DISPATCHES

Mazur

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We had a rest day after our climb of the normal route where all of us reached the summit and then we said good-bye to four of the team members and now three of our members are up river, route finding on the Kuksay Glacier. That would be Walter Keller, Xiao Yang and Ann Ramzy. And now three of us are heading up river today to meet up with the others and that would be Lakpa Tamang, Jon Otto and myself, Daniel Mazur.

It's a beautiful, sunny day here. The mountain has been getting hit by storms for about the last five days but it looks like it's clearing out now and it's a really spectacular place to be here — incredible views.

We're in the middle of a Khirgiz village — small nomadic, semi-nomadic seasonal, winter village. Apparently the people who were here, who we hired to carry some of our gear with their donkeys a few days ago, have moved up river to their summer village which is a yurt village up in a summer pasture with their goat herds.

So were really psyched to be setting off up river and it's probably going us three days to fully reach Base Camp, then we'll start climbing our ridge. We're hoping that the avalanche conditions are settled. Because it has been snowing so much we could use a few good days of sunny weather. Ours being an east ridge we'll have to be watching out for temperature changes, especially in the morning when the sun hits it. That's probably when the avalanches will come down.

And we just saw a really spectacular avalanche a few minutes ago, shooting off the North Face of Mustagh Ata and it came crashing down...was extremely loud even though it was probably about 15 kilometers from here.

We're ready to go now, so wish us luck. We're heading up into a pretty deep canyon. Not sure if we'll be able to make any transmission from there because the mountain is blocking our southern exposure to where we reach the satellite from. It may be that we aren't able to transmit until we reach Camp I or Camp II at 6000 meters but you have the pictures that were taken by other members of our team in previous years including Dan Waugh, so you'll be able to follow our progress on the mountain as much as possible and I'm just going to let you talk to Jon Otto here for a few minutes and he is going to tell you his thoughts. Here you go Jon...

Jon Otto:
Hello Mountain Zone! I believe Dan pretty much summed it up. It's a beautiful day. The two good days of rest were taken off. We have three other team members who have been heading up the valley already and hopefully they have been shuttling our gear up the glacier. Mr. Yang, our chinese member, Walter Keller and Ann. So, hopefully we'll meet up with them either late tonight or tomorrow.

I can't wait to get up on the glacier and see what it's all about and see how long it takes to get up to Base Camp.

I'm getting real excited and right now coming down the hill are two donkeys and one horse which we might hire... they'll take us up the valley and hopefully not in the same drawn out fashion as our first hiring event.

So we are in the same village [unintelligible] as the one I wrote about in my email. The donkeys should be here in about ten minutes and we might negotiate some of those and we'll be on our way. I guess that's it, you guys have a great day there.

— Dan Mazur and Jon Otto, MountainZone.com Correspondents

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