This week’s dream: an adventure on Europe’s highest peak
Ski mountaineering is pretty much what it sounds like: a punishing climb followed by a hair-raising descent. And to attempt it on Europe’s highest peak takes a special kind of “thrill seeker”, says Simon Akam in the Financial Times. Mount Elbrus, on the edge of the Caucasus in southern Russia, is 800 metres taller than Mont Blanc. Although it’s not a technically difficult climb, this is “a big, wild mountain, prone to high winds and ferocious cold”. Most climbers tackle it from the south, where ski lifts and snowcats ease the path to the top. But “purists” take the northern approach: it’s “wilder and more beautiful, but you have to walk, or ski, every step of the way”.
The adventure begins from a base camp at 2,500 metres, with an “acclimatisation phase”, in which the group climbs by day then “retreats” to camp to sleep. The full ascent takes some seven days and the risk of altitude sickness or death by avalanche is ever present as you move up the mountain’s series of huts. There is also “deterioration”: headaches are common, and lips and skin “crack and blister”. In the “toothy peaks” of the Caucasus, you’re in a hostile world.
On the final push to the top, the group sets off around midnight and inches up the glacier “by the light of head torches”. The cold is intense and nausea may well set in – the final steps to the 5,642-metre summit feel like “walking underwater”. Getting down again is “complex”, but as you lose altitude “the air tangibly thickens” and “nausea evaporates”. Suddenly, it’s utterly “magnificent” and you’re covering ground with “thrilling speed”. Then, by 11.30am, it’s all over: you’re back at camp, exhilarated and spent, having completed one of the “most demanding” challenges you’ll ever attempt, where danger and hardship go “hand in hand with the sublime”. Jagged Globe (www.jagged-globe.co.uk) has a 12-day Elbrus trip from £1,995pp, and Aeroflot (www.aeroflot. com) flies from London to Mineralnye Vody from £320 return.