Marble Wall Expedition (6400m)

(click on pictures to see larger images)

We went to climb Marble Wall (6400m) in July 2002. This expedition was a Joint Asian Expedition organised by the Kazakstan Mountaineering Federation under the auspices of the Union of Asian Alpine Association. The expedition team consist of 4 Singaporeans - myself as expedition leader, Paul Leong from our club,  Rajiv and Jason who were new comers. I had a Russian Professor Victor joined us from Moscow, and we also had two lovely young ladies from the local Kazak mountaineering body - Gula and Marshall plus Vadim, our mountain guide.

Picture on the right shows the big Russion MI-17 helicopter that brought us directly to basecamp (3200m) within 45 minutes of leaving the lovely meadows of Karkara where Mr, Kazbek's Kentengri Mountain Service is based. Basecamp is very comfortable with a large dining tent, excellent food and running water.

Picture shows Marble Wall Peak dominating the sky line just beyond the glacier which flows down from the mountain. Here we are enroute to Advance Base Camp (4200m). On the first sortie, we took 9 hours of hard trekking and climbing to get to ABC. The route up the mountain is on the prominent rib that you see on the right side of this picture. Steep climbing on loose rock makes it an exciting and taxing climb.

Finally we are at ABC with a spectacular view of the higher part of the mountain. There is still a bit of ground that was not covered by snow near the edge of the ridge on which we could setup all our tents. The climb was actually done in two sorties. In the first attempt, we took 5 days to go up to Camp I before returning to basecamp. After a rest of 4 days, we make our second and final attempt, taking 6 days in all to reach the top and return. This is necessary to allow the body to gradually adjust to the high altitude and also have a chance to recover from the strenuous climbing.

From ABC it is another tough 6-7 hours of climbing on snow, often steep and very soft to get to Camp I which you see here. Fixed ropes were fixed on the steep climb up to the ridge. Camp I is situated at the base of a very long ridge which we have then got to climb to get to Camp II which is the summit camp. 

A long ridge climb, which gets increasingly steep and on mixed ground brings us to Camp II situated at altitude of 6000m. From this Camp site you can see spectacular views of the Tien Shan Range including the famous and beautiful peak of Kantengri (6995m).  Fixed ropes were used in some of the steeper parts of the climb.

We did not have good weather on summit day as you can see from these pictures. It took us six hours to get to the top and another six tough hours fighting the storm and strong winds to get back to Camp II. The climb to the summit was very interesting as there were several steep traverses we had to cross and some steep mixed ground to climb. We roped up for protection in these more exposed places.
During the descend, the storm resulted in  white-out conditions and heavy snow-fall. Very often we were up to our knees in snow and it was a real struggle to down climb. I suffered from numb fingers for several weeks after the expedition due to the wet and cold conditions.

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