 The next talk of the day is starting now. It's Andy Vine, head of Tell Us How to Climb a Mountain. Okay, can everyone hear me all right? Yeah, good, good. Okay, so I'm gonna talk about two climbing expeditions. I've been on one in 2001, which was to India in the Himachal Pradesh. And the other was actually straight after the last EMF 2016. And we went to the Kulia region of Kyrgyzstan. First, I'm gonna say a little bit about how I got into a position to think that this was a good idea at all. So a lot of people come into mountaineering from either hill walking or rock climbing or a combination of both. So I did a combination of both. I did a lot of walking during my A-levels. I studied in Devon, so the 10-tools event was on there and I participated in that. And then at university I started rock climbing. And at the end of my first year, the club I was involved with was going to the Alps. So I went to the Alps, the Ekran region, which is still my favorite region and climbed up to about 4,000 meters, several mountains of Pulvoo and Alphard. And then at the end of my degree, because I'd been to the Alps every year, during my degree, I started thinking about an expedition. And that was made easier by the fact that there were other people in the club I was a member of that had done it before. And that's kind of how most people get into doing this sort of thing. They join a club and sort of follow that career path. So a friend from the club suggested India because the research was relatively easy and the infrastructure in India is a bit better than the rest of the Himalayas. So, next slide. Okay, so the reason that the research is a bit easier is because the Alpine Club, based in London, have an online database of all the mountains in the Himalayas that have been climbed, hopefully. All the ones they have records of. And they really do have extensive records and they've got a big library. So you're able to search a sort of latitude and longitude square and come up with all the reported climbs that have been reported in various Alpine journals. So, searching around, we were looking at this area and we found that the mountains on this side of the river, the sort of CB range, the CB and then a number, they'd all been climbed and reported. So we had an idea of what conditions you're like in the region. But on the other side of the river, there was nothing at all in this whole big area that had been climbed. And only this one mountain that had a name, Tagne. And on the previous map we had it was the highest in the region. But on this map, it's not quite as peak, 6250, unnamed peak, it's a little bit higher. This was the best map we managed to get hold of. Remember, this is back in 2001. So we tried to get hold of satellite images but we couldn't. And we went to the RGS and their maps were based on the 1800s survey of India by the British. So this map, which is better than the map that they had at the Indian Mountaineering Foundation in Delhi, we got out of Stamford's in Covent Garden. Really fantastic place, Stamford's, because you get the feeling that there are so many people going to interesting, exciting places that sort of pass through. And you never know where they're going. So I kind of like Stamford's for this. And also the fact that you used to be able to just go in and pull out of a drawer, a map of somewhere where nobody's ever climbed before. So yeah, we resolved to climb Tagne at being the only named peak in the area. And we called it the Tagne expedition. So this is us trekking in. We started on a pretty precarious bus journey actually over some big precipices with the tires right on the edge of the road. But eventually the roads deteriorated into paths and so we'd arranged to have ponies carry all our stuff. There's quite a lot of stuff as well. Climbing the Himalaya, you tend to end up with a bit of an entourage of a cook and various people to help him out. And it's a bit of an unusual way to climb if you're used to the Alps because it's just two of you there generally. Okay, just gonna say a bit about glaciers now. Forgive me if you already know this but I think it's worth saying. So obviously when the snow falls but it isn't cold enough to melt it, it sort of compacts into a big ice sheet. And then the ice sheet flows down the mountain like it acts as a viscous liquid moving very slowly, flowing down the mountain. But when it goes over a bulge the top of it goes into tension and that causes cracks and they're big cracks, crevasses. So it's always really important if you're on a glacier that's covered in snow that you stay roped up because the snow forms bridges which sometimes don't give way but in the afternoon when it gets hotter the bridges can give way and you can fall into the crevasses. So you've got to know how to get out and make sure you're roped up whenever you're on a wet glassy like this. It matters less when there's no snow on the glassy like this one in Kyrgyzstan. But I'll make reference to that later in the talk. So, okay, how well does that come out? Yeah, that's good. So this is Tagney, we made it there. We actually wrecked several different glaciers on the way there and worked out this was the best approach and our line was up the side of this ridge here. Rounds are here to the coal here and then up here over several rock steps and then a snow dome to the summit. And that's about 500 meters of height gain from our camp which was down here. So this is us high on the ridge. Our tent is just that little dot there and so we come up this ridge and around the amphitheater and you can see that the glassy is pretty impossible as well. The glasses can be quite dangerous if they're like this because bits can break off and ice can come down the mountain at you. So it's well worth avoiding them and staying on the ridge. This is