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Altitude has stolen my ability to sleep. In the rarefied air, my heart compensates by beating faster and harder – a panic attack that never ends. For the second night running, I lie awake in a state of frustrated semi-consciousness fighting back intermittent waves of nausea. The anxiety isn’t helping matters any. I’m 4,400m up the highest mountain in the Middle East and soon our expedition party of seven – five adventuresome Brits and two local guides – will begin our attempt to reach its summit, still another 1,300m above.
At road’s end, 3,000m above sea level, we transferred our gear from truck to mule and set off on foot, following the trail up the mountain’s northern face and round a pair of huge swellings in the earth, produced millennia ago by an upsurge of geothermic pressure. “You see those two big humps? We call those ‘Khayeh Damavand’ – Damavand’s balls,” said our diminutive head guide Mohammed, pointing at his crotch unnecessarily. The mountain is a product of the earth-moving energy that exists at the junction of the Arabian and Eurasian plates. For Damavand is a volcano, the highest in Asia at 5,671m above sea level. Mercifully, it hasn’t been active for 10,000 years. Later that evening, we ate a dinner of rice and barberries and watched Damavand disappear beneath an ocean of cloud, which enshrouded the lesser peaks of the Alborz and lapped the edges of the natural plateau on which we’d established camp. It was all a far cry from Tehran, just 66km to the southwest. But it’s this proximity to the capital that brought us here, following in the wake of the many thousands of Tehranis who regularly seek refuge in these hills to escape the heat and smog of the city.
When we finally rise at 4.30am, the conditions are good. I force down a glucose-heavy breakfast and stumble outside, where Mohammed and his colleague Nasir explain the route we are to take, vaguely delineated by a faint path snaking up a pumice-strewn ridge known as the Takht-e Fereydun – Fereydun’s throne. In the Shahnameh, the poet Ferdowsi’s epic distillation of Persian folklore, Damavand was where the hero Fereydun overthrew the evil king Zahhak, who is said to have fed his serpents with the brains of two men every day. Fereydun imprisoned the tyrant within the mountain and usurped his crown, going on to rule for 500 years. For us there is somewhat less at stake – just vainglorious egogratification – but it feels like a big deal; no one wants to fail now we’ve come this far. We start up the ridge with the sun rising at our backs. Barely visible against a carapace of wispy cloud, a gate can be seen ahead, a gap between two rocky outcrops through which lies the summit. The overland distance to the top is a little under 10km, but it will take an age. For the next six hours we are utterly at the mercy of the fickle mountain conditions. The weather on Damavand can be deadly. In 1971, the great climber Reinhold Messner was forced to turn his back on the summit after a storm threatened to sweep him from the same slope I’m walking, very slowly, on. Henceforth, Messner would describe Damavand as “that little hill that defeated me”. Three conversation-less hours of plodding later and the digital display on Nasir’s GPS has flickered past 5,000m. Halfway. Next to the altimeter, the barometric pressure is plummeting as the weather, so promising at daybreak, rapidly deteriorates. With the gate now obscured behind a brooding mass of slate-coloured cumulus, we plough on through groin-deep snow, with heads down in deference to the eye-watering headwind.
Now, we are standing on top of an icon. The country spreads out in every direction. I can’t see any of it, of course – the cloud has seen to that. But I know that, far below us, people are drinking from bottles of ‘Damavand’ brand mineral water, purchased with 10,000 rial banknotes decorated with a monochrome image of the snow-streaked mountain. Turning our backs on the roof of the Middle East, we begin the long journey back to rejoin them. www.mountainzone.ir |
Sore-footed and sleep-deprived, Henry Wismayer somehow stumbles to the peak of Mount Damavand, Asia’s largest volcano 
Two days earlier, as we passed beneath the rusty iron gateway of Nandel village and bade a temporary farewell to civilisation, there was little clue of the tribulations to come. Huddled into the back of a flatbed truck, we bounced along dirt roads over an idyllic landscape: a wide and wind-ravaged steppe teeming with insects and wild flowers and studded with ramshackle farming settlements. From down here, the huge pyramid of Mount Damavand looked to belong to another world; the point around which life in the Alborz Mountains ebbed and flowed.
The following morning, after a fitful night’s rest, we continued uphill enveloped in the clouds. By mid-afternoon we had stumbled into the musty sanctuary of the mountain refuge – effectively base camp – in which I now find myself insomniac. Damavand is what’s known as a ‘non-technical trekking peak’, so straightforward a climb that the English gentleman adventurer W Taylor Thompson achieved the first recorded ascent way back in 1837, in the days when mountaineers still wore tweed. However, this is no place for the complacent. The distance from Nandel to this point is only 30km – but the need for gradual acclimatisation has been crucial; people die here every year, most of them victims of acute mountain sickness brought on by altitude, the mountaineer’s bête noire.
Towards the summit the incline grows dangerously steep. With metres to go Nasir takes a forward step that fails to break the surface of the snow, and slips and slides several metres downhill before plunging his elbows into the drift to halt his perilous progress. “That always happens when I think about my family,” he chirrups, retrieving his ice axe to chop steps into the frozen ground, seemingly unperturbed. I immediately stop thinking about how furious my mother would be if she could see what I was up to, and return my gaze to the unflappable guide’s trailing leg. Minutes later the terrain beneath his boot-heel changes from a carpet of snow to one of stones, made gnarled and yellow by the same sulphurous gases that have begun to pollute the thin air. At midday, I lumber over the crater rim.