V2 and Peter chip their way up the ice slope above Pastukhov Rocks Photo: Michael Liebreich

To our surprise, the morning of our second summit attempt dawned fine and clear.

We woke at 5.30, having decided there was no need for a 4 am start if we used the ratrac. This time I was taking no chances, I put on my toughest all-weather gear. The Doc and I decided we would conserve heat by putting on our crampons inside the Barrel. We felt sure no real mountaineer would stoop to these depths, but were pleased to note everyone else following our cue. We laced our "Death-Crampons" particularly tightly. Now we were ready for anything.

The ratrac, however, had other ideas, grinding to a halt after only a few yards. It was already 6 am, if we had to climb from here we would immediately be in time trouble! The driver, another swarthy and heavily-bribed Balkarian, seemed unperturbed. He dismantled part of the fuel tank, sucked a mouthful of diesel through a tube, spat, and returned to his cab. The engine restarted. He repeated this ritual every few hundred yards. As we reached the altitude of the Priutt Refuge, dawn broke, and so did the ratrac, this time irretrievably. We were already behind schedule so we piled out to begin our long climb to the roof of Europe.

Kirill and V2 forged on ahead. Nothing Alan could do would make them understand the Western approach to guiding, to stay with their clients.

I meanwhile dropped back; within seconds of setting out it became clear that today I was wildly overdressed for the mild conditions. I spend fifteen minutes removing layer upon layer of Goretex. Adjustments completed, I settled in for the first leg of our summit attempt - back to our old friends the Pastukhov Rocks.

What a difference from the day before! It wasn't quite the same sultry weather as on our first acclimatisation climb, but the sun was out, the sky was clear and the temperatures certainly bearable. It looked like our summit bid was on.

Above the Pastukhov rocks stretches a long, featureless slope, rising from 4,700 to around 5,200m at an almost uniform 22 degrees. In summer, we learned, this is covered with snow, and it would be possible to skin all the way from the Barrels to the summit and ski back. Until late June, however, some freakish combination of wind and sun turns this slope into a pane of glassy ice. It was here that the Austrian climber had made his fatal error a few days before.

Kirill and V2 were becoming visibly agitated as Alan checked our ropes and harnesses and we prepared to set off in small, short-roped groups. They wanted to put in fixed ropes and kept thrusting ice-screws into Alan's hands. He wanted us short-roped and moving quickly. My vote was with Alan. Voices were raised.

Kirill grabbed his pack and set off alone, at a speed none of us could match.

V2 set off after him, towing Jimmy and Peter puffing in his wake. The Doc and I settled in behind Alan at a sustainable pace, our Death Crampons biting well into the warm ice.

The next landmark after the Pastukhov Rocks is the Saddle (5,416m), a flat area between the East and West summits with the ruins of an observatory building. Unwilling to stop before reaching it, we pushed on, increasingly tired and dehydrated. After a while we were joined by Jimmy, who had cast himself adrift from V2 in protest at his speed, and was now wandering up the glacier alone, unroped. At one point we found ourselves cut off by a narrow crevasse, which we crossed clumsily, hampered by our ropes. The Doc slipped, and Alan and I pinned her to the snow. Jimmy watched as we hauled her away from the hole, then jumped across, still unroped, amid a stream of obscenities from Alan, the only ones we heard him utter in two weeks.

Once we had the bulk of the sheet ice behind us at 5,200m, we expected at every moment to reach the pass. But the path curves gently out of sight around the East summit, on and on, rising slowly. Slowly, trudging one foot at a time, we rose to the level of the saddle. Suddenly, the vista in front of us changed - instead of staring at a blank snowy slope, we could see through the col between East and West Summits and over into Svanetia and Dagestan. To our surprise, the mountains on the other side were not jagged and snow-covered, but flattened and red, like a scene from the deserts of Arizona or New Mexico.

The Doc, Jimmy & Alan struggle up the final steps to the roof of Europe Photo: Michael Liebreich

We arrived at the Saddle, where the others were waiting. Kirill was in a deep sleep, tired more, we presumed, from his night-time exertions than from his sprint up from the Pastukhov Rocks. I was fighting my altitude headache and the Doc and Jimmy appeared equally queasy and weak. We drank and ate as much as we could, fortifying ourselves for the final few hundred metres. Ahead of us, the summit cone loomed, steeper than anything we had climbed so far, snow-covered and crevassed.

Jimmy and V2 had already pushed on. Kirill remained asleep. We left our packs and set out up the final pitch. With no local guide to follow, we were living on our own wits. We stopped frequently to check our route, we had lost Peter and V2's footprints almost immediately on leaving the Saddle. But we continued to make progress, climbing steadily until we reached the top of the final steep section. Now we were on a high glacial plateau, punctuated by two or three false summits, and there, in the distance the real one.

Peter and V2 passed us, heading back down. Climbing much faster than us they had already been all the way to the top, around a shocking kilometer away. Focussing on the point in the distance, the highest point of Europe, we pushed forward. It seemed like an eternity until, finally we were climbing the short, steep slope to the summit at about three o'clock in the afternoon.

Alan, Jimmy, the Doc and the Author on top of Europe Photo: Kirill Korabelnikov

What can one say about reaching the top of a mountain. Those who understand the feeling need no explanation, those who don't, wouldn't be reading this.

The culmination of many months of preparation and many hours of effort is always a mix of exhilaration and disappointment. The views were tremendous - in one direction the strange desert-like landscapes of Dagestan, in the other, the now-familiar views across the Caucasus, including the spectacular Mt Ushba.

On the summit itself is a monument to the Soviet military climbing team who, in 1945, climbed Mt Elbrus and removed from the summit the Nazi flag which had flown there during the German occupation of the region. Kirill, awaking refreshed from his high-altitude nap and moving quickly, joined us. We stayed for only a few minutes, conscious of the lateness of the hour, and took the obligatory photos of each other. Then we headed down, Kirill again disappearing quickly and leaving no traces for us to follow on the hard-packed ice.

One of the great attractions of attempting to ski-tour up Mt Elbrus had been the thought of the ski down. Descending big mountains, hour after hour of bruising jogging downhill, is very hard on the knees and thighs. For months I had fantasised about making the summit of Elbrus and being down in time for tea an hour later. Of course the ice had put paid to all that. In all it took five hours to descend, including two agonising hours stepping carefully down the ice-slope above the Pastukhov Rocks, trying not to think about what would happen if one of us slipped. It was dark by the time we regained our skis, and we were so tired and dehydrated that the Doc and I had to help each other step into our bindings. We finally got back to the Barrels at 8 o'clock in the evening after 14 hours on the mountain.

Celebrate? No we just slept.

We spared no expense to bring you this panorama of the Caucasus, using the latest technology. Elbrus is so high you can see the curvature of the earth (honest!) Photos: Michael Liebreich