down here there are places, from here, down here there is a little chain, and from the rescuers‘ huts up to the top there are places for tents everywhere; you can sometimes look behind the ridge, it is three metres there, there are lots of pitches. They are all walled in already, you do not have to do anything. Plus here where the road is around “Garabashi”, they dug the road out, but the side remained, and here on these rocks there is a row of places for tents. And lower down there is no shortage of them at all.

— (1:48:56) Sergey, could you say a bit more about training in a fitness club…

We all run in fitness clubs in winter, I am old and lazy too and do not want to go out in the cold.

— Circuit training in the gym and those, or…

You know, how often I meet on forums “how much should a spoon weigh?”, “where can I get a titanium spoon 3 grams lighter?”. Do you think that ever bothered us even on the most serious climbs, on K2 for example? Whatever was there got lost in the snow, we took new Pakistani ones from base camp at two roubles apiece, the sort that sell for 5 roubles here and tie in a knot, and off we went. And it is the same with training, that is, this sprint work is enough. That is, volume – and if you run like a first-grade sprinter you can forget about all the other training (1:49:49). Some people train in a pool, but I cannot say anything about that. I have swum in a pool, but I am not much of an enthusiast.

— What do you say about the stepper? (1:49:55)

I ran in a fitness centre once, when I signed up once, I tried it. Some duty trainer there worked me to death, and my knees hurt very badly straight away. And I cannot say. It is the one where you walk, the stepper, yes?

— Yes.

Yes. Absolutely not at all.

— (1:50:15) And in July and August will ordinary firn crampons do, or is it better to take something more serious?

They will do. There is summer ice there, it is soft. In principle they will do in June too. But in June under Pastukhov there may still be smooth winter ice left. I would not take the risk.

— (1:50:37) In August, from roughly what altitude does the ice start?

That depends on the August. In early August it can be from where the snow comes down from the summits in early August and to about “Priyut Odinnadtsati”. And at the end of August it may not be below 5 at all. There have been such years more than once. And the hardest thing of all is which month to climb in. When you climb in August there is a very high risk that you will hit exactly this melted-out ice; it is very soft summer ice and not dangerous. You can even self-arrest on it with an ice axe, it is all porous. But with every step down you, tired, take a hard blow to the knee, to the hip joints. Your muscles tense up incomparably more than when you walk somewhere in June on nice snow and slide calmly down. On the nice snow people slide down on plastic sledges. So they sit down at five thousand and go carefully down to “Priyut Odinnadtsati” in fifteen…

— having taken their crampons off…

Yes, having taken their crampons off. If you ever slide down on your backside – and it is an important question, incidentally, because a great many people simply sit down and slide in crampons – you catch a crampon in the snow and your leg is broken. That is it.

— (1:51:48) with crampons…

It happened. Possibly. I twisted my leg when I was already a guide, already knowing that you must not do it, but thinking that I would be careful. I did twist it, yes. Not badly, mind, but the knee, yes. They still remind me of it. I managed without the emergency room, but…

— (1:52:12) What can you say about the races up Elbrus that have become popular now?

Good subject.

— (1:52:20) Not climbing high, up to 3500? There.

Why? There are people who go up a couple of times a year for the Elbrus race.

— (1:52:30) the ones who do ******* more lightweight

There is a race round…

But I have run 24-hour rogaines of a hundred kilometres myself, I just like it for fun. As preparation for something… it is more a waste of health than an acquisition of it.

— (1:52:52) they do not score points…

It is not even about all these altitude fluctuations, they will not affect your health there. It is specifically the joints, because running on mountain trails does nothing for your knees.

— (1:53:06) And in terms of safety?

I can only speak about the Alps, I have studied the question. We wanted to run the GoreTex Transalpine Run at one point, and we still want to. But at the moment we need to concentrate more on being in shape. It is the biggest mountain ultra-marathon that exists in the world. It is about 370 kilometres, I think. And people have frozen to death there. (1:53:27) Simply on the passes at 3500 m, the sort of altitude you are asking about. Yes. Because a runner is light, he is defenceless. I ran 90 km round Oshten in a competition; we used to hold them at one time. I would pack a hat and gloves and run in shorts and a vest, with a GPS on a bum bag, and 4 Snickers and 4 guaranas. Incidentally, guarana in my subjective view is quite stimulating; we carry guarana with caffeine in our first-aid kits, to give a client when he has already sat down and does not want to walk, and it does pick him up in principle. I think it is the caffeine more than the guarana.

