 Ed Viesturs' Quest for the 8,000 meter peaks |
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Monday, April 17, 2000
 Viesturs | |
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Hi, this is Ed Viesturs reporting on the Mountain Zone. It's April 17th — we're at Annapurna Base Camp. We arrived here yesterday afternoon after descending all the way from Camp II. The weather's been a bit unsettled. Yesterday afternoon a huge thunderstorm rolled through camp, a fair amount of snow, thunder, lightening — we were very glad to be here at Base Camp and not higher on the mountain. It snowed into the night and then cleared off somewhat and then snowed off and on during the day, today. So, it's a good place to be here at Base Camp.
Things are still a little bit unsettled on the mountain. We're waiting for some clearing patterns, some more settled weather to let the snow stabilize higher on the mountain and when that occurs we're ready to go back up to Camp I and then begin looking towards climbing a different route in hopes of circumventing all the hazardous areas that we decided not to climb — meaning the Dutch Rib and the original French route.
We're still looking forward to going back up. We're excited at the new prospect of finding a different way to get ourselves up to the summit, hopefully the main summit, if not perhaps just the east summit. But the potential is still there, we're still strong, we're still healthy and we're still looking forward to going back up and snooping around and seeing how we can't get ourselves back up high on the hill.
So we had a good day here resting and relaxing at Base Camp; three square meals, nice and tasty. We all took showers today, did some laundry, relaxed, had a good day and we'll see what the weather does tomorrow. Right now we have a full moon coming up. It's clear outside but we're going to need a day or two of stable, solid weather to consolidate all the new snow that's up on the mountain and also to allow us to go back up and start climbing once again.
So I'll report again tomorrow with future plans. What will occur after tomorrow I'm not certain but I'll keep you informed. So that's Ed Viesturs signing out from Annapurna Base Camp on the Mountain Zone.
— Ed Viesturs, MountainZone.com Correspondent
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