Laila Peak (In): Man's Search for Meaning

For: Sebastián Álvaro (text and photos)
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The Laila Peak is the best answer to all those who ask me the reason for my tenacious fascination for Karakorum. For those who love the mountains, Watching this impressive fang of ice and rock rise is an incomparable experience.. You fall in love with mountains like this the same way you fall in love with a woman, for its beauty, for its powerful attraction that only causes mystery, for its apparent inaccessibility, Why do you close your eyes and only think of them?, because, beyond, It is a provocative and exciting challenge. His unmistakable profile, sharp as a knife blade, stands out defiantly over the Karakorum skyline, nailed above the clouds, stirring the imagination of mountaineers.

When a friend proposes you to climb a mountain like this you are lost, because you have no choice but to say yes and follow the command of your heart, in that hidden section, apart from the reasons of the reason that, as Pascal said, sometimes we don't understand.

For those who love the mountains, Watching this impressive fang of ice and rock rise is an incomparable experience.

with some of these friends, as Ramon Portilla and Juanjo San Sebastián, I have more than 30 years sharing adventures and misadventures, many more than the vast majority of marriages can bear. We have stumbled all over the planet living extraordinary moments, good or bad, but always extraordinary.

We have embraced on the highest mountain in Antarctica, sheltered in a tent in the middle of a storm in Patagonia, Tibet or the Himalayas and past cold, heat and thirst in as many remote places, and we have cried hugging enduring the pain of losing many close friends in these years. Our petates are worn out by more than a hundred expeditions and the unmistakable smell of the porters of the Baltistan and in our hearts we have more scars than the old soldiers of the Thirds of Flanders, and yet, Nonetheless, we have not put armor on it.

When a friend proposes you to climb a mountain like this you are lost, because you have no choice but to say yes

Life has been lavish on us with immense joys, for which we had to pay, but it has not spared us sadness and bitterness. To Juanjo, a mountaineer with the soul of a poet and the face of a boxer, he is missing seven fingers for staying next to his partner Come on in a dramatic drop in K2. Ramon, a boy who exchanged the mountain for a fatal destiny that would have led him to be a magnificent butcher or a boring notary's assistant, still limping from his fall in the Alps, where he was about to die, and the three together several more times, in Morocco, New Zealand, the Himalayas or the Karakorum.

But despite all this, the Fortune, chance or destiny has allowed us to stay together; sometimes it is not convenient to ask many questions about why we are still alive when everything indicates that we should have left this world a long time ago. we just got luckier. Although we argue vehemently and have very different characters, we have in common that our hearts have not hardened, neither with time nor with the disappointments with which, inevitably, life shakes you.

Sometimes it is not convenient to ask many questions about why we are still alive when everything indicates that we should have left this world a long time ago

According to Juanjo, we are naive who continue to believe, despite so many disappointments, in the kindness of people and in the certainty that friendship and loyalty are more important tools than "friends", climbing shoes or ice axes to climb mountains... and also to walk through life.
Perhaps that is why we continue together sharing the intense emotions that these places on the edge of the world offer us., beyond the control and domestication of man.

It is likely that we have become a kind of outcast from routine life, because we flee from the crowds and take refuge looking for those last spaces of exclusivity, beauty and loneliness, where you can still breathe the scent of great adventures.

We flee from the crowds and take refuge looking for those last spaces of exclusivity, beauty and solitude where you can still breathe the scent of great adventures

There was a time when everyone was well: grandiose, wild, nice, bleak. The world before and after man. Places where you feel like you're seeing Earth for the first time. Where you're always passing, where are tiny and vulnerable, where only be assumed, often, risking life. Everything about them is unconscionable: light, distances, loneliness, the silence, their storms. Your great beauty. In the Karakorum you must also add the altitude, where you breathe that light air, that barely feeds the body but enriches our imagination, as, as well wrote Shakespeare, we are of the same substance of dreams.

They are places that reject and harass you with all their might., that many. but that always, and despite everything that we have left in them, it was worth it to go through them. They are an essential part of my inner landscape. For me is the beauty of the world, the silence, the loneliness of the world. I am the sum of them all, because, ultimately, we are the sum of what we live and what we love.

Those places that reject and harass you with all their might are for me the beauty of the world., the silence, the loneliness of the world

That was the reason why I embarked on an expedition, in risky appearance, exposed and crazy, heading to the wildest heart of the Karakorum, whose objective was to reach the summit of Laila Peak located about 6.250 meters, with a light style and in winter, something no one had even tried before. Actually, only three expeditions had achieved the Laila (apparently the meaning of "beautiful" in Arabic), which gives an idea of ​​the complexity involved in stepping on its top. But if I went, I did it essentially because of its beauty.. It is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful mountains in the world., a perfect pyramid that all children would paint and the one that all mountaineers dream of.

We knew that the technical difficulties would be increased by temperatures below 20º below zero in the base camp and below the – 40C. at the top of the mountain. Addition, we had "cheated" José Manuel Fernández, who had already participated with Ramón in another expedition to Laila, Alvaro Corrochano, Alex Txikon, Mariano Left and David Pérez, all of them good friends of the three.

The Laila is one of the most beautiful mountains in the world, a perfect pyramid that all children would paint

No one had fooled us about it. The eight friends were convinced that we were going to be very cold and that we were getting into a big mess. But winter climbs like this are the ones that are defining the path of mountaineering at the highest level today., who seeks to measure himself on a more difficult pitch, exposed and risky. It is the last frontier of mountaineering.

We knew that the margin of error, already small in summer, it is practically nil with a light style and in the dead of winter. The latest experiences in the Karakorum winter are dramatically resounding; the previous year Alex Txikon had lost three companions in the Hidden Peak and this same winter, two of the four Poles who managed to reach the top in the Broad Peak They did not return to base camp alive. That is the degree of exposure of a winter climb in this place. As you can see, also, all very far from the orthodoxy of commercial expeditions, oxygen bottles and fixed ropes so fashionable today in some mountains like the Everest.

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Comments (1)

  • Raul Garcia

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    I liked reading you Sebastian. Although I don't think I'm at your climbing difficulty level, I reflect myself with practically everything you have written. A pity about the commercial ascensions, there are fewer and fewer places that are not accessible by anyone. The mountains should be for those who respect them and do not try to make money with them taking people who do not even know where they are going in most cases.

    Greetings!

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