NEPAL TIME: 
|  Manaslu (8163m) and Dhaulagiri (8167m) |
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All the Way Up... Wednesday, April 21, 1999 — 11:40pm (PST)
 Hear Ed's Call from NepalClick for [RealAudio] [Windows Media](Requires FREE RealPlayer or Windows Media) |
Hello it's Ed Viesturs reporting on The Mountain Zone. It's 12:20 on April 22 and guess what, we're on our way down. We got to the summit at, I think it was, around 11:00-11:30 this morning. We left our camp at around 4:15. It was quite windy so we delayed quite awhile; we needed some visibility to see the upper plateau. It was very, very windy this morning until about 7:00 or 8:00. We didn't know whether we could continue or not, but thankfully the wind died just enough to allow us to get to the summit.
The summit ridge is quite long, because it's about a hour just to climb the knife edge ridge of snow and rock, but we made it to the top. We're happy, we're on our way down now. We're sitting here relaxing for a minute, we just left the summit 20 minutes ago and we're already down about 800 feet, and we're going to keep cruising. As you know the climb ain't over until we're down in Base Camp.
So we're going to keep moving down the mountain — was a crystal clear day, it was windy on top, a little cloud cap on top, but we could see a lot of the peaks. We could see Machapuchare (The Fishes Tail), we could see Annapurna, Dhaulagiri [Satellite Transmission Fails]
— Ed Viesturs, Mountain Zone Correspondent
...And Back Down Again
Thursday, April 22, 1999 — 3:51am (PST)
 Viesturs | |
Hear Ed's Call from NepalClick for [RealAudio] [Windows Media]Hi, it's Ed Viesturs reporting on The Mountain Zone once again. It's April 22 and we're back at Camp II. We, ah, from our last conversation which I got cut off, we kept descending to Camp III, packed up our gear, felt we had enough time and we left Camp III at about 2:30 in the afternoon and got here in about a hour-and-a-half.
So we're settling in here. We were welcomed by the German team that we're sharing a permit with, they're very gracious. They gave us hot chocolate, tons of tea, they invited us to dinner so we don't have to do any cooking. We're happy to be down. So we're just trying to relax a little bit; we're just sitting around not doing anything. We're very lethargic. It's hard to move once you've stopped, but we plan to go all the way back down to Base Camp, hopefully for breakfast tomorrow morning and we had a great climb today. I tried to make a call from the summit, but it was a very small, precarious summit and it was way too windy. So I carried the phone all the way up and all the way down. Oh, well, we'll try next time.
Alright, we'll report more tomorrow. We had a great day, Veikka and I are both fine, tired, but we're happy. We haven't eaten much for the last two or three days and we're looking forward to seeing what they're serving up for dinner. Thanks for listening, Ed Viesturs signing out.
— Ed Viesturs, Mountain Zone Correspondent
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