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Jim Zellers 

Recon from the Snowcaves
Tuesday, March 30, 1999 — 5:41am (PST)


Jim Zellers
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Hello Mountain Zone, this is Jim Zellers calling from the Altai. Well, we're pretty well dug into our snow caves. We've got eight of us in one and a few in the other, and we had a little break in the weather today. Woke up to some pretty good skies and about a foot of new snow.

We headed off to do a little recon to see where our route actually was because we weren't really sure which was the summit — there's so many peaks out here. So, we mustered through the crevasse field. We're pretty much all roped together now because there's so many holes out here. One of the guys, Freddy, here from Denmark, fell into a crevasse 30 feet from the cave door, didn't even know it was there.

We were roped up all the way through, got some powder going on up a little bit higher and made our way into the cirque at the base of the peak. It looks like there's some good snow up higher and a lot of ice covering it.

We've got still some pretty cold temperatures, down around minus 30. The high today got not much more than about minus five, so we're still kind of dealing with the cold and our toes and everything else.

Let's see, messages... John says hello to Laura, Darcie and Jessie. Look at the moon and touch your lips, he's there. What else, oh, we have way too much chocolate and not enough beef jerky; everyone is starting to moan about that, but we're "choco'd" up and everybody's [unintelligible] and tomorrow we're going for the summit push.

Our battery is getting a little low on our phone so you might not hear from us again but everything looks good. It looks like we're going to get a ton of powder, so we're psyched about that. Talk to you again soon. Bye.

Jim Zellers, pro snowboarder

The team says hello to their friends in a second dispatch.


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