DISPATCHES

Heilprin

	click for dispatch photos

As the expedition nears the end of rope fixing on one of the most difficult sections of K2's North Ridge, an international tent community has sprung up on the glacier below made up of climbers planning to use the same ropes.

"It's going to be like directing traffic on a freeway," Jeff Alzner, the expedition leader, mused after a flurry of meetings with teams of Chinese, Japanese and Mexican-Spanish climbers that netted gifts of yak jerky and a Chinese flag.

"What's happened in the last 24 hours is just mind-boggling. All these people are here now," he said. "We're really lucky that everyone is cool."

With more than 1000 meters of rope fixed above Camp 1, at 5950 meters (19,500 feet), a team of climbers led by Paul Teare and including Ivan Ramirez, Wayne Wallace, Gill James, myself, and Jeff Rhoads, of National Geographic television, will likely establish Camp 2 during the next several days.

But getting to Camp 2, at 6600 meters (21,650 feet), is a tough climb. "It's going to be a hell of a commute out of Camp 1," said Mike Bearzi, whose team with Ziggy Emme, Alzner, Drew Hansen and Rhoads has done the bulk of the rope fixing upwards from a rock buttress and diagonally across the unrelentingly, steep ice faces.

"The ice faces between Camp 1 and Camp 2 are major features to overcome on the mountain,'' he said. "This is really the key to the whole route. Even though it's the lower part of the mountain, it's difficult load-hauling and is continuously technical and difficult terrain because of the traversing."

For the past two days, Fred Ziel's team, with Shawn O'Fallon, Heidi Howkins, Jay Sieger, and Greg Ritchie, also filming for National Geographic, has been pushing the lines across the 45-55 degree ice faces.

With limited tent space at Camp 1, there has been tension on the K2000 expedition among team members worried about whether they will have adequate opportunities to sleep high and acclimatize properly.

Chinese expedition leaders D.J. Chou and Sam Duuk met Wednesday night at Advanced Base Camp with Alzner and other Americans. The Chinese team has 14 climbers, mostly Tibetan and Taiwanese, who are closing in on getting to the top of all 14 of the world's peaks higher than 8000 meters.

"We want to reach the top together in harmony, that is the best mountain spirit," Duuk, speaking through Chou, told Alzner. Despite K2's location on the Sino-Pakistan border, the Chinese had never set foot until today on the mountain they call Qogori.

As chief financial sponsor of their K2 climb, Chou, who is president of Taiwan-based Enertron International, Inc., and spends most of each year living and conducting business in Mesa, AZ, said in fluent English that the ethnic makeup of the team was meant to be "politically symbolic."

He repeatedly offered help in fixing lines. "Why don't we just work together and summit so we can go down and rest," Chou told Alzner.

Also present at the meeting were two members of the four-person Japanese team, Shoji Sakamoto, the leader, who is from Tokyo, and Toshiyuki Kitamura (who goes by "Kita"), of Toyoma. "We are very happy to be included in this meeting because we are a very small team," Kitamura said.

Taking a collective inventory, the three national teams found they could pool resources that include 10,000 meters of rope, 85 ice screws and more than 100 snow pickets.

The Chinese proposed an ambitious schedule of establishing all camps on the mountain and reaching the summit by July 15. But on their first day of climbing up the American fixed ropes, during which they hoped to establish their own Camp 1, they were hampered by improperly assembled crampons.

Another four-person team of climbers hoping to take advantage of the large-scale American expedition's efforts finally arrived at ABC today, though they are still camping lower down. Some of those climbers already know members of the American team.

Led by Hector Ponce de Leon of Mexico, the Mexican-Spanish team hopes to put the first Spanish woman, Araceli Segarra, on the summit of K2. She gained renown as a featured climber in the Everest IMAX movie that shows her successful effort to become the first Spanish woman to climb Mount Everest.

When do they plan to get on the mountain? "Maybe in a few days," she said. "We need to establish a base first."

— John Heilprin, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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