Ed Viesturs' Quest for the 8,000 meter peaks

Viesturs

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So we came up with an alternative plan, and that was to climb to where we are now, set up camp, and to climb up and over the pass, which is at about 14,500ft, tomorrow. So things worked out quite well.

We arrived here about five hours after leaving the village of Lete this morning. Initially we hiked through some beautiful fields of fresh, beautiful green wheat that was growing, pastures. We descended down into a small stream valley where Veikka and I took a nice, refreshing, but very cold, swim — on purpose — and then began our very steep ascent, zig-zagging our way up through forests of bamboo interspersed with huge, gigantic rhododendron trees and now we're in stands of evergreen trees, here on this grassy knoll.

When we arrived here we bumped into the Spanish expedition that, they were initially two or three days ahead of us, but we've caught up to them simply because they've had problems getting up over the pass with their porters; there's still some snow there. But they've managed to break a trail up and over the pass, so they plan on going tomorrow also.

When we arrived here they were really friendly. They gave us tea immediately, forced us to sit down and have lunch with them, which we happily accepted and we became friends very quickly with them. So we're looking forward to having many more gatherings with them on the mountain and sharing the brunt of the work to climb Annapurna.

So everything's going quite well, we're all healthy and happy, excited to get up over the pass tomorrow, and if all goes well, we should be at Base Camp in about two days, depending on snow conditions on the other side of the pass. But once we gain the pass, which is at 14,500ft, we're pretty much at the altitude of Base Camp. So we just have some traversing to do and some moraines to climb across until we reach the site where we're going to spend the next two weeks climbing Annapurna.

That's all for now, the weather's been great. Every afternoon we have our afternoon thunderstorm, at about two or three in the afternoon, then it clears up for the evening and then it's nice all through the night and into the next day, until the two or 3 o'clock thundershower. So that's it for now, I'll call again tomorrow night. That's Ed Viesturs reporting on the Mountain Zone.

— Ed Viesturs, MountainZone.com Correspondent


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