Hello again everyone.
All is still well here in the Khumbu as the remaining team members made our way back into Namche. It was a super busy day on the trail with climbers, Trekkers, yaks, and porters all bound uphill to Everest Base Camp. We slowly made our way through the trail traffic and enjoyed one last good view of Everest.
Along the way we ran into several old friends from my past trips and stopped to wish everyone good luck and finished the day off with a nice reunion with one of RMI's finest Billy Nugent. Godspeed my friend!
Tomorrow we'll be moving out early on our final leg of the journey back to Lukla. So please keep you fingers crossed we have good weather and can make our flight back to Kathmandu the following morning.
RMI Casey Grom and crew
Hello blog followers for the freshly started Ecuador Skills Seminar. Adam Knoff here, I am the team's fearless leader and occasional dispatch sender.
As our group assembled this morning for our first full team meeting, there were no delusions about rule number one of international travel- expect the unexpected. Half of us are still missing bags, one of our team members hasn't even arrived yet and the weather forecast for the next three days looks more unsettled than the streets of Quito.
I am pleased to say despite all these immediate challenges, everyone is in good spirits and excited to face the adventures ahead. But one day at a time right? After breakfast and a nice team orientation meeting, we all piled into a comfy bus and took a roundabout tour of some of Quito's classic sites. From the old town we headed north to the Mitad del Mundo, or middle of the world, for some wacky equator tricks and small history lesson of this magical line.
Now back in the hotel we are resting up for a nice family dinner tonight and our first push to altitude tomorrow.
Stay Tuned.
RMI Guide Adam Knoff
The Four Day Summit Climb June 17 - 20 led by Mark Falendar and J.J. Justman reached the summit of Mt. Rainier at 7:00 a.m. PT. They reported gusty winds and cold temperatures but blue skies above them and great views all around.
Congratulations to today's Summit Climb Teams!
The Four Day Summit Climb June 10 - 13 and Five Day Summit Climb June 9 - 13 made their summit attempt of Mt. Rainier early this morning but were forced to turn around at approximately 11,200' due to high winds. The teams returned to Camp Muir safely and will be making their way down to Paradise later this morning.
What a difference a day makes! No more camping and no more climbing. Today we woke to rainy skies in Usa River, but we woke in comfy hotel beds and got into nice, dry Toyota Land Cruisers. Our Safari guides: Jakob and Ng’orongo took us west through Arusha and out of the rain into the Maasai country beyond. We made it to Lake Manyara National Park by midday. Things started out slowly… a few baboons. A bird or two. The odd bushbuck. At our picnic lunch, the mountain guide on the team suggested there was nothing much remaining to be seen and that we should call it a day and head for the hotel swimming pool. Nobody listened. Our safari guides then found a lion asleep under a tree. Which turned into seven lions when we looked a little closer. Which turned into seven hungry, hyper, and hunting lions when a cheerful, clueless zebra came strolling along. Our guides kept us alongside a protracted hunt as the zebra got smart and began to move away along the lakeshore. The lions - actually five lionesses and two lions - finally pulled the trigger and sprang after the zebra. We couldn’t quite see that but somehow, they switched prey in the middle of the attack, coming away with a couple of warthogs in their jaws. The mountain guide on our team admitted that the swimming pool idea had been a poor one and that in ten years of visiting Manyara he hadn’t seen one lion let alone seven making multiple kills. To drive home the point, we then saw Cape Buffalo, giraffes, and elephants at close quarters and in quick succession. And THEN we went to the pool. We were at the Plantation Lodge for sunset and an excellent dinner. Safari Day One, in the books and exceeding all expectations.
The second day of the trek took us ever higher into the desert valley on our way to Aconcagua Basecamp. The trail wound it’s way through the high desert of the Andes, past scrub brush, and the occasional Guanaco. Today also provided us with the first views of the mountain. It was a beautiful bluebird day and the upper reaches of Aconcagua were in full view as they towered over the surrounding peaks, including Amighino, a mountain that tops out at the same elevation as Kilimanjaro. Tomorrow we make the final push to basecamp at 13,800 feet and start acclimatizing for the upper mountain.
Hey, this is Dave Hahn from Lobuche with RMI Everest Climb. Not much in the way of internet here in Lobuche, so I am giving you a call to tell you that everything is good. We have a rest stay here in Lobuche today. Went for a light hike, and everybody's feeling good. So after tonight, which will be our second night in Lobuche, our intention is to move up to base camp tomorrow. All the way to 17,500 feet. Tonight we're still at 16,000 feet. A beautiful evening here in the Himalaya... (transmission lost)
RMI Guide Dave Hahn
Hello Everyone,
Casey here checking in from Moscow.
All is well and the team arrived yesterday evening. We had a quick meet and greet, then headed out for a bite to eat before calling it a night as everyone was feeling the jet lag.
Today we had a wonderful breakfast and then set off on today's adventure. We spent most of the morning in and around Russia's famous Red Square. We started off with a quick visit of Lenin's Tomb, then headed to the Kremlin for a few hours. Up next was a short subway ride to one of Moscow's many Cathedrals and then headed back to see the beautiful St. Basil's. Several team members did a little exploring on their own and others got a quick cat nap back at the hotel. We have just returned from a nice meal and are getting ready for bed again. Tomorrow we have an early departure and catch one more flight before we get to Elbrus.
We spent last night here at 16,000', and today we are resting and getting used to the rare air up here. We will head out to the glacier soon for a little training-review of cramponing, ice axe arrest, and other climbing techniques. We will get and alpine start and head out for the summit some time around 1:00 am tomorrow morning. I will be in touch when we return!
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.
My fingers are crossed for good weather tomorrow. Excited for everyone to return home safely to their families.
All my love,
Sydney
Posted by: Sydney on 4/7/2015 at 9:46 pm
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