Glacier Number One; Xinjiang, China
by SCMA Member Keith Hay

On the morning of June 10 (2000), I stood in line at the United Airlines counter at LAX to check-in for my flight to Beijing. From there I would travel to Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang, the western most province in China, where I would meet members of the Ürümqi Mountaineering Association (UMA). The night before, I had repacked my life into an extra large base camp duffle. With sage advice from more experienced members of the Southern California Mountaineering Association, I had my plastic boots in my carry-on, which explained all the strange looks people gave to me. I had ten weeks before I would see home, but less than a week until I would begin my first expedition style climb. I arrived in Beijing seventeen hours later.

My climbing objective, and the reason that the Durfee Foundation funded my grant to China, was Bogda Feng, a technically challenging 5445-meter peak. Mr. Wang, my liaison with the UMA suggested at our first meeting that we should make a four-day trip to a nearer peak to help me acclimatize and to help us get used to climbing together. I agreed, and plans were set in motion for the trip.

Until he knocked on the door of my room in the Red Mountain Hotel (Hong Shan Binguan), our only contact had been a series of email messages sent during the past seven months. In less than a day we would be leaving for three or four days of climbing together.

Around 3:00 PM on Friday, June 16, I met Mr. Wang, Yang Li (who asked me to call him Sam for this climb), Yang Chen Fu, another climber whose name was never clear, Ding Yu and our driver in front of my hotel. Two more people would join us the next day. With more gear than I thought necessary for four days and three night of camping, we piled into the minibus.

About two hours outside Ürümqi the desert yielded to a set of green hills backed by snow-covered mountains. I woke Mr. Wang to ask him if these were the peaks to which we were headed. "No", he replied, "We will pass several sets of mountains before we get into the valley where Glacier Number One is," before going back to sleep.

The road deteriorated, became narrower and eventually became little more than a one-lane dirt track. My Chinese van-mates continued to sleep. As we entered the first of several broad glacial valleys between the snow-covered peaks, I got my first sight of the yurts, camels and herdsmen who lived there. Traffic slowed our journey. Several times we had to wait while Kazakhs on horses ushered their herds of sheep to the side of the road, sometimes forcing them onto precipitous perches. A recalcitrant bull refused to move to the side of the road as the rest of the herd had done when our driver honked. Instead, he turned and stood directly in front of the van. A thirteen year-old boy dismounted from his hourse, grabbed the bull by the rope tied around its snout and pulled it to the side.

After two trips shuttling supplies from the village where the van dropped us off, I settled into the camp we established at 3,300 meters, just below the snout of Glacier Number One. A small stream of glacial water flowed only 200 meters from camp. The summit rose 1,180 meters above our camp. The other peaks around the valley stood at only slight lower heights. In places, the head of the glacier towered at least 100 meters above us.

Though it was 8:00 PM, sunlight still warmed camp. We would have daylight for at least two more hours (a result of Xinjiang's being in the same time-zone as Beijing, seventy-two hours to the east). I set up my tent while Mr. Wang and his group set up their four-person tent, which also served as the camp kitchen. That job completed, Mr. Yang began boiling water for tea and noodles, the first two courses of a large evening meal. I now understood why we had some many bags. There seemed to be an endless supply of food, including at least five pounds of peppers and several large heads of cabbage.

On Sunday, the day we had decided to try for the top, I once again awoke long before the others. I started getting things into my pack and getting water boiling for tea. The weather, however, looked as if it would keep us from climbing. Clouds wrapped the summit, and snow was falling as low as 3,000 meters. Hopeful that the weather would break, I continued preparing breakfast. Mr. Wang crawled out of his tent at around 6:30 to find a day little better than what I had first seen. When I asked him if we would climb, he said that we would. The weather, he assured me, was normal for mornings in this area and would break before lunch. By 7:30, as we were leaving camp, spots of blue sky dotted the peaks while rays of sun warmed the now almost empty camp.

After a lot of discussion the previous night, we decided to alter our route. Mr. Wang wanted to take a direct route. To him, we should climb up the head of the glacier, which would take us almost directly to the ridge that would be our route to the top. I argued that we should head up a less steep section onto the main glacier and then turn east toward the ridge. Though marginally longer, my route would not require climbing vertical ice, would miss a traverse that probably could not be protected, and would avoid crossing several questionable snow bridges. I prevailed.

We decided that we would climb without roping up on the lower part of the glacier. Mr. Wang, by far the most experienced climber, led the party. Mr. Yang and another climber followed him closely (and would share leads with him when we did rope-up). I came fourth with Sam in the rear. Since they had climbed this glacier several times already this year and the consolidated snow was still frozen, I felt comfortable following their route un-roped.

It took almost an hour to cross the glacier. At the end of the crossing a twenty to thirty meter section of forty-degree nieve stood between the start of the ridge and us. We soloed to the ridge. From there, we faced several hours of exposed third and fourth-class rock. To the left (east) the ridge fell away in a long scree field; to the right the ridge dropped onto a steep snowfield. Barely able to hear one another over the strong gusts, we stopped to take off our crampons. Clouds once again swirled around the summit. The sun, still low in the sky, kept us warm despite the fierce wind. With most of the sky still clear, we continued climbing through the snow squalls.

