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Posted by: Geoff Schellens
Categories: Expedition Dispatches North Cascades
Hi All,
Well, Jim, Joy, and I were hoping to climb Shuksan today but the weather once again thwarted our summit attempt. It rained hard all through the night and intermittently this morning. We had a nice breakfast between showers and then hopped back in tents for the better part of the morning. We emerged from our tents around 10:30 to find threatening clouds bearing down on us but as it was not raining at that moment we decided to do some more training. That has become our motto on this seminar, "Let's do some training until it starts raining". After going through crevasse rescue practice and a lunch break the weather kept holding for us so we got in some great ice climbing and fixed line training. During dinner we watched as the clouds appeared to be breaking up and patches of blue sky made their way towards us. Tonight we are all sleeping with fingers crossed that we get our chance to climb tomorrow. That's all for now. Thanks for checking in.
RMI Guide Geoff Schellens
Another great day here on Killimanjaro. We had about 12 hours in the tents last night. The team used them well, for a strong group of climbers met the challenge to our new camp at 13,000 ft Baranco camp. We did have to climb up to a high point at 14,700', an altitude record for a lot of the group, to get here. No rain today which was very nice and everybody is resting and enjoying peanuts and popcorn in the dining tent.
The groups performance is all I could hope for. If we keep this up, with a little luck, we will soon be standing on the roof of Africa.
RMI Guide Mark Tucker
BIGGGGGGG DAY!
We are all now at 10,000' after reaching the summit of Kilimanjaro at 19,340'. Some of us are a bit more tired than others. I guess it's to be expected. We woke at 11:30 pm, powered down some porridge, hot drinks and started the climb at 12:40 AM. There were headlights well up the mountain side already, which was a pretty thing to see. A bit of a moon allowed us to travel without headlights, at times which was very enjoyable. A bit more than seven hours put us all on top. Conditions up and down were perfect, a bit cold but that's to be expected at these elevations. It was a true test of endurance for most of the crew.
RMI Guide Mark Tucker
On The Map
CONGRATULATIONS!!!! You guys are AMAZING!!! Katie, your myzone was so cool to look at!!! I’m so stinking proud of every single one of you! Please come home quick and tell us all about it!
Posted by: RAB on 7/23/2019 at 7:04 pm
Way to go, Prime Family!! You are amazing and I can’t wait to hear all about it! You are such an inspiration!
Posted by: KERI LEHMAN on 7/22/2019 at 6:53 pm
Posted by: Billy Nugent, Mike King, Sean Collon
Categories: Expedition Dispatches Mt. McKinley
Elevation: 17,200'
June 29, 2015 5:20 pm PST
Hey there, it's Billy checking in from Camp 5 on Denali at over 17,000 ft. Our crew made the move today. We got up super early this morning and made great time moving up the West Buttress. We're settled in now at High Camp. We spent some time, improving one of the campsites and building some walls. And now everybody's snug up in their sleeping bag hanging out in their tents. We're sort of chilling and filling with food and water. We are hoping for a good patch of weather in the next few days so we can maybe take a crack at the summit. Yeah, that's all for now. Everyone is psyched and doing extremely well. We will check in again tomorrow and let you know what happens.
RMI Guide Billy Nugent
RMI Guide Billy Nugent calls in from Camp 5 on Denali.
On The Map
Hope you summited today. You’ve been in my thoughts all day
Posted by: Stacey on 6/30/2015 at 12:39 pm
Incredible progress - keep it up!!! Hopefully the “Jim jokes” (ask him to tell you the joke about the bell ringer) aren’t ruining everyone’s time up there. Looking forward to updates from the summit…
Posted by: Jessica LaTorre on 6/30/2015 at 12:10 pm
Posted by: Billy Nugent, Chase Nelson
Categories: Expedition Dispatches Mt. McKinley
Elevation: 17,200'
June 26, 2014 - 9:33 pm PT
Hey this is Billy checking in from 17K on Denali, again, where we are still pinned down by the weather. Today is our second storm day. We actually had some sort of blue skies and clearing and some hope on the horizon but things closed back in here. They are calling for high pressure to build over the mountain this weekend. If we get up tomorrow and it looks promising, we might take a crack at it or we might be sitting tight until Saturday. Last night was definitely one of the most ferocious storms I have had to battle up here in Alaska. We were definitely up all night digging out tents with feet and feet of snow and very, very strong winds- 70 miles an hour. For our chance for it, we have tons of food and fuel, and we just need the weather to cooperate. And that's all for now.
