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15 APR 2001
 Audio Dispatch
Viesturs
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Hello, it's Ed Viesturs calling from Advanced Base Camp on Shishapangma. It's April 15th, Sunday afternoon.
I would like to wish everyone a happy Easter, and particularly sending my love and happy Easter wishes to my wife Paula, my son Gill, and my daughter Ella, and Veikka sends his love and wishes to his girlfriend Laura in Finland.
We just returned a little while ago from a short walk. We loaded up our packs and headed up the moraine. It was quite a tough day. It took us about three hours to get to the end of the moraine, where we can then step onto the end of the glacier. Lots of boulders, gravel, wind blown beach snow in places, but it was a good workout and so at the end of the moraine we left a pile of gear. We left two tents which we are going to use on the mountain, 2 small bivi tents. We have our climbing rope up there, our harnesses, all of our hardware, pickets, a couple of bundles of marker ones, shovels, tents, gas, cartridges for our stoves, all of our down gear, our sleeping mattresses. What else? Pretty much everything that we need for a while.
So it was a good day, took us almost three hours to get there, and because its so undulating and serpentine we really only gained about 500 or 600 feet in elevation in the whole day. It took about an hour and a half for us then to return here, back to Base Camp.
But it's a good start. We got a big dump load full of gear up the hill ready for us to go up again. What our plan is now is to take a rest day tomorrow and then the day after to go back, pick up some of our gear, and move on up the mountain to establish our first camp. So once we do that we are going to stay on the mountain for several days acclimatizing, getting all of our gear in place, and pushing the route on up, in hopes of perhaps even reaching close to Camp II.
It's all going to depend on snow conditions, what the weather is doing, and our health, but things are going well now. There's a big cloud cap blowing off the summit of Shishapangma. Otherwise it's clear and sunny. It was a very nice day. We are happy with the results of what we did today. Feel good and feel fit. In another day or two here we are going to feel quite acclimated.
I'll give a call again tomorrow afternoon. We'll have a few more items we are taking with us up the mountain. We are going to minimize what we take up knowing whatever we take up we have to take back down.
Also, by way, for those interested, Veikka has his own web-site as well if you want to do some reading about what he has done, what's going on in his neck of the woods in Finland. It's Veikka.com.
— Ed Viesturs, MountainZone.com Correspondent
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