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12:45 pm PT Billy called the RMI Office from Camp Cholera: Everyone is safe and sound. We will stay here tonight and descend to Plaza Argentina tomorrow afternoon. Thank you for all the blog comments and congratulations! 8:48 am PT Hey there, it's Billy Nugent of the team El equipo de dos Guillermos, checking in from the summit of Aconcagua. I'm up here right now with six climbers and three guides, 22,800-something feet. So what do you guys think? [Team cheers!] As you can tell a happy but tired bunch. Everyone is doing extremely well. We are definitely winded up here at extremely high altitude. We'll give you guys a jingle when we are headed back into our high camp at Plaza Cholera. Other shout-outs. [Brief loss of transmission] Carter, Walker, and mom I love you guys so much. Thank you for everything. Erica, Thurston, Bella, Brent, Ally, Christian, everyone. We made it! Hurrah! Hey guys, it's Lindsay, I made it. Thank you so much for the support and love. Love you guys. See you when I get back. Tanya, Benjamin, and Abby- love you and I'll see you all soon. Kathy, Kelsey, Eric, Ailie- I love you. I'm on the top of Aconcagua- woohoo! Jerry and Rhonda, John and Kathy- thanks for the support. I'll be seeing you soon. Babs and Phil- much love from Katrina. That's all I got unless Haas has something. I love you mom and dad [from Billy Haas]. Sorry mom and dad, love you guys too. Signing out. We'll call you from high camp. RMI Guide Billy Nugent

On The Map

The Four Day Summit Climb Teams Led by RMI Guides Tyler Jones and Geoff Schellens reached Ingraham Flats on Mt. Rainier today, but due to poor visibility and bad weather they were forced to turn abort their summit attempt. The team returned to Camp Muir and have started their descent back to Paradise and will arrive at Ashford BaseCamp this afternoon. Congratulations to today's team.

The Four Day Summit Climbs led by Lindsay Mann and Tyler Jones were unable to leave Camp Muir last night. The team experienced heavy thunderstorms that brought much lightening and 6 inches of new snow to Camp Muir. The teams plan to leave Camp Muir shortly and will be back in Ashford in the early afternoon. Congratulations to today's teams!

Tuesday, June 25th, 2013 We are back at our 11k camp after a very successful day of carrying and caching gear at 13,200. What had been a pretty busy camp now feels like a ghost town, as most teams in camp got an early start this morning to move to 14,000. We also had a decently early start to try to beat the heat, and by 1 pm, we were back in camp snacking and napping. We'll be a day behind the main pack; everyone did excellently today, and so the plan is to move ourselves to 14k tomorrow! That will put us in great position, and one step closer to our goal. Best to everyone back home. Cheers, RMI Guides Pete, Geoff, Robby, and the gang

On The Map

All right you deserve to know. We have to be honest to all of you that have been following our trip. We have not been roughing it. Tables and chairs on the mountain, hot water for washing at each camp. Fifty five local staff with us throughout the Kilimanjaro climb. We could carry any or nothing throughout the day. Fresh foods at each meal. You would have loved it. Now here we are at the Plantation Lodge with white table cloths and fine china, eating incredible curry chicken and organic garden fresh salad, do not even want to rub in what we had for desert. All this after an awesome day of game viewing in Lake Manyara National Park. I feel so much better now that you are in the loop. Wish I could say that it's tough surviving here in wild Africa but that would just not be true. It is a real vacation now after a pretty physical week on the big hill. There are a few sore and tired muscles but over all the team is in great shape. We said a sad good-bye to one member of the group as he started his trip back to the USA, he had to get back for work. We will miss his wonderful sense of humor and great companionship. Tomorrow we are off to one of the great natural wonders of the world - Ngorongoro Crater. Where there are so many animals in a small space, I better get the camera battery charged up tonight. All is well, RMI Guide Mark Tucker