— (1:54:08) How do you solve the problem if we are going as a group without a guide and somebody feels ill on the way up – should he wait or go down on his own?

You can abandon him. The statistics show that there are quite a lot of memorial plaques to lads abandoned like that from non-commercial groups. And I recommend that everyone go up to “Priyut Odinnadtsati” on acclimatisation; some of the plaques nailed up there are for whole groups. And you can even read about Soviet practice, when it was not done to abandon people, but sometimes people were forced to leave their comrades and go for help, and then could not get back in time. So I consider that splitting up, in the case I described where in the end they buried the man in winter, although the man had simply broken his leg and could have sat there for two or three days… You must not split up, because you are unlikely to get back with help in time, you have to try to get him down even if slowly. In that case I think they would have taken twenty-four hours but they would have got him down, with pain, but never mind, he would have lost consciousness a couple of times but he would have been alive. And without a guide, you decide yourselves which of your friends goes; you must never let one person go alone, I think. Even if he looks a hundred per cent. It is absolutely wrong and contrary to all the rules to let one person go alone.

You wanted something.

— (1:55:26) Yes, are there perhaps any personal statistics on successful May climbs, apart from the free ones?

It depends on the degree of stubbornness, that is, commercial mountaineering differs from independent mountaineering in terms of the days, the percentage of days, on which you can go. And the more experienced a guide is on Elbrus, the worse the weather he pushes into, the more he can push. Everyone goes as far as the stage where he is confident. So the statistics – I have not had a single group from the south that did not get up in all 15 years. My statistics are that 3 climbing days and 2 reserve days have always been enough for me to find some sort of window. I have only three times in my life gone up on the third day out of three.

— (1:56:14) In May specifically?

In May we used to start on 1 May, but we all guided. So if we start on the first, or on 29 April this year, then we managed to take 4-5 week-long groups up in May, in the calendar month of May. The beginning of May and the end of May feel quite different. The end, 25 May, is already June, and 1 May is almost March, so spring comes quickly there.

— (1:56:46) And how can you be found on the internet?

Mountain Guide. You can simply type in the two words in Russian; we cannot come up with a decent name. Our site is Mountainguide.ru so we are living with that for now.

— On Instagram? (1:56:59)

On Instagram there is Mountingguide, yes. As one word.

— (1:57:04) Sergey, a question. You said you carry Trental with you.

Trental dilates the peripheral vessels in the fingers and the extremities, it dilates the vessels. There is also nicotinic acid, but there is a view – check it yourselves, ask doctors. I cannot say that nicotinic acid – smokers will understand me – damages the vessels, whereas Trental apparently does not. But there are pitfalls: if you dilate the vessels here as with alcohol, you lose blood pressure overall. If a person has low blood pressure to start with and you give him Trental, then he may sit down on the snow and that is that. So you should not overdo it, but I have not yet seen one tablet harm anyone. They are tiny, tiny, like a pinhead. But with two tablets, questions can arise even for a healthy man.

— (1:57:52) A question about blood pressure. Who finds it easier to get up, people with high blood pressure or people with low?

Last summer I did very little guiding myself, but last summer I had both cases. But I would say, probably, that it is easier for people with low blood pressure of course. You see, you can bring them back to normal with medication, with coffee for a while; if their upper reading is 100, getting it up to 120 is no problem. Whereas with people with high blood pressure it is practically impossible to reduce it carefully and hold it steady. People with raised intracranial pressure most often turn back and leave.

— (1:58:40) And what are the clear weather reasons for not going?

Everyone has their own limit of confidence, and you know how…

— Rely on the guides?

You can rely on the guides, but what if the group you have attached yourself to turns out to be stronger than you? What then? No, they will probably try to help, but on the other hand they may simply not notice.

— (1:59:15) If you do not attach yourself but rely on the guides, they sort of know?

Yes, of course, then you do not think about anything.

— (1:59:20) can’t heaaaar. (Asking for the question to be repeated?)

The question was about what the limit for taking a decision is when judging how bad the weather is. How bad it is. How do you tell? Everyone decides for themselves.

Any more questions? Is the internet silent? That is all, thank you?

— (1:59:55) About the crevasses on the saddle.

