Climbing Asia’s Forgotten Mountain, Part 2 | Nat Geo Live

Hilaree: So many things went awry everyday. It was a lot of hard work. And to get to base camp when I think of all the times we almost threw in the towel, it was a total relief.

Both: Oh, we made it. Climb on. We're at what... like 11,000 feet we have 7,000 to go. (audience applause) So, we made it to base camp, which... felt like kind of a huge accomplishment in of itself, was to get to 13,000 feet to get out of the jungle. We all struggled so hard individually in that jungle. Everything looked the same. You know, we're all like pretty much A-type personalities. And trying to, you know, rely on people who you can't communicate with.

Then, finally, you know, we come out above all of this. And it was like coming out from, like being pinned under water or something. And all of a sudden we could breathe. And we're like "Oh my gosh, we're in our environment. We're where we can, you know take control of our own destiny. And we're at base camp." This was the transition basically coming out of the jungle. For us to come out of the jungle and see white snow and glaciers was really an amazing time in the trip.

But, we'd lost so many days under town arrest, and we'd lost so many days trying to find porters that we were rushed and we were stressed at this point. And at no point in those 30 days had we spent more than two nights in any one place, except for when we were in Putao under town arrest. So we were hustling, and we were trying to switch over all of our gear. We got to... high camp, October 30th. The next day was Halloween. And I remember this because I got on the satellite phone and I called home.

And I remember my kids asking me where their Halloween costumes were. Because I'd put them in this bin and I'd forgotten to tell my husband, and they didn't know where their Halloween costumes were. And so I'm like talking on this phone, like directing him through the house to find this bin to find their Halloween costumes. And I was like "This is so weird." And then... my older son, you know, he's seven at the time, and he was having a really hard time learning to read.

And he'd been working on it really hard, so he picked up his book and read to me over the phone. And, I mean, I'm going to, yeah like it was, I was... crushed. So I had this going on all at the same time. That we're trying to turn around go through all of our gear that we hadn't seen in weeks. And we had one day to do it in, and that was Halloween and then the next day we were climbing.

So, we started pulling out all of our food and trying to divvy it up and we realized that we had actually lost a lot of food along the way. We hadn't cut it out as a way of cutting our bags or anything like that. But, we had lost snack bags and I think some of it got left in villages. We'd lost a lot of rice because there were military outposts in some of these villages. And in order for us to move through that village they essentially bribed us out of bags of rice.

So, we were losing some of these food supplies along the way. And when we sat down and sorted it out, we were like "Okay, we have enough for eight days of food to climb this mountain. And if we really stretch it out we've got ten days." But, that's taking everything with us. That leaves us basically nothing for 130 miles walking out after trying to climb this mountain. (instrumental music)

Cory: You know Mark and I looked and we thought you know, we should go this way avoid some of the technicality of the lower ridge. And Hilaree thought we should go another way.

Hilaree: Even just from the get go trying to pick out camp one There was... dissension. (sound of wind howling)

Mark: It turned out that Hilaree had made the right call for camp one. It's just hard making these decisions so far out there. (instrumental music)

Renan: Big day. Going up a giant couloir with technical climbing with heavy packs. (bleep)

Emily: People were kind of just like, this is real, it's serious. But, at the same time I was just right there with everyone else. A lot of the things that I did today I've never done before.

Cory: Kinda sketchy some of it too, right? It was kind of scary. You are going up 55 degrees, 60 degree ice slope. (sound of tent flapping) Whoa! (instrumental music)

Hilaree: This mountain is full of surprises. We have followed yet another dead end. So, we have to backtrack an hour and basically drop elevation. Then do some steep snow and ridge climbing.

And then... And then, I don't know. In reality, the peak was like this Alpine version of the jungle. It was up and down. There was no straight way. We kept having dead ends, uh... it was really hard. I think, as a team, we became really focused on climbing. But, we sort of lost that team dynamic. We stopped focusing on each other and how... the team was gonna get to the summit.

This was our second day out of base camp. And we were already in this crazy Alpine environment. And that second day we reached a dead end. We had to come back down to camp one. And then start day three over again. And, I think it was a really kind of... rude awakening for all of us that the mountain wasn't going to be this sanctuary.

This place... that we would un-map and magically arrive at the summit. It was going to be a lot of hard work, and we were very thin on resources. Right here, we're basically standing on the Tibetan-Burma border.

And... we were just on our second dead end coming up from camp two. And trying to figure out our route. The climb was steep. It was pretty windy, it was a little bit colder. I was definitely missing the down pants that I'd left, like at 2,000 feet in the jungle, like three weeks earlier.

The big, like 8,000 meter boots that we didn't bring and opted for like the smaller lighter boots. This is Emily and I on the face. And so I know that this probably like a total news flash. But, men and women are different. Just a little bit. We have a different way of communicating.

And... Emily was definitely my choice to bring on this trip. And she was really green in this kind of environment. But, I had the utmost faith in her. And she's so strong, but she's emotional and she was nervous on a lot of this. And so, I chose to kind of like hang back and climb with her.

And on this particular face I had been in front and I stopped and I waited for Cory and Emily to pass. And I hung back behind and climbed below her. And just hung out with her. Plus, she's really funny and she's super fun and we climb well together. But I think as we were moving up towards the summit that was sort of perceived as a weakness with the rest of the team.

And then again, like women talk about things a lot more than men. And when you get on a big mountain sometimes the guys just weren't talking at all. And Emily and I were like, "My toes are cold." Or "How are you layering? Are you putting that under this?" And "Are you going to wear your balaclava under your hat or over your hat?"

We were like, talking about all these things that like, girls talk about like, um... I don't know, like "You put your hands in your armpits or down your pants to keep warm." And um, I think that was also like, our kind of chattiness and like, "Check my harness" and "How does my anchor look?" was again sort of this second tick against both of us.

And... again was sort of perceived as like another weakness as we were moving up the mountain. When we got to this face it was just sort of assumed that one of the guys was going to lead the face and I was like "Wait a second." Like "I'm... I want to climb. I want to lead this face."

And it was the first sense I kind of got where, like there's a division going on here. Where the girls are in this corner and the guys are in this corner. And, in the end I did lead the face. And it was fine, and this led to our high camp which was at about 18,200 feet. And we were six days into the climb at this point.