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We leave base camp at 3:30 am. Not out of heroics, but because the Icefall is never safer than when it is cold. As soon as the sun reaches the seracs the ice softens, and the blocks above the route start moving again.
Six hundred metres of moving river
The Khumbu Glacier drops about six hundred metres between base camp and Camp I, and it does so by breaking apart. The route through it changes every season, sometimes every week. The Icefall Doctors — a team of Sherpa specialists — fix it before the first expeditions arrive and repair it all season long.
The ladders
Aluminium ladders, lashed end to end, bridge the crevasses. You clip into the fixed ropes on each side and cross in crampons, front points on the rungs. The first one is the hardest. By the fortieth, you are thinking about your breathing rather than the drop.
What I watch for in a client here is not fear — everyone is afraid on the first rotation — but rhythm. Someone who finds a steady rhythm in the Icefall will find one on the Lhotse Face.