NEPAL TIME: 
|  Manaslu (8163m) and Dhaulagiri (8167m) |
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One Down, One to Go Friday, April 23, 1999 — 8:22am (PST)
 Hear Ed's Call from NepalClick for [RealAudio] [Windows Media](Requires FREE RealPlayer or Windows Media) |
Hi it's Ed Viesturs reporting on The Mountain Zone. It's the evening of April 23rd and Veikka Gustafsson and myself are now back safe and sound at Base Camp. The climb is now over, officially. Once we get to Base Camp we feel things are finally safe and sound and finished. We got back here at about noon today. We left our Camp II this morning at about 8:30 and descended to our Camp I, picking up more of our equipment. We had huge loads as you could expect: we've had three tents with us and all of our gear; cleaning off the mountain completely, all of our trash, and working our way down.
It was quite warm today and we were glad to finally get off the mountain as things are starting to loosen up this late in April. Things are quite warm lower down on the mountain, snow gets slushier and things become more difficult. But we're happy to be at Base Camp. Things are quite luxurious. There's a lot of oxygen down here. We have our Sherpa cook who's making us three huge meals a day, which we can barely eat because our stomachs are so small.
But we're happy to be done with Dhaulagiri, I mean Manaslu, and for my 11th 8,000 meter peak, I'm very, very happy. We are still planning to go on to Dhaulagiri. We are now making arrangements to get porters up to here, to our Base Camp and then we need to go down to the village of Chamegon where we will then arrange to have a helicopter come pick us up, hopefully in about three or four or five days, which will then fly us over to Dhaulagiri. We will land there, spend a day perhaps reorganizing and then, with weather conditions being favorable, we hope to make a three or four day ascent of Dhaulagiri, climbing it in alpine style.
Now we don't have to worry about the effects of altitude, we've acclimatized. We can pack our loads at Base Camp, planning to be on the mountain four or five days with food and fuel required to do that, and simply climb as high as we can on the first day; set up camp in the night; the second day pack up our camp, move as high as we can the second day and repeat that probably three times and, hopefully, reach the summit on the fourth day.
So that's our plan for now. We're just going to relax a little bit here. Tomorrow we have to pack our gear because we have porters coming up the following day to go down to the village of Chamegon, but we're very excited, very happy. For us it was and enjoyable climb; it was quite challenging, there was nothing simple or easy. The route finding was complicated, the climbing was good, sustained, interesting and challenging. The summit ridge of Manaslu was beautiful and when we got to the top it was quite a wonderful feeling to climb this beautiful mountain on the first go.
So safe and sound at Base Camp, I'll talk more probably tomorrow or the day after, but thanks for following our climb on Manaslu. Ed Viesturs signing off.
— Ed Viesturs, Mountain Zone Correspondent
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