Darkness turned to gray, and the first victims of mountain sickness appeared out of the gloom. A lone mountaineer trudged past me down the slope, his face bile-green, his summit attempt clearly over.
At 5,000m we took a longer rest stop. Zhenya lit a cigarette that took an age to burn at this height and gave us an opportunity to rehydrate, refuel with jelly babies and admire the view in the first light. Low pressure at altitude acts as a lens, making mountains zoom in closer than they really are. We were now above the ridges of snaggle-tooth peaks that stretch out in a chain for 1,200km from the Black Sea to the Caspian. Our base camp at the Priut-11 refuge was just a tiny fleck.
Pasha and the five others caught up with us on the traverse, a single track that runs around the lower east summit towards the saddle, the dip between the twin peaks. Although it’s not steep — about a 25 percent gradient — it’s very precipitous with sheer drops on either side of the track. One false footing here could have sent me skidding down the glacier into a crevasse — just one of many ways that takes the lives of an average of 12 climbers a year.
It was after 10am when we left our backpacks at the saddle for the final section. Without my pack I felt liberated. In my mind, I was fleet of foot and wanted to stride ahead. In reality, I was probably as ashen and wobbly as the others. But I was in the grip of summit fever, the euphoria caused by high altitude that endangers climbers with exuberant confidence, and it pulled me up the steepest incline.
We passed a final spur and the mountain opened up across a wide snowfield towards the summit: a small pyramid of white. Summit fever seized everyone, Simon forgot his fatigue, Myles got color back in his cheeks and Colin shouted at an American trying to urinate upwind from us.
Pasha called us to a halt. “Felicity, ladies first,” he cried, inviting me to take the lead for the first time. After 14 years of waiting, I counted every step — 15 — before I got to the top and I became, for 20 all-too-short minutes, the highest woman in Europe.
Pasha hurried us off the summit. The weather was closing in and cloud rapidly envelopes the mountain.
After an overnight stop at Azau, we rewarded ourselves with a few days in the spa town of Kislovodsk, where Russian aristocracy flocked in the 19th century to cure everything from heart disease to depression. As I soaked my aching muscles in a “Narzan bath” of hot, fizzy mineral water I pondered my next summit.
The nine-day trip was organized through the Russian-based Extreme Group (www.extremegroup.ru). The best time of the year to go is June through August.
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