RMI Guide Billy Nugent
RMI Guide Billy Nugent calls in from 17K Camp.
On The Map
Keep warm and safe above all. The forecast is much better for the weekend!
Posted by: Monique on 6/27/2014 at 7:21 pm
The Four Day Summit Climb June 16 - 19 led by Seth Waterfall and Gabriel Barral reached the summit of Mt. Rainier this morning around 7 a.m. PT. The teams reported light winds from the north and sunny skies.
Congratulations to the teams!
Jambo!
We set new altitude records for many team members today when reaching 14,750' on Kilimanjaro!
Too often climbers seem to decide how they are going to feel at a certain altitude in advance. Today the team climbed steady and before we knew it we were standing at 14,750' and everyone was feeling great.
From about 13,000' to the high point there was about 4 to 6 inches of snow. We were fortunate to stay dry as we hiked up the Shira Platuea to our new camp at Barranco but once in camp the rains began. The rain has stopped now, we are all in good shape and getting ready for a hot dinner.
Cheers,
RMI Guide Mark Tucker
On The Map
Very exciting! A hot meal sounds nice after a day like that. Hope everyone is having fun, staying dry and doing well!
Kristin, Justin and Henry (Vogt) Osborne
Posted by: Kristin Vogt Osborne on 2/17/2011 at 9:48 am
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.
Posted by: Hannah Smith, Ben Luedtke, Daniel May
Categories: Expedition Dispatches Aconcagua
We woke in our beds ready to start the day. We ate breakfast, grabbed our duffels, and loaded the van. A quick 45 minute drive (there was air breaking being done by all) brought us to Penitentes. We weighed our duffels for the mules and reloaded the van to bring to the trailhead. The team made quick work of today's hike. Lulls of no breeze made for a hot walk but when the wind did hit it it was the best feeling. A couple rest breaks and some frogger with another team got us to camp. To say we are roughing it would be a lie. We enjoyed melon and nuts for a snack at a picnic table waiting for our mule team to arrive. For dinner was Carne Asada, chorizo, potatoes, cabbage salad, bread and wine. No complaints over here. Things will get tougher, but not just yet. Tomorrow is another day hiking along the Vacas River. Weather was good today and hopefully good tomorrow.
Good night all,
RMI Guides Hannah, Ben, Dan and team
Hello!
Another day here in the Ishinca Valley, and another summit for your ESS-Peru Team! Around 9:00am this morning, we stood on top of Urus Este, around 17,800’, after a beautiful evening of challenging climbing where the team gave it a huge effort! It’s a lean snow year here in the Cordillera Blanca and the route was bit rockier than normal, but the team managed that challenging terrain exceptionally well. The weather was so nice on top that we were able to spend almost 45 minutes enjoying the views of the surrounding peaks and turquoise blue lakes that the Cordillera is famous for. We returned back to camp midday to a wonderful lunch, as usual, and took the afternoon to rest, recuperate, and enjoy our last day here in the Ishinca Valley after a week of calling it home. Dinner is almost served this evening, and we’re looking forward to catching a night back in the comforts of our hotel in Huaraz tomorrow evening. Shortly, we’ll find ourselves headed back to the hills for a closing climb to end our program with a bang! We’ll touch base from town tomorrow, and we’ll send some pics!
RMI Guide Robby, William, Alfie, and Team Summit!
Another summit conquerd. Congratulations Trey. Enjoy being back in civilization.
Posted by: Phyllis Craig on 7/23/2019 at 12:28 am
Love these posts! Congrats on another summit. Can’t wait to see the pics.
Posted by: Bridget on 7/22/2019 at 6:35 pm
FLOS3 sends best wishes and we hope the rain stops!
From (also rainy) Boonton, NJ, elevation 397 Feet :)
Posted by: Stef + Trish on 8/29/2013 at 5:45 am
Rain, rain go away…. Glad to hear there are breaks and you have been able to train.
The summit is calling down everyone’s name, so positive thinking that Thursday is the day to get up there!
Posted by: Jann on 8/28/2013 at 10:26 pm
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