Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain, Jonathan Bloom [best ebook reader TXT] 📗

on the lip. But then the lip erratically drops from its greatest height of approximately 30, 121 feet down to its lowest point of 18,330 feet in the north. When one looks at Fumu from Everest in the north, one sees a peak in the distance with two ridges fanning out from it to the east and to the west. Then like a pair of curved staircases, the ridges come back around, descending toward you and downward, curving back toward each other, and ultimately they meet each other at the bottom to create the lowest point on the lip of the Icy Bellows. Many Nepalese Sherpa who have traveled in the high elevations north of Fumu call the mountain “The Childless Mother,” with the summit as her head and the two descending ridges as cradling arms holding nothing at all.

Although the main vent between the ridges has long been dead, that does not mean Fumu is dormant. Small eruptions like the one that killed Zach Hoover continue to occur from smaller vents along the ridgelines and especially at the summit. If the mountain were momentarily transparent, you would be able to see vents wending their way to and fro but always upward, some reaching the surface and others coming to dead ends of high pressure. Some of the veins reaching for the surface look bloody, swollen with lava, almost living, like leaves of red chard. Others carry only steam, water, and gases such as carbon dioxide and hydrochloric acid. Others hold nothing at all but darkness.

It is hard to think of a better metaphor for strength and immobility than a mountain. But in the case of Fumu, the metaphor breaks. Fumu is in motion from bottom to top. Running down between the spurs near her base are glaciers that can be heard by the human ear as they plod downward. Creaks and loud snapping sounds echo through crevasses, often accompanied by the sound of ponderous ice chunks dropping into subterranean water. Between the glaciers and at approximately the same elevation (10,000-12,000 feet) is the scree. Needless to say, the scree is no monument to stability. New chunks of fresh lava rock and pulverized granite tumble down the mountain to feed its size every day. And every day, older rocks tumble off of it into the glaciers to be slowly pulverized into oblivion. Above the scree one comes to the two main ridges on the north rising up to the summit on the south. The Icy Bellows between the ridges includes ever-moving snowdrifts, sloshing slowly from east to west like cold broth in a bowl on a boat in rough seas. The winds of the Bellows may be unpredictable, emanating up from the Earth via the Oculus and down from the heavens, but one can always depend on the snow drifts moving from one side of the bowl to the other in perfect, yearly cycles. On the other side of the summit, the South Face, opposite the Bellows, the mountain above the scree is comprised of snowfields. Climbing these is not difficult, except where the fields are interrupted by steep rock cliff. And then there is Rauff’s Maw, cleaving in half the route the Rauff expedition took. That route started at the bottom in the southeast and zigzagged up to meet the Eastern Ridge just before the summit. The fate of the Rauff expedition makes it clear that part of the mountain is also not at rest. Finally, there is the summit. So busy is this part of Fumu that it cannot be seen through plumes of grey smoke. Maps of the mountain assumed a perfectly pointed top for centuries. No one truly knew what the top looked like until the Hoyt and Junk expeditions.

Getting close enough to study the mountain has always been a source of difficulty. Forgetting the brutal challenges one must face in order to climb her, simply getting to Base Camp is nearly impossible. Like Nanda Devi, Fumu is ringed by four smaller but by no means small mountains. Most Europeans and Americans still call these mountains by the labels bestowed upon them by the Great Trigonometric Survey – H57, H58, H62, and H63 – but the locals call them Mitya, Abel, Lata, and Asha. Their names are as mysterious as that of Fumu. No in-depth investigation has been pursued. Each of the four peaks soars to heights ranging from 26,000 to 28,000 feet. They are connected by wall-like passes reaching more than two thirds of the peaks’ heights. Seen from nearby mountains like Ama Dablam, the effect on the human eye is that of looking at a castle or fort built for gods. This may be why the entire area is locally referred to as Qila, the Urdu word for ‘fort.’ The four peaks are the towers and the passes the outer curtain walls. The problem with this castle is there is no portcullis. The only way a human can even consider reasonably entering Qila is over a sixteen-thousand foot pass on the southern perimeter, aptly called the Qila Pass (also known as the Fumuri La to locals). The pass is shaped like a giant shoehorn, wide at the bottom, narrow at the top, and concave toward its center line the entirety of its length. It starts off gradually at roughly a forty-five degree angle; then it steepens, and by the top it takes the form of a chute rising consistently at a sixty degree angle. That pitch would be very possible for most technical climbers except the fifty-foot wide chute is made entirely of amethyst. The rare version of amethyst called ametrine is beautiful to behold. It is purple like most amethyst, but because of heating from volcanic activity, it is streaked with glittering yellow. In addition to being beautiful, the bumpy face is very hard and devoid of cracks. There is no purchase for climbing equipment. Countless men have tumbled to their deaths, tenderized while they fall on rough, rare stone, their twisted bodies