Rob DesLauriers  John Falkiner  Frederik Jacobi  Kit Katzenbach  Ace Kvale  Kasha Rigby  Scot Schmidt  Jim Zellers

Kasha Rigby

Hear Kasha's Call

But we got up, all of the team went to the bottom of Deloney Pass, which is at about 3450m [11,319ft], and we got some ropes there. Half the team went up the fixed line and checked things out; went to the top of the pass and actually saw beautiful snow. But just [inaudible] hard ice climbing, and the pitch not being so bad because the ice is really hard because of the temperatures.

The other half of the team actually did some skiing. We shot a bunch of footage which was great for all of us and for Rob. The weather, the skies were beautiful blue— just a crisp, clear day. But our biggest concerns now are the cold. It looked really good from the top of the pass, we could see our route to the summit, see where we can put some snow caves in, but it's cold. People are having cold feet and cold hands. Otherwise I think if we work on that, everything is looking pretty good.

[We] came back, skied down a gorgeous — probably what in the summer — is a gorgeous river, [we] probably crossed three or four but just frozen. So we came down all these drops and waterfalls with just blue, blue ice, we'd just point towards big snow piles and sail down these little ice waterfalls and hit the snow and stop and head down again and we did that for about 3,000 vert [vertical feet], once in a while hitting a little snow, but most of the time on this ice.

And then [we] skied across this lake, the big Lake Akkem, that has flowing springs on top of it so it's always frozen — about probably two meters of ice goes across the top, but there's about four inches that's really not that frozen so it cracks and sometimes you break through and one guy got a really wet foot today, broke way through. But besides that it's a drag getting your skis and skins wet. It's kind of exciting skiing down this river and the lakes are beautiful, the views are beautiful. Beautiful alpenglow this afternoon and we just had a great meal and the mandatory toasts and toasts with lots of vodka, and we're getting ready for a good night's sleep. Hope you guys are doing great and we'll talk to you tomorrow. Bye, goodnight.

— Kasha Rigby, telemark skier

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