Ed Viesturs' Quest for the 8,000 meter peaks

Viesturs

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The reason the day was so short today — this is a staging place where we can reorganize the loads, lighten them up a little bit for the porters and also issue them with footwear, clothing, hats, gloves, sunglasses, that type of thing so that they're relatively well protected as we go up toward Base Camp which will be located about 14,500 feet.

So, not a bad day today. Got an early start, left our last village at about 7 o'clock in the morning and most of us were here within two or three hours. Tomorrow will be a very long day, six hours at least, and the trail leaves the main river valley here and we cut back toward the east and the south into the valley which will then be putting us very close to Annapurna Base Camp.

Weather has been good. Every afternoon at around 2 o'clock we have a thunderstorm, which is very typical for this part of the country. It's clearing right now, once again, which it does every evening, and then we have fine weather during the day.

So everything is going quite well, minor problems, as usual, with some of the porters, but for the most part. Nothing that's totally unexpected or something that we can't deal with.

So I'll be signing out now, talk to you again tomorrow night after a long day of climbing hopefully reaching an altitude of about 13,000 or 14,000 feet. This is Ed Viesturs signing out for the Mountain Zone.

— Ed Viesturs, MountainZone.com Correspondent


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