Hi, this is Linden calling with a dispatch from Island Peak Base Camp. We left Chukung this morning and walked for several hours up the Imja Khola Valley through big piles of old glacial moraine eventually making our way to the base of Island Peak where our base Camp is set up. It is tucked right between a giant glacial lake and the slopes of Island Peak right above us. After rolling in to camp and getting settled we had a top notch lunch and spent a couple hours in the afternoon finishing up some trainining and getting the team dialed in for the climb. Everyone is showing their experience in the mountains and looking very prepared for the climb. We are moving to High Camp tomorrow with plans to summit the following morning pretty early. The weather has been really nice so far and we are keeping our fingers crossed that it stays that way. We will give you a call tomorrow from High Camp.

Two in the morning rolls around fast over here. It did today, at least. That is when I got up to stuff a few last things in my pack and meet Ed Viesturs for breakfast in our dining tent. I think we both were focused and keyed up for a journey through the Khumbu Icefall and thus were not too picky about breakfast. Instant coffee and rice porridge did the trick for me. We walked a little before 3 a.m., at first in some fog, but then under stars and a big moon by the time we'd gotten our crampons on at the start of the climbing route. Ed graciously allowed me to go first so that I could set a pace I might live with and complain less about. I'll admit that my natural tendency might have been to be a little insecure over having Ed Viesturs, one of the world's great aerobic athletes, two steps behind me where he could see just how feeble and weak I might turn out to be on any given day. But ...the short sleep, the rice porridge and bitter coffee must have worked the perfect magic, because I didn't feel feeble and weak as we crossed the first ice ridges. I actually felt ready to go climbing ... ready to feel my heart and lungs ramp up, ready to get some sort of burn going in my leg muscles. The plan was actually two plans that came together. I swear I don't have any great love for the Khumbu Icefall. I wouldn't generally go through it without good reason, but when I hope to guide someone through it, I've come to value previewing the darn thing first myself. It can be wildly different from year to year (and from the beginning of a climbing season to the end), and I like to know where the hazards are and where reasonable rest breaks might be hiding. Ed, with his goal of going for the summit without oxygen, has to continually push himself in the weeks and months leading up to that attempt. He needs and wants all the exercise that he can squeeze in ...preferably at altitude. And even better if he can preview the Icefall route and get a little gear up to our newly established Camp 1 site. So our schedules converged and it seemed to make good sense that we go together, despite his need for speed and my need to not be humiliated. We both had light loads of gear for CI and our standard guide's pack-load of emergency and rescue gear in case we either got ourselves in trouble or came upon someone else inclined that way. We could see about a dozen headlights some distance ahead of us, but we reeled those in before too long and passed a team of Sherpas that were carrying heavier loads than ours. We didn't talk as we climbed by headlight and moonlight ... I doubt I'd have been capable of talking and there wasn't any need for talk. It was a time for thinking and doing. I thought a bit about how I'd met Ed Viesturs in the summer of 1985 on Mount Rainier. He would have been starting his third year of guiding then, and I was a wide-eyed and fairly naive aspiring climber. I took a five-day climbing seminar with Rainier Mountaineering, Inc. and Ed was the junior guide on the trip. He must have done something bad, because when it came time for choosing rope teams for the summit bid at week's end, Ed got me. I was strong enough, having just spent a first winter working in the ski industry - and before that I'd swum competitively at college ("competitively" being used loosely here), but I didn't know anything about big mountains or how to tap into the strength I had for them. That climb was memorable. We were well up the Ingraham Glacier and taking a break when another guide with a different team busted a big crevasse bridge and took a huge fall. That guide was Eric Simonson, who is camped just a hundred meters away from me right now and who turned out to be a great friend and mentor. I didn't know Eric then though, and so when Ed tried to get his rope team moving in a hurry in order to go up and help with the crevasse extrication, I believe I protested -pointing to the unfinished peanut butter and jelly sandwich in my hand. (I'm sure I didn't protest vocally since, although Ed wasn't famous back then, he was still formidable.) Long story short, Eric lived, I didn't get to eat my sandwich and we didn't make the summit. I was hooked. I became a guide with RMI the very next summer. Ed and I, although we worked together for some years at Rainier, didn't do a whole lot of climbing together. Partly because before too long, his expedition career took off in a big way; mine took off a little later and in different ways. We come at things differently. Ed relies on hard-won fitness, VO2 Max, pre-trip training, and a legendary ability to calculate and get shrewd in the big hills. I bring mountains down to my decidedly less athletic level through repetition, constant practice, pigheaded determination and never-ending fear of failure. Sometimes the results of the two methods can be similar. Like today in the Icefall. I thought we made a pretty good team, and I took a lot of pride in that when we rolled into the Camp 1 area three hours after we'd begun. I never imagined, 24 years ago, that Ed and I would be bouncing over ladders and scrambling up icewalls together on Mount Everest all these years later. It was a blast. And it was cold up there at 19,867 ft. before sunrise at Camp 1. We cached our gear and began to beat feet down. It can be tricky to keep up the concentration required so as to not misstep, catch a crampon or poke through a crevasse bridge on a fast descent of the Icefall, but it can be equally dangerous to go slow in a place where big things tend to fall down around you if you linger. We did have to do some lingering though. Ed and I encountered about a hundred of our best friends ... Sherpas from various teams who were either carrying loads or guiding climbers. We'd look nervously at the big ice towers tilting above us, but we'd stop to exchange pleasantries anyway, remembering which trips we'd done together and promising to catch up over tea in some safer place. Ed and I were kicking off crampons at around 9 a.m. in bright sunshine down at basecamp. We both expressed relief at having satisfied some of our curiosity about the glacier's surprises and our own fitness to tackle it again. We'd come down in time to see the rest of our team suiting up for ice climbing practice and rope technique review taught by Seth Waterfall, Peter Whittaker and Jake Norton on the glacier close to camp. I passed the rest of the day with adrenaline in my veins and a smile on my face. The plan is for a few others to check out the Icefall tomorrow.

