Hello Mountain Zoners this is Vern Tejas with Alpine Ascents' Mount Elbrus trip. This is Team Updog and we're reporting in after three days of planes, trains, busses and pains in the rear, we've finally got to the Turskol Valley high in the Caucasus.

Today, beautiful as it was, we've been viewing the flowers on the hill opposing to Mount Elbrus and we're doing an acclimatization hike. We're just about at 11,000 feet and the whole teams taking lunch; the whole team's here, say hello team. 'Hello!' And for the most part they're in pretty good spirits. We're eating bread and bananas and salami, all the good stuff.

It's been fabulous here; it's been getting a lot of rain. There have been some flash floods that took out several of the bridges on our way in on the bus here so we had to route off side roads and go around and actually had to do one shuttle. But, other than that, it's just fabulous. The flowers are amazing this year, we've seen lilies and columbines and things I've never seen before so it's the best of the best.

We're getting acclimatized for the next couple days. We'll be staying in the Turskol Valley at a hotel next to [Mount] Cheget so we're going to be staying low, working high, just following the old mountaineers' axiom. And we want you to stay tuned, stay with us and please pray that Jean's bags do arrive before we get to the summit.

And for everybody who's concerned, we we went out jogging this morning so you know that Jean is okay, she's in good spirits. And anybody else on our team who wants to get up early, 7 o'clock, we'll go out for a little acclimatization run [groans].

Stay tuned. We'll see you soon. Ciao for now.

— Vern Tejas, Alpine Ascents International Guide and MountainZone.com Correspondent