There are crevasses on the saddle on the way to the East. There are fumaroles – those are the fissures you do not think are there. You are walking along the rocks of the East summit and there may be 3 metres between the rocks and a 10 m fissure between them, and you think you are walking on rock. I have seen it with my own eyes, I have stepped into them. I fell through 3 metres at most, thank God into some soft volcanic sand, which is like snow. (26:00:22) Yes. Anyway, I remembered it all then and for good. Otherwise there is a bergschrund there, but you cannot really show it without a photograph, and no classic route passes there anyway; things are simpler there with the crevasses. However, if you are coming up onto the saddle… I will show you now (2:00:46), there is a very important nuance here: if you try (2:00:51) to go off right at the bottom here, then here you can already end up in crevasses. And on that side, when you go behind the hump, you walk here along the edge; behind the hump everything is fine with the crevasses. And here, incidentally, lies the tent of the Czechs who froze at one time. 4 Czechs: 2 lads, 2 girls. You can see the tent, it is still melting out, they left all the equipment, only the bodies were brought down. They were 21-25 years old, and there is a plaque nailed up at the shelter. What else can I tell you that is cheerful?

— (2:01:33) Sergey, what beautiful acclimatisation outings from Terskol would you advise?

From Terskol, the classic ones. We do the observatory.

— How high is it?

The observatory is 3300 m, but above the observatory you can gain absolutely any height you need, and before that, if it is a gentle acclimatisation programme, you can walk up Cheget. Descending by cable car from the bottom, say.

— Thank you.

To be honest, because of the border zone your choice there is not rich at all; there is also Terskol Peak, but there even well-prepared clients get back at 5 in the evening having set out at 8 in the morning, it is quite a long trek. Whereas the observatory is a standard half-day trek, 3 hours up, a day down, lunch and all the rest of it.

— (2:02:22) Thank you. And what lower temperature limit should a sleeping bag have if I am going to sleep in a tent?

In a tent… you know, I…

— (2:02:27) The maximum minus, probably, yes?

I slept on Elbrus in winter, in February, in a tent near the “Barrels” in a sleeping bag costing 600 roubles at the time, a Bask quilt, which is still made today. It has 3 layers of hollowfibre laid in and sewn, and it is not even a mummy bag but a quilt. It was very cold. Then I took it on technical faces, we slept packed in tight in a tent, four of us, and that was fine. Then I went with the lads on a really serious face, and they took single-layer sleeping bags weighing 800 grams. I still took my three-layer one and it was the warmest, comfortable to zero. Nowadays, at 33, in summer I would take one rated to about 15 degrees of frost. But you can combine

— Is there any point in sleeping on Pastukhov? (2:03:17)

No; incidentally, this question reminds me that I have not mentioned one of the most important parts, which is why Elbrus has snowcats and all the rest of it – because in all the mountains in the world where we work, in South America, in North America, in Asia, everywhere summit day is a vertical kilometre or less. Very rarely, only on Chimborazo in Ecuador, is it an exception, there it is 1300 m of ascent; on Elbrus it is 2 kilometres. And that is why, if you have a tent and want a camp system specifically, then you are surely going to want to go higher afterwards, and at the same time you will have the experience of a night out on Pastukhov. That is good.

— And if you sleep on Pastukhov Rocks, what sleeping bag do you need? (2:04:00)

If it is on Pastukhov, then probably 20 already, yes. You can combine. In Alaska I used to go…

— ******? (2:04:07)

No, you buy a second thin sleeping bag, you have some sort of…

— (2:04:13) I have a quilt, but it is for -5.

You buy a second one rated to zero, put one inside the other and that is that. That is how I went on McKinley. Good for drying, though my inner one was down. A lad took it off me today. I used to put that down one inside a single-layer hollowfibre one; the down one was comfortable to -15 and at -45 I spent one of the nights alone in a single-layer tent. It was all fine.

— ****? (2:04:37)

I was not cold. It is convenient to dry them separately when there are two layers.

Is everyone too shy to leave?

(2:04:54) A question from the same person who asked you the first question about whether to leave someone or not. Tell us ****** using *****.

Say that again?

— In the event of an accident, how does the helicopter get there? (2:05:05)

The helicopter does not come at all, and never. There has not yet been a case, at least I do not know of a single one, where a person was taken off Elbrus by helicopter.

— (2:05:18) And if it is on insurance?

You have to negotiate. There is now a helicopter club in Pyatigorsk, a private one; they are trying to push the idea of working with insurers, but insurance is… You see, who will you pay, Rosgosstrakh? He will try to swindle you almost certainly. We came across it when we were consultants directly and other clients were being evacuated. And EMERCOM’s helicopter is a Mi-8 and it is in Nalchik and I do not know when it last flew out. When did the Mi-8 fly out? Nobody else knows either. (2:05:56) The lads have Eurocopters, they land on the summit and lift a person, or two, out of there quite calmly. So it is possible to negotiate. The locals and the helicopter people are both developing that theme. HeliAction is the name of the company in Pyatigorsk. But a helicopter in Pyatigorsk is easy to find.

