Manaslu (8163m) and Dhaulagiri (8167m)

Establishing Camps on Manaslu Wednesday, April 7, 1999 — 6:08am (PST) Viesturs Hear Ed's Call from Nepal Click for  [RealAudio]  [Windows Media] (Requires FREE RealPlayer or Windows Media)

We left Base Camp early this morning, got to Camp I at 7:30 and we were back down here at Base Camp by 9:00 in the morning. We chose to climb early because it's quite warm up here and the conditions early in the morning are perfect, the snow is firm. We had some route finding to do on the glacier itself, which was a lot of fun. It was a beautiful, beautiful clear morning. It was a lot of fun being out front. Nobody had been up there since last autumn, so we were having a good time finding the route to Camp I.

Tomorrow we plan to go back up to Camp I. We're carrying with us eight days of food, some more fuel and some personal gear. We're going to set up our tent at Camp I. We're going to be using a Mountain Hardware Trango 2 for Camp I, and then we plan to establish two more camps higher on the mountain and those will be smaller, single layer bivvy style tents, also made by Mountain Hardware.

So we're going to go up tomorrow and depending on our health, on the weather, on the conditions, we hope to stay up on the mountain for anywhere, possibly seven or eight days, and depending on how things go, we may work our way up towards Camp II, and if we're real lucky and feel good and strong and the weather is favorable, we'll try to get up to Camp III.

So we're doing fine. The other expeditions are also here at Base Camp. There's a German team here, there's small group of Catalan climbers and also an American-Canadian expedition here. So we'll report again tomorrow from Camp I, like we said everything is going well here. The route looks very good. the route above Camp I steepens up into a glacial headwall, that's probably the steepest part of the route. And then above there we'll establish Camp II and then from there work our way to the summit plateau where we'll talk to you tomorrow.

— Ed Viesturs, Mountain Zone Correspondent

EXPEDITION DISPATCHES