Everest diaries: Johnny Ward reaches summit after 'brutal' climb

Galway-born Johnny Ward is documenting his 50-day journey to the top of Everest, the highest mountain peak in the world, weekly on irishexaminer.com.

Johnny Ward takes a selfie on the last leg of his journey up the highest mountain in the world

I did it. I summited Everest.

I’m absolutely wrecked — I just got a helicopter from base camp to a small village, and then to another village where we got stuck due to fog — but we’re finally in Kathmandu. I also have frostbite on the side of my face.

We did the summit push over six/seven days, we went up through the Khumbu icefall again where we’d been before during various rotations. That felt alright, to be honest — I felt strong. 

I went up it pretty fast, four hours or so, and we slept at camp one which isn’t the best camp, snow etc, everywhere. Then we went to camp 2, which is a really easy day. We slept there and the next day we went to camp 3, and that goes alongside something called the Lhotse face — Lhotse is a mountain to the South of Everest measuring 7,600 meters.

Camp 3 is half way up Lhotse face, and almost like a vertical glacier — you’re just going up a fixed rope and it’s fucking brutal. I felt really strong all during the expedition but that day completely wiped me out. The camp itself is literally dug into the glacier so you can’t really relax as you’re hanging off the side of a glacier at some weird angle, your tents at a weird angle, you’re sleeping at a weird angle and if you came out of your tent and took a wrong step then you’d fall down the mountain. The day was shit, it took us eight hours or something.

Also, that’s the day you got to start using oxygen. I get quite claustrophobic so the mask freaked me out to the extent I didn’t wear it for the first half of the day even though everyone else was. I got to 7000 and I was struggling for oxygen so I reluctantly put it on, then I was half breathing in the oxygen, but half taking it off as I felt that claustrophobic. 

Johnny Ward and friend with oxygen masks during final Everest summit

That night at camp everyone sleeps with oxygen — but I couldn’t. I can’t sleep with an oxygen mask so I tried to sleep without it which fucked me a bit (of course!). At 5am the next morning we moved from 3 to 4, which is high camp. That was also straight up the Lhotse face — up to about 8000 meters, the death zone. 

Our team is pretty strong — we were hoping to do it in five, six or seven hours, but we ended up taking about nine hours in the freezing cold due to other people's ill preparations (to put it mildly!). We were freezing, tired and had to wait. When you’re stuck, you’re practically vertical, so we were basically hanging off the mountain.

It was so dangerous as the people that weren’t prepared were taking ten minutes or more to do something that should take a minute maximum (change ropes). That was happening every 20 minutes — that was pretty sketchy. Things improved once we got to camp 4, just over 8000. 

Camp 4 is a desolate wasteland just at the foot of the summit. We settled there at around 4pm, normally if you are a strong team you leave around 9pm and climb all throughout the night, but because we didn’t want to get caught up with the people that caused the problem from camp 3 to camp 4, we changed plans and left camp at 2am, a lot later. 

We started the summit push and within an hour we caught up with the people that we were behind from camp 3 to camp 4. We were stuck behind them at this famous place they call the balcony. It was infuriating, I actually got frostbite on my cheek and chin because we couldn’t get past them and the wind is just whipping you… brutal!

At the balcony there’s a place where you can change your oxygen bottle, there were loads of people standing there, so we couldn’t get across to the flat bit to change our oxygen. We were stuck on our ropes and the weather turned really bad — winds of 50/60 km p/h. That’s how I got frostbite. I could feel it burning my face. In the end, I had to say to them “get down the mountain or move on”. I changed the oxygen bottle and carried on. 

Johnny Ward has summitted Everest

It took about five hours to get to the balcony and it took another five hours to get to the summit. Then we went past famous places like the hillary step and the summit ridge. The ridge is less than a meter and there’s like 20 people coming back and forth, you can just fall off of it. There was an Irish guy called Seamus who died after falling off the ridge in 2019. That was on the forefront of my mind the whole time. He died after the summit, so even after I summited, I was still so scared of death. 

We went across the summit ridge which took ages, and I ran out of oxygen on the summit ridge which is scary as fuck, but thankfully Furtenback Adventures are always prepared and one of the Sherpas had an extra bottle of oxygen that I was able to use.

Then we went to the summit which was cool, very emotional, obviously ten years in the making and cost a fortune and I trained so hard for it — so that was tough emotionally but in a beautiful way, it felt really good. 

It felt like I earned the right to be at the summit.

I only spent 15 mins there as heights still scare me, you can’t really see it in the videos but there are sheer drops at each side which is so scary. I took a video there, took a few photos and tried to soak up what I achieved. 

We went back down the summit ridge and I saw a dead body from a few years before which was harrowing. 

We went back down to camp 4, rested for a few hours and then all the way down to camp 3 and camp 2 which was a mission considering we’d been going for over 20 hours. On the way down there was a Nepalese guy who had ran out of oxygen and died. He was just hanging off a rope by the Lhotse face. Someone covered his face with a tshirt. That was heavy. 

We got to camp 2 at 11 or so, and slept for 3 hours on the rocks. It was brutal. Back up again at 4am to go through Khumbu icefall and then around breakfast time we got into Base Camp and tried to get drunk but I was just so wrecked, I was like a zombie. 

This morning, I took a helicopter out. I am currently trying to process it all — and recover from this frostbite.

Thank you

Thanks to everyone for reading along with my digital diaries, it helped keep me occupied while I was stuck at base camp. A huge thank you to Vickie Maye for organising this, and to Denise O’Donoghue and Mary Cate Smith for writing about my wild adventure.

There’s one thing I want to touch on briefly and that's the tough job single mothers have in our world. Kids growing up without fathers, mothers struggling day to day to keep the lights on.

Thank you for what you do. Don’t give up on the kid. Don’t let the kid use it as an excuse to limit themselves. Through love and emotional support, the sky's the limit. Maybe even 8848 metres of it. 

A massive thanks to my mum, my wife and my friendship group. And also to Lukas Furtenbach for believing I could do this. And to you, reading along each week.