— (2:06:14) And which insurance policies come through, as far as you remember?

I use Reso. As far as I know Reso has never let anyone down. An insurance company always operates on the other side, especially through an assistance provider. As a Russian citizen, in Russia, to be honest, you do not need insurance. That is, EMERCOM should rescue you at the taxpayers‘ expense. EMERCOM has a snowcat, EMERCOM has climbers, which is more than enough for Elbrus. Abroad they all work through some sort of intermediaries and there you have to look at which insurer works through which, because there have been complications. We have recently worked through the helicopter question separately, and many people’s standard insurance, if you fly abroad, states outright in the contract that a helicopter is not included. I think only Reso had it written in; we were comparing 15 different companies very carefully at the time. My assistants did it, they spent several days comparing, reading everything, all the boxes, the small print; basically, a helicopter is included practically nowhere. On Elbrus none of that should worry you anyway. If you get stuck – and you will get stuck in bad weather; in good weather they will rescue you anyway – then in bad weather a helicopter will not come for you. The helicopter will wait for the weather to clear, and whether you are alive or not is a matter of complete indifference to the helicopter pilot. Although pilots from Afghanistan came to Lenin Peak in a Mi-8. We brought down a French woman from another group and paid for it with our Lenin Peak expedition, but the clients all looked at each other and at me and in the end decided that we would bring her down with oedema. Then we did not have time left for the mountain, and it was night, and evening, and getting dark, snowfall. A Mi-8 helicopter – we ran around looking for a landing site for it… Sorry?

— (2:08:02) From what altitude did you bring her down? Where did you bring her down from??????

We brought her down from 5400 m to 4400 m, across crevasses, across the icefall.

— *****? (2:08:09) (unclear clarification)

Above the frying pan, yes. In the end the helicopter came in the evening and rested on one wheel, since we had not found any level landing site there. It rested on its little wheel, they waved – load her in. I even have the video of us loading her into the helicopter. The year was 2007, I think.

Do not be afraid of the mountains. Just be careful.

— (2:08:36) What size rucksack for the summit push, it is the smallest one after all. And what do you absolutely have to take with you?

We all carry, well, Brad probably, is this the smallest of the guides‘ ones?

(2:08:51) — A thirty.

An honest thirty, because there are thirties that are half the size. I have never taken less than a fifty on Elbrus for a climb, because it is better to stuff the down jacket and everything else inside. (2:09:03) No, as a guide, well, I have a rope in there as the bulky item, and everything else fits in the lid, the guide’s things, the first-aid kit. There, well, simply

— (2:09:13) they walk with “monsters”…*****

A 90 is difficult, because you cannot feel what is in there. Whereas with a 50 you just throw things in and do not think about how to pack it, stuff it in, clip it on. When a blizzard is driving like in the photographs, you will be stuffing everything in anyway, wrapping the ice axe in the down jacket, sticking it in, you will not care, because the stakes will be high.

— (2:09:32) Share some information on this: when people walk with poles, if you start sliding? (2:09:36)**** and one way and the other, how?

We usually recommend a pole from the saddle for clients, so as not to lose stability but not to lose out on safety either. We usually give them a pole in one hand and an ice axe in the other. The ice axe on the uphill side, the pole on the downhill. Classic mountaineering.

— (2:10:09) by zones, territorially…

But before that we always, first, run self-arrest sessions with the clients until they can do it automatically, which usually takes several hours on the rest day; second, you have to get it across to people very firmly and repeatedly that you have to forget about the ski pole at the moment you fall. So far there have been no failures. Our people have fallen without a rope above the saddle, but everything has been fine so far. There is a rope hanging there now, and the most dangerous section is fixed. But we used to fix whatever we had in our rucksacks, and three or four of us would club our ropes together and fix them, and then when I got some money I decided to fix it (1:10:51) permanently.

— (2:10:59) On the subject of helmets, is there any point?

Only on routes with crevasses. From the north the probability is low. This too is a very contentious question and very much discussed on the internet. Some are for helmets on glaciers, some not; we guide from the north without helmets. On the south there is nowhere to fall at all, on the south it is all fine. On the north it is the rope teams and the crevasses, that is why.

— (2:11:31) The minimum kit for the summit push apart from a flask?

I had better send you the list, because there are 50-odd items on it.

Thank you all for your attention!