Shishapangma

Hear The Team's Call from Shishapangma
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Alex: Ah, that looks great.

Andrew: Would you like a double shot or a triple?

Alex: A triple shot of espresso, please. That would be great. Dave, are you drinking espresso this morning? Okay, ah, let's see...

Dave: I think that will get me to the top of the mountain, if anything else will. Whoo-hoo.

Alex: Dave, are you looking for salsa?

Alex Lowe and Andrew McLean
We've got the espresso shop set up here. We've got Mark drinking coffee and Dave and Chris and Andrew, and Alex is at the controls here. So we're making "cheer" espresso, at 17,000ft, and it's great.

It's a clear and sunny day. Trying to set up a puja today; put up our prayer flags, do a little rest and then go skiing tomorrow.

Descendants of the peacemakers, coffee is a good thing at any elevation. This is a really nice place to have espresso here. We've been skiing a couple days here. We skied off a 20,000ft peak and plan on having a little ceremony this morning called puja. Which is, generally, it's sort of a blessing to sort of make sure everything goes right on the expedition. The Sherpas — our Sherpa staff here — essentially won't start doing any of the climbing-type work until they've had puja. They take this thing very seriously and it's a wonderful ceremony for all. We put our ice axes, and helmets, and family pictures, and just anything you want on this little chorten, this altar that we've built here, drink a lot of scotch and Tang, and bless everything. It's just a really nice day, so pretty much the rest of the day for everybody is Base Camp and then the trip essentially after puja. Although, we've...[Unintelligible]...and skied a few peaks, been hacking around taking loads to ABC, Advanced Base Camp. But it's a nice way to sort of conjugate the whole event here. I'll pass you over to Kris.

Kris Erickson
Greetings listeners, like Alex said, and Andrew as well, it's a wonderful sunny day and we're looking forward to a great day of rest, puja, and lots of coffee drinking in the morning [laughter in background]. Hopefully lots of rest and good weather will follow in the higher, higher mountains soon. I'll pass you on to Mark.

Mark Holbrook
Good Morning, Mountain Zone. A little bit about the skiing yesterday. Oh, it was a really beautiful day. Got up early because...[Unintelligible]...so between eight o'clock and noon, the sun is out, it's beautiful, kind of warm, the snow we skied on was three different types: from 20,000 down to about 19, where there was about four inches of nice, fresh powder; 19 on down, it was varying degrees of corn snow in the middle, probably about three to four inches of corn; and then as you got close to the bottom, about an inch of corn...[Unintelligible]. The skiing was good. We've got to plan also to start carrying up loads...[Unintelligible]...Advanced Base Camp. We'll be setting up a camp...[Unintelligible]...before we attack the mountain. Let me let you talk to David, hold on a minute.

Dave Bridges
Hi, this is Dave, one of the film crew members and we've been shooting a lot of 16mm of these guys skiing — got some great images. Other than that, basically we've drinking a lot of coffee and a lot of scotch. So, here you go.

— 1999 American Shishapangma Expedition, MountainZone.com Correspondents

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