DISPATCHES

Otto

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Yesterday we hired two donkeys to take us up the Torbulung River. We walked up the rocky river and the riverbank for 17km. Fairly easy and nice walking, good hike, about six hours — six, seven hours or so — and then we camped right at the foot of the Kuksay Glacier, which we are now, right here now at the moraine with waterfalls on both sides of us.

Today, we haven't seen our other three members, which are up on the glacier now. Hopefully today we'll hike all the way to Base Camp — it'll be a very, very long day — and hopefully bump into our members. So, that's all I have to report now, and I'll put you on to Dan.

Dan Mazur
Hi Mountain Zone, this is Dan calling to say hi and thanks a lot for having us out here and listening to us. I thought we did pretty good yesterday, we made good time. We covered like two days of ground in one day, and today we're going to try to be right in to Base Camp. So, we're going try to catch up for four days of time in two days.

I'd like to wish all you guys a happy Fourth of July Independence Day for all those Yanks out there.

I'm a little concerned that we haven't seen our other members. Last night we climbed up the moraine at 7 and tried to make a radio call, but we had no contact. So, it's kind of a mystery; we haven't seen them for five days so we don't know where they are. We hope they're okay, but we're not sure. I'm a little worried about that. Being the team leader, sometimes I worry about that stuff and hope that everybody's okay. The three members we haven't seen are Walter Keller, Ann Ramzy and Xiao Yang. I hope they're okay.

Lakpa has a song he wants to sing for you right now.

Lakpa Tamang
[sings a traditional Nepali song]
Thank you! Nepali song it is, trekking song. OK, bye.

— Jon Otto, Dan Mazur and Lakpa Tamang, MountainZone.com Correspondents

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