Ed Viesturs' Quest for the 8,000 meter peaks

Viesturs

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Tomorrow morning, very early, the four of us are planning to start our trek out of here. The walk should take us about three days until we reach the village of Jomsom, which is to the north of us. So we'll be going out a slightly different way than we came in, simply because it's a little shorter. And once we reach the village of Jomsom, from there we'll fly with a small commercial airplane to Pokhara and then from there to Kathmandu.

Last night we had quite a snowstorm; we got about 10 inches of snow overnight. We woke up this morning, everything was completely buried and covered, it was very pretty, very beautiful and throughout the day literally all of that snow melted. And right now we have crystal clear, starry evening once again.

So it'll be a while until I make any more reports simply because, as we're trekking out, the porters will be coming in to pick all of our loads up and they'll be walking out a different way than we will and included in one of the loads is this satellite phone. So I won't be able to make anymore daily reports until I get back into Kathmandu.

The news here from the mountain, there's a French team here, a very experienced French military guide team from Chamonix, France. They arrived about a week ago. They have also decided not to climb the mountain. They went up and looked as we did, thought that the climbing conditions were too dangerous and they made the call to quit climbing Annapurna at this point also. The Spanish team is still here and the news is they're going to go back up in a couple of days and take another look and perhaps continue climbing the mountain.

But for us, it's time to start trekking home. We're looking forward to getting home and it's going to be several more days just to get ourselves out of here — get all of our equipment out of here. But that's the way you wrap these things up, they never go as quickly as you would like; there's logistics involved, there's people involved, there's transportation, weather — that type of thing. But we're happy to be on our way, we'll get up very early and start walking and be on the road to getting home.

So thanks for following us on this expedition, we've had a good time. Unfortunately, we weren't able to climb Annapurna but we certainly had a good look around. We did a little bit of climbing lower on down the mountain; it just wasn't safe enough for us to go any higher. I'll be checking again once we get into Kathmandu. So for now, this is Ed Viesturs signing out.

— Ed Viesturs, MountainZone.com Correspondent


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