DISPATCHES

Mazur

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I'm sorry that we haven't had a lot of time to communicate with you, we've had a lot of bad weather over here. I've seen the sun very little and, unfortunately, we don't have a generator, so we're just strictly dedicated to solar. But we've been trying to do our best and getting as many photos out to you as possible.

It's been quite a season out here: a lot of real, mixed snow conditions. The skiing has been extremely challenging, I think out of about five or seven possible days of skiing, we've had probably about one day that was pretty good. The rest of it has been quite a few days of breakable crusts and a lot of, kind of, mixed ice with powder patches, and a lot of crevasses to dodge as well — so it makes for a challenging thing. But overall, I think our team's been doing pretty well.

We've had a really solid Camp II set up; it's at 6150 meters. And we've pushed for a Camp III, but we've been hammered by the weather. But this time, we're just going to go up there and do it like full-on siege style. I'm bringing a pack with a week worth of food in it and I'm just going to sit up in Camp II, and push and push for Camp III, at 6800 meters, 'till we get it and then go for the summit from there.

So far it's looking like every single person in our team will probably get to the top and for the new routers that's Walter Keller, and Jon Otto, and myself. We are going to bring 100 meters of rope to the summit and we are planning on dangling Jon Otto off the top with a camera and he's going to shoot down onto the new route with, you know, a bird's eye view, and try to catch as many digital images of what that upper part of that new route looks like because nobody's ever seen it before, and we thought that would be a unique perspective on it.

We'll be in touch and we'll be sending you as much stuff as we can. I think John will probably be back here at Base Camp in like four days and I'll probably be back here in a week, myself. Wish us luck with the weather, that's the main thing up here is storms just hammer this place, they come on in from Afghanistan and they just sweep over the mountain and visibility just shuts down to zero. And I don't know, we've probably had about, I'd say, about something like 60 centimeters of snow here in the last week. We've had quite a lot of snow in Base Camp even, which is surprising because it's only 4400 meters.

But today wasn't too bad, it only snowed like three times during the day, but the sun did come out for about 40 minutes today and we were able to get some emails off to you and we'll be doing our best to keep you posted. It's looking like a really exciting trip. Take care and I hope you all are doing well out there in Seattle and California, and whereever out in the world. And wish us the best of luck, so see you later, bye.

— Dan Mazur, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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