Manaslu (8163m) and Dhaulagiri (8167m)

On the Way to Kathmandu Thursday, May 6, 1999 — 12:39am (PST) Viesturs Hear Ed's Call from Nepal Click for  [RealAudio]  [Windows Media] (Requires FREE RealPlayer or Windows Media)

Tomorrow evening, Friday evening, we have porters coming. We ordered them actually when we were on the summit knowing that it would take a few days to get a message down valley and then a day or two for the porters to arrive, so they arrived Friday evening. Veikka and I are planning on starting walking tomorrow, Friday morning. It's a two, long two, day walk to the village of Jomson and so rather than doing the Bhutan death march, which we, which Veikka and I currently do, we're going to leave tomorrow and go as far as we can, camp and then hopefully, on the second day, arrive in Jomson and that would give us time there to organize our plane tickets from Jomson to Pokhara and then to Kathmandu. The porters will come Sunday evening too and we'll already be awaiting their arrival then in Jomson and then the next day, Veikka and I will fly to Kathmandu, and then I plan to leave Kathmandu for the US on Wednesday.

So we're very excited this is all over. It was a really fun climb to just go fast and as light as we could, being as acclimatized as we could be. But it was three long days to reach the summit, this is one big mountain as we discovered, and it was a lot of fun, but a lot of hard work, too, and we're very glad that we pulled it off. You know, we came here with our sights set on doing two 8000 meter peaks. We knew that the conditions would have to be perfect, our health would be good, we'd have to be motivated to not only do one, but to do two and we're very happy that we did what we came to do. It was a lot of work, but it was very exciting and we're certainly...now that we're down, we're happy that it is over.

Tomorrow the hiking, we have to climb 1200 feet through what's called French Pass, and then we enter a valley called Hidden Valley which we walk along and then we go over another small pass called Bembush pass and from there it's a very rapid and steep downhill to the village of Marpha and then to Jomson. So a little bit more uphill before it's downhill, but that's the way it goes, but we should be doing fine.

Again, it was a great season. We pulled off two wonderful climbs. It was fun being in these mountains, kind of alone. But I think it was a perfect season, since there wasn't much snow all winter the conditions on both mountains were as good as they could be, as safe as they could be. The climbing conditions, the snow conditions were excellent. I mean if we had more time and energy we could go climb another peak, but two is fine. This was a really great season, I think we had opportune weather when it was appropriate and on our summit days we had perfect weather, nothing more that you could ask for, and on Dhaulagiri [Satellite Transmission Fails]

— Ed Viesturs, Mountain Zone Correspondent

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