Seb - 2 Poles and 7 Summits

Ama Dablam

Background

Some of you may be thinking, hang on a minute, Ama Dablam is not one of the 7 Summits; why are you climbing it. There are probably 3 reasons for it:

1.  1. The 7 Summits are more physically tough than technically difficult and I wanted to have climbed a properly technical mountain.
2. 2. Everest is the most technical of the 7 Summits and also you are dealing with that at significant altitude. This is the weakest part of my mountaineering and I wanted to push / prepare myself here by climbing a rather more technically difficult mountain at a lower altitude.
3. 3. I will be climbing Everest from the Tibetan rather than Nepalese side and as such will miss out on the iconic trek up the Khumbu valley to the mountain. This trip will give me most of that.

The Mountain

A very beautiful and technical mountain - it is on most climbers' wish list. A great trek up the Khumbu valley and a real challenge to climb.

Decisions

Apart from the usual one of the level of support you want for the climb, you also need to decide how to acclimatise. You can either do that on the mountain as you provision your advance camps, but a more interesting option is to climb one of the other, slightly lower mountains in the area which should get you acclimatised to a higher altitude and you do then have time to recover when at AD base camp.

Route

The expedition is roughly structured as follows:

1. 1. Fly to Lukla which is the nearest airport to the Khumbu valley which has a lot of Nepal's climbing and trekking.
2. 2. Trek up the Khumbu valley (past Ama Dablam) to Island Peak which is one of the most popular trekking / easy climbing peaks and summits.
3. 3. Trek back to Ama Dablam for our ascent of that - we should do this much quicker than normal as we should be pretty handily acclimatised after our ascent of Island Peak.
4. 4. Trek back to Luckla and fly back to Kathmandu.