Waterford’s Adam Sweeney reflects on rocky start to Everest expedition as he braces for summit push
"We're all happy now, healthy, fit and ready to go, which is amazing," said Adam Sweeney.
Becoming the youngest Irish person to summit Mount Everest was never going to be easy. But of all the years to tackle one of mankind’s enduring challenges, this was one of the worst.
22-year-old Adam Sweeney spoke to the at Mount Everest base camp, connecting to a Starlink satellite. The Waterford native is currently tackling the world’s highest mountain with three other Irish mountaineers.
The quartet landed in Nepal in early April, planning to beat the long queues lining up to tackle Everest in peak season. An unprecedented ice block further up the mountain stymied progress.
“It's never been like this in 20 years…this time last year, they were well fixed for the summit, we were looking at a week ago, they hadn't even gone into the icefall because it's too dangerous," Sweeney said.
“It was real bizarre this year…that's kind of the luck of it. It's a moving kind of river, the ice block, so it kind of moves every day.”
Sweeney estimates there are about 900 people on the mountain who have their ascents postponed because of the daunting glacial block, known as a serac.
The serac hovered over the Khumbu Icefall, a key route to the summit.
The expert fixing team that is the first to scale the mountain each year - leaving ropes and aluminium ladders for prospective climbers in their wake - opened the icefall route on April 29.
“The serac has multiple cracks and may collapse at any time. SPCC (Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee) strongly urges all expedition operators and climbers to exercise extreme caution,” a statement from the team said.
The serac has forced a change in strategy. In Everest, as Sweeney explains, the key is handling the wafer-thin oxygen levels, constantly rotating between higher altitudes for adaptation and lower levels to recover.
His team decided to traverse to Lobuche, another peak on the mountain (around 6,100m high) that would help build their aerobic capacity.
They returned to Everest base camp, spending another two weeks there before they were forced to drop in altitude as the seemingly impenetrable serac prevented access to the higher resting camps.
The serac has now been partially cleared. It’s now or never.
“We have a chance at least. A week or two ago, we were thinking, ‘is this thing going to open?’ It would have been a tough pill to swallow to come home without at least having an attempt at it, with everyone feeling so strong… we're all happy now, healthy, fit, and ready to go, which is amazing.”
The plan is to go for the summit on May 18-20, a day behind the Everest fixing team.
As well as becoming the youngest Irish person to summit Everest, Sweeney’s team would be the first all-Irish crew to summit Everest in more than 20 years. History beckons.