Narendra Singh. He actually didn't come with us from England because in India you've got to pay to climb mountains. So he's a representative of the Indian government who's there to make sure that we only climb what we said we'd climb and we pay for everything that we climbed. Normally they send a guy from the military but we were really lucky. Narendra had his own trekking firm and he was a climber just like us. We had a very similar mindset and got on really well so he's climbing the mountain with me. And we got to the top in the end. And so here's the view from the top. Obviously this is the view no one's ever seen before apart from us at the time anyway. And here are the CB mountains from over the other side. They're bigger mountains so that people are more interested in climbing them. That's why that side had already been climbed. And this is me on the summit by pure coincidence on my 23rd birthday. So great way to spend my birthday. Okay, quick word about altitude. So I think most people know that the air gets thinner the higher you go but what's worth pointing out is that it's a really big effect. So this is a graph of altitude versus atmospheric pressure. And you can also see this as a graph of oxygen concentration because when you're down at sea level it's 100% but obviously as it drops the oxygen concentration compared to the baseline of what you're used to drops as well. So on the summit of Snowden about a thousand meters you've lost 10% of the oxygen that you're normally used to. On Mont Blanc, 4,800 meters, probably about 55% of what you're used to. And on Tagney, 6,111 meters down to well under 50%, probably like 47, 46%. And you really feel that it basically means you've got to rest a lot, you take a few steps and have a rest, breathe heavily. Obviously your body adapts to it so you breathe more deeply and your body produces more blood cells which you've got to be aware that can possibly be a risk of clotting. And also you've got to be aware to acclimatize really slowly which was why we did quite a long walk in for this trip. We didn't need to walk quite as far as we did but getting some exercise over 3,500 meters was really useful in making sure we were really well acclimatized on the day. So this is the other mountain that was climbed on that trip. I didn't climb this one, it was the other guys in the team. So Alan Geer, John Ellis and Steve Jolly summited, they went from our camp here all the way out the glacier and then all the way out this ridge which they were hoping would be a nice snowy ridge but turned out to be actually pretty rocky and quite difficult climbing. They spent 20 hours going from the tent up down back again and we're a bit worried about them and quite pleased to see head torches coming down the glacier quite late at night but it all worked out in the end. So at the end of the trip we made this map. It's pretty rough but you can see the important bits. This is where we made our base camp. Then we carried low to go back. Then we carried loads up to advanced base camp and then we wreckied these glaciers and climbed on Cigar and Tagney from the south and we identified some passes as well. So this is based on the Learman's map that you saw earlier, the ridge line map. The green is ridge lines but with a little bit more information from us. So that's India and now I'm going to talk about our Kyrgyzstan trip. So this part of the talk is adapted a little bit from a talk my climbing partner Miles gave. He couldn't make it here. So he thought mountaineering was a little bit like doing maths research. Unfortunately I'm not a mathematician so don't ask me any questions about maths. So okay. I'll tell you some of his thoughts and some of it I can back up with my own experiences in engineering research. So some questions that you can get quite a lot particularly if you're involved with maths is do you really do this for fun? And secondly, is it really possible to do new stuff? So yeah, there are plenty of unclimbed mountains left in the world. And probably if you follow this kind of thing a bit more you're aware of the people that are right at the cutting edge. The famous mountaineer is doing the really difficult routes. But actually there are plenty of mountains and plenty of interesting maths that are well-trained, mere mortal can approach and perhaps find solutions to. So once you've decided that this is a thing that's possible and you want to do it then you need to pick a general area. And in this case we pick Kyrgyzstan. Excuse me. So this is the sort of tail end of the Himalaya borders China and Kazakhstan. And it's good because there are no peak fees and it's quite well-developed as well. And there's lots of unclimbed mountains that aren't too difficult. Drawback is that the research for this area is really hard. So like research in other subjects you have to start with the literature review. And in this case it's all in Russian. So this was a bit of a barrier. But we did the best we could. And like other areas of research, it's kind of hard work. There's a lot of inconsistent notation, same names for different things, different names for the same things. And what was actually done can be quite poorly reported and it's quite difficult. But eventually we came up with an area that we were really interested in. The kindic valley, kindic glacier. And we identified some mountains we wanted to do. So this one right at the head of the valley, objective A, this one off to the side, objective C, objective D is there, objective B is there. Our base comes way back here and we're planning to carry loads about six kilometers up to the snout of the glacier and then make a camp there and from there we could do all the other mountains. So once you've decided what you want to do, you've got to raise some money. Again, a lot like