Climbing Everest - Route Breakdown - Stage 3: Western CWM

I'll give you a quick tour of the peaks behind me here. I'll try not to go blind. It is incredibly sunny right now. It's probably 90 degrees and the the reflection of the sun off the snow is incredibly intense. You can see I've got my shirt off. It's it's that hot up here but if I leave my shirt off for more than five or ten minutes I'll get burned especially with my pale lager skin. So anyway up behind us we've got the route going to Camp 2. You can see some boys working their way up the Lhotse face. That's Lhotse, this peak just behind me. Lhotse over here and then Mount Everest is just behind up there. You can't quite see the summit from here but that's where we're headed. The next section of the climb we are showing you takes us above Camp 1 through the Western Coombe and past Camp 2 to the base of the Lhotse face. The Western Coombe, named by Mallory, Coombe is Welsh for valley, is a broad gently undulating glacial valley basin. We will climb through the Coombe numerous times on our rotation. Once to Camp 2, again to Camp 3 and then finally on our summit bid. Why do we do these rotations? It's a great question. Most other peaks that are not incredibly extreme altitude like Mount Everest we simply double carry up. So we'll carry a load up, drop a load, come back down and then move up the following day or we simply just climb our way up the mountain. But a mountain as big as Mount Everest, you make a foray up the mountain and you're so tired trying to acclimatize that you need to come all the way back down to base camp, rest and recover and then make another foray up the mountain, get a little bit higher, acclimatize a bit more, come back down, rest again and then head on up to the summit. So on Mount Everest we're doing three rotations. Some teams do two. We find we have better success with three. So this is the second of three rotations trying to make it to Camp 3, 24,000 feet without oxygen. And after this rotation we should be able to drop down, rest, recover for four or five days. It takes your body four or five days to recover even at base camp after being up here high on the mountain. And then we'll sneak up Camp 2, take a rest day, Camp 3, Camp 4, high camp, go to the summit from there and come all the way back down. So even the summit bit on Mount Everest is five or six days long. So just the summit bit itself is as long as climbing most large peaks elsewhere in the world. That's how grand the scale is on this mountain. While the climbing here is more relaxed, the altitude still makes it challenging. You must continue to stay focused and not let your guard down. There are objective hazards from avalanche danger from the surrounding peaks to lateral crevasses and navigating vertical crevasse walls en route to Camp 2. The greatest impression of the Koum is the scale that it gives. Being able to see the summit from afar, the steep walls of Nupsi and the west shoulder hemming in on either side and the Lhotse face ahead. It is typically two to four hours from Camp 1 to Camp 2 and it's important to leave early because once the sun is high it can be unbearably hot. You'll spend a good few nights at Camp 2. Like an advanced base camp, this is where we stage for the upper mountain. It's a fairly safe flat camp with significant infrastructure. Beyond Camp 2 it's a short climb to the Bergschrand and the beginning of the next main phase of the route, the Lhotse face.