The story of Peanutbutter Mountain

Peanutbutter Mountain.

Who even gives a mountain that name?

What even happened up there?

The questions are many and my answers are few.

November 15, 2019. Rolwaling Valley, Nepal. It’s a beautiful, sunny day. No wind and not a cloud in the sky. Jost and I are out for an acclimatisation tour toward the nearby Yalung Ri, a fairly easy high 5000er in the area where we are staying. The Yalung Ri is a trekking peak – meaning that it doesn’t require advanced climbing skills. You don’t need a lot of gear, maximum a pair of good crampons, an ice axe, helmet and possibly a rope if you’re going as a team.

We’ve been walking for a few hours on the trail leading up to the summit, when suddenly I stop. Jost, who is walking in front of me engaged in his own thoughts, notices my sudden halt. He turns around toward me and asks me if something’s wrong. I think for a second and then tell him the plain truth: I am bored. We are walking up this clearly beaten path, we can see the summit in front of us the entire time, and there seems to be no obstacles on our way to keep us from getting there in no time. Where’s the adventure in that?

*Jost on his way toward Yalung Ri (above in the middle)*

So we mutually decide to turn around. We feel like there is nothing more to see or explore on the route. After a while we stop again to have a sip of water. Jost turns to me yet again and points at a rocky peak in the distance, residing between two vast glaciers. “What about that one?” He asks me with a smirk on his face, the way he often looks when he’s got mischief on his mind. We sit down on a rock and take out our map, where we soon manage to locate this mountain without a name, rising 5798 meters above sea level. We have no idea how to get up there or what the climb will require of us (read: me…) – but we’re not exactly ones to say no to a good training session.

*Peanutbutter Mountain - looks harmless eh?*

November 17, 2019. After a breakfast of tsampa and oat porridge with peanutbutter at 3 am, we get going. There’s no light but the one coming from the moon and the stars and my headlamp. We are lucky - it’s going to be another beautiful day.

The first part is easy. It’s a clear serpentine trail leading up to the Yalung Ri basecamp, walked by many people before us. It takes us about two hours to get there.

After that it gets trickier, as we have to navigate our way toward the foot of the mountain with no clear direction or plan. Later, this turns out to be one of our biggest setbacks, as navigating takes up way too much of our time. At first we cross the glacier, initially an endless giant pile of rocks and then ice and crevasses. Then we start climbing a steep snow field with a lot of rocks, soon arriving at a section of pure alpine climbing. We rope up here, Jost goes first and I come after.

After then heading up a rocky ridge and realizing we can’t get any further, we turn back a couple of meters and climb down to walk along the foot of the ridge on the snow field. Soon there’s nothing but a snow field ahead of us and we can see the summit within reach. But shame on us, because this section is very steep and – since nobody has likely ever been up there before – we have to make our own tracks in knee-deep snow. Every time we take one step, we glide double the distance down again. It’s like walking backwards on a treadmill. I am starting to get tired, it’s been more than 8 hours since we started. Plus, I have a headache which I know is a sign that I am not adjusting to the altitude properly. Jost is a little tired too, but doesn’t sense the altitude in the same way I am.

*On the ridge with a 360 degree view of the Himalayas*

It’s now past noon and we make the decision to turn around when the clock strikes 2 pm sharp, no matter how good or bad we are progressing. We know we’ve got a long way back down, and the last thing I want to do is navigate my way back through the darkness – especially in exhaustion. The climb feels never-ending, the snow doesn’t get any less deep, and we’re getting more and more tired. It’s a race against the clock and at some point we realize that we’re not going to make it by 2 pm. But we’re so close. We can see the summit right in front of our eyes. Just a little further.

Just less than 40 meters before the summit, we arrive at another very steep mixed rock/snow section. It’s already late, almost 4 pm. But we’re almost there. I have never been so tired before and a part of me doesn’t care anymore whether I reach the summit or not. I just want to be safe. The sun has started to turn orange, sinking lower into the valley behind us. We decide that Jost should go ahead of me and see if he can establish a good route to the top. I wait, balancing on a ten centimeter wide spot of snow and holding on to the rock. If I slip, I go down. Stay focused.

After a short while Jost comes back, saying that it’s doable and that we can rope up if I want. I hesitate. In the blink of an eye so many emotions pass through me at once: exhaustion, hope, excitement, fear. I feel a fear of dying. Or perhaps – I feel vulnerable, like my life is hanging on a thin thread. At once there is life and there is death, co-existing so close to one another. They are not two separate things. They are two sides of one coin.

Nevertheless, it is in moments like these, when you’ve fought so hard to get to where you are, that making the decision to turn around can be incredibly difficult. Maybe the most difficult of them all. I also feel like I don’t want to let Jost down and take this opportunity away from him to do a first ascent. But naturally, in hindsight that didn’t matter to him nearly as much as me feeling safe.

So I swallow my pride. It’s past 4 pm now.

“I want to turn around.”

“OK.”

With less than 40 meters to the summit, we turn around.

When Göran Kropp descended from his solo climb on Everest in 1996, he said that he was so exhausted he didn’t care whether he lives or dies. That is similar to how I felt on our way down. And that is a very dangerous thing.

On the snow field we slide down on our bums to make the descent faster, and on two different occasions I start sliding uncontrollably. My autopilot response both times is to take my ice axe and pierce it into the snow to stop me. But in my mind, I am indifferent. One part of me feels like it doesn’t care what happens to me. I am so tired. Another part, hidden beneath the many layers of exhaustion, is trying to stay sharp and focused. This inner battle is an entirely new experience for me.

Perhaps I make this whole thing sound like it was a horrible experience. But truth be told, it was everything but horrible. For one, I want to clarify that it doesn’t mean that mountains or alpinism need be dangerous. The chances that something happens to you rise significantly higher when you don’t have the right experience – and this time, I probably didn’t have the right experience. We were on the same mountain, but Jost didn’t sense the same kind of fear I did because he is more experienced than I am. That’s the hurtful truth. Plus, one has to remember that we had not really prepared this climb at all, we didn’t know what it would be like, and we had to navigate as we went along.

Looking back at it today, I see it as one of the best training sessions I’ve ever had. Sure, we didn’t reach the summit. But from the beginning that was never the goal, actually we felt more sure that we would not make it this time due to the nature of the whole project. Nevertheless, when it became clear to us that we might make it, a sort of summit fever took over.

Nothing happened to us and I learned some great lessons along the way – about the mountain, about myself. I felt feelings I have never felt before. I have never felt so close to death, even if the proportions of that feeling might have been completely blown up because of how exhausted I felt.

Either way, who cares if we reached the summit or not? As Jost always likes to say: at the end of the day, the mountain is nothing but a meaningless, snow-covered piece of rock.

But one thing I can tell you for certain is that it is on this edge of complete vulnerability and nakedness where I feel the most alive. It may sound like a paradox, but fear gives me strength.

And the name of the mountain? Well, since we didn’t reach the summit, we’re not allowed to give it an official name. But we decided to name it anyway, after the endless amounts of peanut butter we consumed during our time in Nepal. So to us, it will always be the Peanutbutter Mountain.

*The day after - having peanutbutter pancakes on my birthday!*