research. So thanks to our sponsors. Mount Everest Foundation, Elite Mountain Supplies, Gather Foods, High-Five Sports Nutrition and RAP. Some provided equipment, some provided money. The Mount Everest Foundation is the one that's really worth having because they give you a lot of credibility if you can get approval from funding from them and also they'll help publicize you after the trip. So this is a bit I added. After you've done all that, then you want to get the snacks and supplies in whether it's research or mountaineering. So this is the good thing about Kyrgyzstan. This is a Kyrgyz supermarket and it looks almost exactly like a normal supermarket which is great because it makes shopping really easy. There's no complication involved and it kind of blew my mind a bit because a couple of days from this supermarket there are people herding sheep, nomads living in yurts and unclimbed mountains two days from here. So this is why Kyrgyzstan's brilliant. So quick word about what we eat. So the trick is to carry plenty of really dense, calorific food but it also has to be palatable as well. So one thing we went for quite a lot was the Thai curries because you can buy individual pastes, Thai curry paste sachets and then you can get this kind of block of coconut milk which looks like a bar of soap. And you just melt it down, add water, cook it up with pasta and dried mushrooms and some local dried meat and that's a pretty tasty meal. You get a lot of calories in you that way. Likewise, you can get pesto and individual sachets, cook it with pasta. Parmesan's really good, loads of fat, loads of protein and again, salami. So we're a bit sick of it by the end of the trip but it kept us alive and kept us moving. So next thing you obviously have to do is plenty of training. So again, like other research into new areas, you have to practice solutions to known problems so clients, other people have done before. So that's perhaps in the Dolomites or maybe in Scotland which is definitely cold enough to freeze your beard. And after all that, you can get to Kyrgyzstan and get into the mountains. So yeah, this was the first sort of, when we got out of the van, it had been raining, the rain cleared, got out of the 4x4 and had a good look around, it looked really amazing. This is Nikolai and Sergei, Nikolai was the driver and Sergei was the translator. So when you get stuck into the problem, you'll probably find other people already working in the field and it's really handy to have someone to translate what on earth it is they're saying and make some introductions and that was Sergei's job. I quite like the horse getting involved in this conversation. And at any stage in this, you may find something that you really weren't expecting at all. Like maybe camels. Yeah, that's a camel. I wasn't expecting to see camels. I don't know if you were expecting to see camels on a talk on mountaineering, but there were camels. So this is Beck who helped us out. So we're talking to those guys because we wanted some help getting our kit up the valley. And these shepherds have ponies, so we're hoping they could help us. Beck looks after 502 sheep, which he counts into the sheep pen every evening. And this is his mate, Talai, who helps him out with the sheep, with the shepherding. They live here. This is the hut that Beck's grandfather built. And before that, he'd lived in a yurt and it was really nice and cozy inside with this stove that was fueled on Animal Dung. It didn't smell weird or anything. It was great. Really cozy, sort of traditional felt on the floor. And their top tip was, if you've got black tea and jam, you can make fruit tea by adding them together. Brilliant. So the next day, we set off for the Kindic Valley. Now quite a lot of climbing areas have cool-sounding, hard names like Death Valley or the Nameless Valley. So we're walking along with Beck and the horses and he says, you know what Kindic is? It's this. So we've planned a trip to the Valley of the Belly Button. Oh well. So as we went, the ground got harder and we ended up leading the horses. Miles had some difficulty establishing a rapport with his horse because his horse just wanted to eat grass. But eventually we made it to a point where the horses couldn't go any further and we made our base camp, so our tents here. The reason I'm so excited is because I've worked out a way to stop all the marmots eating our food by hanging it off this big rock in the panniers that we borrowed for the horses. Um... So, ITMC are a company in Kyrgyzstan who helped us a lot and they're very keen for us to take a lot of kit with us that we didn't really feel we needed. So we said no to the mess tent and we said no to the folding chairs and we said no to the cutlery and crockery and all of that because we bring our own, it's all lightweight and that's great. But they insisted that we take a stove from them so they supplied us with this stove. Which is absolutely huge and has this massive gas bottle. My mountaineering stove is 125 grams and it's made of titanium and they gave us this. So... And on top of all that, this ring we couldn't turn on and this ring we couldn't turn off. So we had to turn it off at a gas bottle. It all felt pretty silly. But, you know, we managed the stove worked in the end. So... Then we carried quite a lot of kit up the valley and made our camp here just before the end of the glacier. And all the way up we could see this big mountain here which is Objective A. And incidentally this is the tentman, the actor that played tentman stayed in when he came to EMF. Yeah, we didn't see a lot of vegetation or animals. We saw some marmots. We didn't actually see any ibex but this is an ibex skull. It's a pretty big one. These big curved horns, serrated horns. So... There you go. So, all right, the climbing