About 500 meters from the top I joined Mr. Wang, Yang, the other climber and Sam in a small, wind-protected notch. Shouting over the wind to ask for tea, I realized that I was getting cold. I was losing feeling in my right hand. I put on my shell jacket as well as a second pair of gloves. We shared water, hot tea and some food, while Mr. Wang pointed out the next part of the route. Just after the notch, we would leave the protection of climbing on rock and enter a thirty-five degree snowfield. About Forty meters of slogging would place us just below another section of the ridge and on firm snow. We would follow the ridge for about one hundred meters then traverse out onto what, even from here, looked like a wind-sweep ice field. After the ice field, our path would bend back toward a thin line of rock before swinging out into another long low angle ice field that would be our route to the summit.

As I was finishing putting on my crampons, Mr. Wang tested the anchor he had built and then started breaking trail through the thigh-deep snow. He kick-stepped about fifty meters then built an anchor in the rock. After Yang fixed the bottom part of the rope, Sam and I clipped our ascenders onto the rope and started climbing. After we tied into the anchor, Yang and the other climbing almost ran up the slope. Yang belayed Mr. Wang who led the next pitch through steep snow to a small outcropping of rock just before the traverse. Again, Yang fixed the rope for Sam and me. He climbed quickly as Mr. Wang belayed him. From the warmth of our small wind sheltered stance, Mr. Wang led the traverse out onto the ice. As I clipped into the rope and moved onto the ice, I realized that the point of my axe did not penetrate. The tips of my crampons were not biting well. Though the ice was not more than thirty or thirty-five degrees, it was almost a thousand meters before I would come to a stop if I fell. Safely at the belay, I thanked Mr. Wang for his lead.

Mr. Wang handed the ice screws to Yang to lead the first ice pitch of the ice field that appeared to be the route to the summit. As Yang reached out to grab the screws, he dropped one of his gloves. It rocketed down the ice field. Within seconds it was out of sight. I offered to get an extra glove out of my pack (none of the Chinese climbers had backup gear), but Yang declined. Mr. Wang, Sam and I remained clipped into the three ice screws that made our anchor. With the snow blowing harder, I again asked Mr. Wang if we should keep climbing. Sure that the weather would not get worse and would most likely break, he said that we should climb on.

Near the top of Yang's pitch the route edged back toward the east, toward the ridge line we followed earlier. Sam and I reached the anchor that Yang had built and waited for Mr. Wang to join us. I again offered the spare glove; this time Yang happily accepted it. Though the first several meters of climbing from here would move out onto a 45-degree ice field, it quickly eased back to 25-30 degrees. We untied from the rope to make the climb onto the summit easier. My altimeter showed that we were over 4,360 meters. I was moving slow. Sam and I followed the trail that Yang and Mr. Wang had broken. As we walked onto the edge of the summit, they were sitting waiting for us so that we could make the true summit together.

After a few seconds Mr. Wang suddenly leapt forward. He had punched through into a hidden crevasse and was jumping to make the other side. Yang, Sam and I probed to find the edge of the crevasse. From there, Sam jumped across. The far edge gave way again. Yang Chen-Fu then stepped quickly onto the remains of the snow bridge and jumped for the far edge. It receded before him too. Unwilling to commit to a jump that had gone from less than a foot to almost three feet, I began probing left and right to see if I could find an end run around the crevasse. After searching ten meters in each direction, I gave up and returned to the remains of the snow bridge. Though making the leap might not be the most desirable option, at least I had a sense of how far I had to go. Everything else was a frozen mystery. I took two steps back and took a running jump. Though I easily cleared the yawning gap, I landed face first in the crunchy frozen snow.

Though the sun had come out earlier to warm us while we waited in the ice, the clouds closed in again as we neared the top. By the time Sam and I joined the other on the edge of the summit, there was a heavy snow falling. Through the clouds and swirls of snow, I took some photos of the endless sea of peaks. We shared warm tea, a couple of chocolates and some bread. As we finished taking pictures and began heading back to the edge of the summit the sun broke out.

We descended via the route we had used coming up. As the angle grew steeper, Mr. Wang place two screws as an anchor (his axe acting a back-up third piece) and had Mr. Yang lead. Yang fixed his end of the rope and Sam and I placed our safety-lines on the line and began walking down toward the relative safety of the ridge line. With the storm coming down the mountain, we opted to climb un-roped through the traverse and back into the deep snow field just above the notch.

In the notch, Sam and I shared some tea while we waited for Mr. Wang. Yang, impatient to get down, went to explore a gully that would take us down the eastern slope of the ridge and onto the flat glacier perpendicular to our base camp. Yang and Mr. Wang reached the notch at about the same time. Yang believed that we could quickly scramble down the scree and talus slope, and that we would back to camp faster than if we followed the ridge and re-crossed the glacier at its snout. We followed his advice.

By the time we reached camp the snow had changed to rain. I ducked into the vestibule of my tent. We had been climbing for around nine hours. I took my boots off, pulled the liners inside the tent and fell asleep while I was undressing. Mr. Wang woke me a couple hours later so that I could eat.

The drive back was far from anticlimactic. Once again we were stopped for the local traffic jams and roadblocks. Despite being tired, I snapped off several photos of a road fully closed by a heard of over 200 sheep. Further adventure ensued when we stopped again in the Chinese truck stop for noodles and cold beer, plenty of cold beer.

The minibus dumped us in front of the Red Mountain Hotel around 5:00 PM. After agreeing to meet with Mr. Wang the following morning, I wished the team good night and headed in for a well-deserved shower. Later that night I treated myself to cold beer and the all-you-eat western food buffet at the Holiday Inn. Thankfully dinner was only across the street from the Red Mountain; I lacked the motivation to walk much farther.