Weather thwarts climbers
Though he says he has learned about ‘‘largescale disappointment’’, Oamaru’s Sam Henehan still smiles when talking about his 26day journey to the Rolwaling Valley on the NepalTibet border earlier this year. Hamish MacLean catches up with the high school geography teacher and mountaineer about his attempt at being the first to conquer an isolated and still unclimbed mountain peak.
LAST month, about 12,000km from home and only hundreds of metres from his goal, Sam Henehan turned around and walked away emptyhanded.
From his high camp about 5400m above sea level in Nepal’s Rolwaling Valley he could see the unclimbed peak of Mt Omi Tso Go at 6332m.
But the trip for the Waitaki Boys’ High School secondyear geography teacher — with fellow mountaineers Norwegians Steinar Laumann and Lisa Kvalshaugen Bjarum, Swede Mans Gullgren and Nepal’s Jyamchang Bhote — was beset by inclement weather.
For eight days at the base camp, at 4800m, the crew huddled in a tent, hoping the snow would let up; it never did.
At 1am on their final day, on what was planned to be a historic first, the team got geared up with crampons, ice axes, and head torches for an ‘‘alpine start’’.
‘‘It was in sight — we can see it, it’s doable,’’ Mr Henehan said this week, home in Oamaru.
‘‘The plan was . . . hopefully that’s when it’s coldest, the snow will be its hardest. But that didn’t happen. As soon as we got around from our high camp, we were just falling straight through.’’
Falling into snowdrifts at times nearly chestdeep, the five climbers only made 100m progress over the next three hours.
The group turned around and years of planning, thousands of dollars in travel and permits — and probably the dream of being the first to reach the summit of Mt Omi
Tso Go — were dashed by nature.
‘‘It was gutting, man. I spent a lot of money on it, eh — a lot of time and a lot of training,’’ Mr Henehan said.
‘‘It was great to hang out with old friends that I hadn’t seen in a couple years; it was a beautiful place; I got to meet all these new people, which was cool; got to do some climbing; hanging out in an awesome place — it was good to learn about largescale disappointment, too, you know.’’
The group was still talking about going back next year if the peak remained unclimbed, ‘‘but it’s out there, people know about the mountain now’’, he said.
The trip was three years in the making, and he knew before he left there was at most only a 20% chance of conquering the remote giant.
Yet the fact luck was not on his side still stuck with him nearly six weeks back from the attempt, as he was ‘‘slowly recovering [and] thinking about the trip’’.
‘‘It’s climbing; this happens’’, he said.
Mr Henehan met the crew he went with while working as a mountain guide in Norway.
And the trip had already almost been thwarted by American climber John Kelley, who took on the mountain alone in February and came ever so close, turning back just 150m from the peak, lashed by winds that made it difficult to stand.
The group was deliberate in the timing of the trip, believing May would provide the best conditions for the assault on the peak.
When Mr Henehan landed in the foothills at Kathmandu it was 28degC. Only the monsoon rains hinted at what the group was about to face in the mountains.
Afternoon storms lasting about an hour drove in massive amounts of rain.
After finding 13 more to add to their ranks, hiring 11 porters, a chef, and an assistant chef, and then a 14hr drive, the group of five arrived in Gonggur Khola.
From there it was a sevenday trek into Na Village, 4200m above sea level. By then the warmth of Kathmandu was far behind or below.
‘‘There’s like frozen waterfalls all the way on the sides of the valleys.’’
Only about 30 villagers remained in Na Village after the magnitude 7.8 Nepal earthquake that killed nearly 9000 people and injured nearly 22,000 in 2015.
And since the last time he was in the valley, massive Chinesebacked hydroelectric projects had pulled even more people away from the area looking for work.
In Na there was ‘‘snow everywhere’’ and temperatures dipped to about 5degC at night.
‘‘We’re starting to get worried,’’ Mr Henehan said. ‘‘Every afternoon, by about
2pm or 3pm, the clouds would come in and it would be rain, or snow, every afternoon.
‘‘We’d wake up, we’d sun ourselves outside, get warm outside in the sun and the clouds would come in up the valley, start up again.’’
But they made the oneday trek from Na to the base camp at 4800m to wait for a window in the weather that would allow them to make their climb.
‘‘Every single day, the weather came in.
‘‘We had to spend a lot of time together in the tent. We had two tents for the five of us, but you all cram in one so you can have a conversation and we just talked a lot about it — you talk endlessly about the weather. By the ninth day we were just like, ‘Oh my god, we just have to go for it. Just try.’
‘‘We played that game 20 questions. We must have played that 100 times. And you just go crazy. You just laugh and laugh and laugh about nothing, about how terrible your situation is, and how you’ve paid thousands of dollars for it.
‘‘I guess that’s the main reason we went for it, I think we were all pretty sure it wasn’t going to happen — the summit — because of the weather, and the avalanche risk, and the depth of snow. All the snow. I think we just went for it, just so that we could say that we did.’’
But after three hours in the dark, struggling through deep snow, they knew it was not going to happen.
Mr Henehan had brought a Waitaki Boys’ High School flag he had hoped to fly from the summit.
Because of the remote location he had managed to send only one text from base camp from the team’s satellite text messager to his father.
‘‘‘Weather not looking good, all fine here.’ That was it. ‘Lots of love.’.’’
His partner, family and friends, were all hoping he would be making the ‘‘glorious return’’ he had hoped for, as well.
But reaching the peak proved impossible.
‘‘And then we just turned around and went home. Got home about 5am. Slept for a couple of hours and then walked back down.
‘‘We were all disappointed, we were all really disappointed. But we were all just trying to justify it to each other, help each other out.
‘‘There wasn’t anything we could have done differently, it was just the weather.’’