Saturday, January 27, 2019 - 11:04 PM PT 100% on top!!!! The Roof of Africa! All is well. Sadly, the sat phone was too cold and died as soon as I turned it on. Bummer. We are all safely back at High Camp after a cold climb of Kilimanjaro. Short break here before we head down to our last camp. Can’t wait to share pictures. RMI Guide Casey Grom

On The Map

May 24, 2017 Today began the exercise in storm living. The low pressure south of us arrived and brought with it a foot of new snow. The team entertained themselves with funny stories over a few rounds of hot drinks and a long breakfast. In the afternoon we stretched our legs with a four mile walk on the main Kahiltna Glacier before blowing snow and a disappearing track turned us back. Thankfully a little bit of stormy weather is not enough to lower the morale of this great group of strangers become friends. Tomorrow we anticipate more snow and winds but that will not be a problem for this team. Hope everyone at home is warm and dry. RMI Guide Leon Davis

We are at high camp! 

Barafu -which means ice in Swahili. We got here nice and early, just after 11 AM.  It only took about three hours to gain the two thousand vertical feet from Karanga Camp.  The team came in smiling and all together and excited to finally be here, in place for a summit bid.  The day ended up a little cloudy, with a snowflake or two in the air but that hasn’t bothered us.  Benson treated us to a nice lunch and then we sat down with Naiman -our lead guide- to talk in detail about the summit and how we’ll prepare for it. 

We are resting and organizing this afternoon, getting used to the altitude and catching up on our hydration.  An early dinner is in order -Spaghetti at 5:30- and then we’re going into the tents for a rest.  It will be an Alpine start; we aim to be walking at midnight. 

Wish us a little luck, please. 

Best Regards,

RMI Guide Dave Hahn & Team