NEPAL TIME: 
|  Manaslu (8163m) and Dhaulagiri (8167m) |
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Dhaulagiri Camp I Sunday, May 2, 1999 — 2:13am (PST)
 Hear Ed's Call from NepalClick for [RealAudio] [Windows Media](Requires FREE RealPlayer or Windows Media) |
Hi it's Ed Viesturs reporting once again on The Mountain Zone, and it's May 2nd and Veikka and I are now at our camp at 20,400 feet. It took us eight hours of climbing to get here. We left Base Camp at 4:30 this morning, we arrived here at 12:30 and it was a good day. The snow was perfect, the weather was great and we felt strong. We're higher now than the normal Camp I and just a little bit lower than the normal Camp II, and then we had quite a bit of linear distance to cover today as well as altitude and then right now we're parked. Our tent is pearched right at the bottom end of the north east ridge which we'll start climbing tomorrow. So it's very straight forward and a lot of altitude gaining from here on out.
We'll do the same thing tomorrow, get up, pack up all our gear, put it in our packs, load it on our backs and start climbing as far as we can go. Then hopefully at the end of tomorrow we'll be high enough, probably 23,000, 24,000 feet, something like that, to be in the position to make an ascent for the summit the day after tomorrow. Looking up the ridge, the snow conditions look really, really good. We were concerned that it might be icy, but from our vantage point the conditions look really good so we're excited about that.
We're happy to be here, it was a long day but we're now in our tent. We made some water, we had some cocoa, we had some snacks and now we're just going to kick back and relax until dinnertime. Try to get a little bit of a rest in. We've got a minimal amount of stuff here four or five days of food. We have freezed dried food, we have some cocoa, some soups, an assortment of bars, we've got Metrix bars, we've got some Snickers bars, some M&M's. We've got a whole bunch of packets of Goo, which we're gonna hope help us get up the hill. We have a little bit of cheese and salami, we brought up a little bit of mustard as a luxury. But that's about it, we've got drinks, we've got NurtaSweet Kool-Aid. Not a lot of nutrition going on in there, but it helps us get the water down. So minimal amount of stuff, but we have a little bit of variety.
And as I said, we're happy to be here. We took a short cut climbing to here today. Normally there's a dog-leg where you climb leftwards a little bit to get to where Camp I is and then right and start working your way up the ridge. But Veikka spotted a route right up the face, we call it the Veikka variation now and so we short cutted the dog-leg and made a direct b-line up some steep snow and a little bit of ice, but it was steep climbing and intersected the ridge far above Camp I.
So here we are, we're feeling good, we're optimistic. The weather is good, the snow conditions are good we feel strong and we hope to talk again tomorrow evening from our high camp. Ed Viesturs and Veikka Gustafsson signing out from Dhaulagiri, 20,400 feet, our first camp. See ya later.
— Ed Viesturs, Mountain Zone Correspondent
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