begins. This is Objective C and we started from the base camp, went across up the glacier through some crevasse fields up onto the ridge and then... along the ridge to the summit passed two or three places we thought might be the summit and then we kept seeing a higher one. But... Eventually we got there. And that's really good because once you've got one mountain done then you can say the expedition was a success and all your sponsors will be happy, hopefully. And so Miles said we should get some promotional shots for the sponsors. But he didn't think I was really taking this seriously enough. But actually the sponsors really liked this photo and retweeted it. OK, so... Remember I said before we can get satellite photos before? Well, things have moved on because now Google Maps is amazing. So this picture here is actually from Google Earth. And this is the real picture when we were there. And you can see it matches up pretty well. You've got this big snow face and this big triangular face. The plateau here matches this. The problem is the resolution because we were hoping to go up here in along this ridge and you can see from the reality one that it's a really pointy serrated jagged ridge and that would take us far too long. It was just more difficult than we really wanted to do on this trip. It didn't show up at all on the Google Maps image. So I guess that's a way that climbing is like research as well. You find things that you just didn't expect. Sometimes things are harder than you thought. Likewise, we were hoping that we'd be able to... Next mountain objective A, we're hoping we'd be able to come up this easy ridge and climb over this rock bulge and then make it to the summit. But this turned out to be a bit more difficult as well. So this picture of Miles harmed the ridge. He climbed further on from here up some quite poor snow. He made it to the top of that rock bulge I just showed you. But we couldn't get any further without committing to an abseil where we'd have to pull the rope down. And then we wouldn't be able to go back the same way. We'd be committed to finding another way down. We didn't fancy that. So since the weather was coming in as well, we retreated off it to try and find a better way. And setbacks like that should be treated with food and tea. Fruit tea, yeah, why not, if you've got some jam. So okay, this was our successful approach on objective A. We're a bit concerned about this steep face here, but it turned out to be fine. So up the glass here, up that face, and then it's just a really nice ridge walk on the snow all the way up to the summit. So yeah, sometimes you try and approach, it doesn't work out, you have to go back to the start. And then when you try the right approach, everything seems so much easier. And that's me on the summit. Obviously we had to take turns taking pictures on the summit. But there's a selfie of us both there. Okay, so the last climbing day, we decided to have a go at this peak, which was just before that jagged ridge. The jagged ridge goes off behind this. So this was the highest point we could get to without committing to that quite unpleasant ridge. So we came up the glacier here, and then went up this ridge, which is probably a bit longer than it looks on this because it's a bit for shortens, and eventually made it to the summit. That was really good. So then we came back down and came back down to the coal here. So you have to get up really early because the snow is frozen then. And it makes it a lot easier if the snow is frozen, mainly because rocks won't be coming down the mountain at you. So when we got back to this point, it was about nine o'clock. And Mars said that he thought we should do something else because he felt like he wanted to do something with his day. And I said, Miles, you've just made the first descent of a previously on climb mountain, the Chen Shan, and you're saying you want to do something with your day. Okay, we'll go along the ridge. So we went along the ridge. So we went all the way along here. This turns out to be a really nice ridge walk. You get these pillars along the ridge that are sometimes called gendarmes. And the first one was sort of white marble. And then the next one was black, nice. And then we got to this bit where it was these weird bands on the ground. It looks like we've raked this out, but I promise it was like this when we got there. I've never seen anything like this. If someone can explain what's going on here, I'd be really interesting, but I really like it. And so, once you get to the end from a new perspective, you'll be able to see other objectives that look really interesting and you might want to try. So all of the mountains in this picture haven't been climbed as far as we know. This is the Arroy Valley. It's the one just over from us and we're looking in from that ridge. And I didn't want to ask what Arroy means. And this mountain looks particularly nice and accessible with all the multicolored scree again, but looks like it wouldn't be too hard. So on the day we arranged, Beck showed up with his horses and the horse pulled this weird face and I put it in the presentation. Yeah, that all worked out really well. Beck took us home. So at this point, you probably want to crack on with those new objectives, but you can't do that because you've got to write it up. And this is the point. This is your opportunity to correct all those horrible reports which weren't clear enough and you have to put everything down as clearly as you possibly can. And so that other people who come to this area after you will be able to have a more pleasant time when they do their literature search. And it's normally at this point where you find the one reference that would have been really helpful at the start of this whole process. So Vladimir Komisarov