NEPAL TIME: 
|  Manaslu (8163m) and Dhaulagiri (8167m) |
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Preparing At Dhaulagiri Base Camp Saturday, May 1, 1999 — 3:45am (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 Saturday May 1st and we spent the full day here at Base Camp at Dhaulagiri. Spent most part of the morning packing our gear, sorting through it trying to minimize the amount of weight we have to carry. We're going to plan on a three or four day ascent to the summit, and then one day down. So we have about four days of food which can be streched to five days, we have a small lightweight bivy tent our down quilt, two down suits. Some fuel, our climbing gear and some marker wands, rope, some shoes, that type of thing. A stove, pot, and it turns out that we're both carrying about 40 pounds. That's as scrimpy as we can get it and really not feel bad when you think about how much weight that we're going to be carrying.
So we're planning on going up tomorrow on Sunday the 2nd as going as far as we can the first day. And hopefully with conditions being good be in position after the second day to make an attempt to the summit on the third night. [Unintelligible] which is really going to help. The weather is good on Dhaulagiri, every afternoon we get some clouds, we get some thunderstorms, but today was pretty good. We're very optimistic, but all we can do is go up and take a look and see how things go. But we're excited to get going, try to get to the summit of Dhaulagiri.
So that's our plan. We'll go up tomorrow, I'll be reporting along the way, I'll have the phone with me. And thanks for following us here on Dhaulagiri and I'll be checking in once again tomorrow afternoon sometime. Thanks a lot, Ed Viesturs signing out.
— Ed Viesturs, Mountain Zone Correspondent
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