Ed Viesturs' Quest for the 8,000 meter peaks

Viesturs

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Last night was a lot of fun, we spent our final evening at the Rum Doodle and Veikka had the honor of signing the board where all past Everest summitters have previously signed and now we can all have free dinners there and free drinks for the rest of our lives. So that's the one benefit we could figure out for climbing Everest — amongst a few others.

And we got up early this morning, left the Garuda Hotel at about 8 o'clock and got here 10 hours later. Quite nice in the beginning, and then the road got smaller, more narrow, more bumpy. We actually had two buses, one for us and all of our gear and then we brought with us a whole crew of porters because porters are very hard to find in this part of Nepal. So we hedged our bets and brought porters in from Kathmandu.

So we're going to spend the night here. We're anxious to get walking and actually moving forward and uphill without sitting in a truck or a Jeep or a bus and the air's a lot cleaner here. It's a beautiful evening, the sun is just going down and we're looking forward to getting on with this adventure.

So thanks for listening. I'll be calling in again tomorrow night after we do our first day of trekking up the Kali Gandaki river valley heading up towards Annapurna. Ed Viesturs, over and out.

— Ed Viesturs, MountainZone.com Correspondent


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