is a sort of big name in Russian climbing. He runs the Kyrgyz Alpine Club. He used to be a master of climbing in the Soviet days. And he put this map together for us, which is really handy, but at the end of the expedition. So you can see that we've added in the mountains that we climbed, but I mean, you know, if you're planning a trip to this area, this is what you want to see. And he was able to research the Russian internet as well because he's Russian. Okay, that's nearly the end, but I've got five tips for camping in a small tent. I've realized actually camping in a big tent is a slightly different set of problems. But yeah, if you're camping in a small tent, this is what I recommend. Number one, at night use a head torch, but dip it down when you talk to people, just like car headlights, because otherwise they'll get a light in their face. Number two, when cooking, if you can use a pan with fins on the bottom, because it's a lot quicker to boil that way, and you'll save weight in the fuel if you're carrying it. And obviously use a windshield and a lid and make the windshield out of one of those foil catering trays. Don't buy one, no one does that. Use a tent loft for storage, drying and watching TV. So this is the top of the tent. It's just a bit of mesh fabric, and you can put stuff up there you want to dry. Or if you want, you can put your phone up there, lie back and watch Doctor Who at Base Camp like we did. LAUGHTER Bring 10 lighters, because lighters always go wrong, and the further you are from home, the more important this is. And if you camp somewhere rocky, don't worry about pushing the tent pegs into the rocks, into the rocky ground, find some big rocks, loot the guidelines around them, and peg the tent out that way. No problem at all. OK, that's all. Do you have time for some questions? So what sort of particular kind of skills would you say are particularly important? I don't know, coming from small expeditions, maybe a little bit since Scotland, to then going on a kind of more significant expedition like that, what sort of thing would you say is kind of the most important that you kind of built up over that process? I'd say... Am I still Mike? Yeah? Yeah, I'd say it's important to get somewhere where there are some glaciers. I'd probably recommend going to the Alps if you're familiar with Scotland. The weather's a lot better, so you'll have a great time. But yeah, go to the Alps if somebody knows what they're doing. Once you've had three seasons in the Alps or so, then you're good to look at the greater ranges. And Kyrgyzstan's probably a good place to go for your first expedition. It was Mars' first expedition, and neither of us had any problem with the technical difficulties. Especially now you can identify the mountains so well with Google Earth. Is that what you want to say? Yeah, great, thanks. OK, let's give him another round of applause. Oh, sorry. More questions? Hi, I was just wondering what you used in terms of safety comms equipment like Aridium phones or E-Pirbs or anything like that, or if you just didn't bother? That's a good question. Yeah, so we hired sat-phones from ITMC. Never hire a sat-phone, ever. Don't anyone ever do this. What you need to do is buy the sat-phone and then sell it after the expedition. Because that gives you a chance to get really used to it. Make sure you've got the right charging cable, which we didn't. LAUGHTER And make sure you can actually use it. It was a real problem. We ended up sort of on text only and having to really conserve the battery just in case we really needed it to call for help. So yeah, we did use some, probably not good enough, sat-phones, so I recommend buying one. Did you get to name the mountains? Yes. So the way... Kind of. The way you name a mountain is you start using a name for an unnamed mountain and hope it catches on. LAUGHTER So, Sagar, the second one we climbed in India that was unnamed, that means ocean in the local land, Hindi. And that's because it was this sort of rippling ridge all the way up. The ones in Kyrgyzstan we got translated into Russian. Objective A we called crowpeak, because there were bird footprints on the summit. Objective B, I can't... Sorry, we didn't climb object to be... Objective C I can't remember, but then the last two we climbed, we called camelpeak and marmotpeak. LAUGHTER Because the things we'd seen on the way. Any more? How much weight did you lose by doing this? We didn't actually lose that much weight on the Kyrgyzstan trip. On the India trip, we all lost a ton of weight. It was really noticeable in the photo. They were like, whoa, this guy's looking a bit skinny now. And actually, the trawlers I bought, the waterproof trousers I bought, they arrived the day before we went, and I thought they were a bit tight by the end of the trip. It was like, no, these are nice and comfy now. The Kyrgyzstan trip, we were fine until we got off the mountain. And then we went to this restaurant where we had a big pie thing with a pastry yurt over the top. And that made Miles really, really ill, and he lost a huge amount of weight at the end of the trip. But yeah, we kept our weight all right, mostly on the Kyrgyzstan trip. We had a lot of energy bars with us, too, from high-five, so that was quite good. What are you going to climb next? I'm not quite sure, and now's a good time to be thinking about it because the MEF have their deadline at the end of the year, so I've got to work out if I'm going to do another big trip or not. There is a mountain in the pool, which I really like the look of. We're calling it nice ridge at the moment because it's steep on three sides, and then it has a really nice ridge going up to the top. I think that'd be a fantastic climb, but that's just an aspiration at the moment. Cool, so thank you very much.