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Alpine Ascents International's
Khumbu Trek Fall '99
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»Home »Dispatches »Photos »Trekking Map »Trek Itinerary »Bios |
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Hear the Team's Call from Nepal LISTEN: [RealPlayer] [Windows Media]
Download a FREE media player to listen.[Windows Media] [RealPlayer]
Hi, Mountain Zone. This is Pete Athans giving you a brief update from Lobuche about 16,400 feet here in the Khumbu Valley. Looking up over the incredible vista on to Nuptse and what a lot of people call the cobweb wall because it is just this incredible diamond-shaped wall of [Unintelligible] shale that has a lot of different striations to it and is just a fabulous view. And we're at the Italian pyramid. This was established several years ago to aid people doing research on anything from global positioning systems studies to medical work.
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And our trekking groups is moving right along. Everyone is doing fine and is healthy and having a great time. We spent the previous night down in Dingboche and just spent the night in a very crowded lodge where we met a lot of different people and it was a very international group that was in the lodge last night. And although very crowded, it was quite congenial. We met an interesting group of young Irish girls who were doing a benefit for the Irish Cancer Society and they had raised quite a bit of money in addition to being able to do their trek and this is their first time doing anything out of Ireland so we were pretty excited about their effort.
But, for us, we took about seven hours to get up here today, for all our members to get here, so our grail is in sight in getting to the little top of Kala Patar and also on to Base Camp as well. A lot of different stories to share with you and certainly a lot of places that we've been.
And we met Alan Burgess today, who is certainly no stranger probably to a lot of people who are listening in on the Zone. Of course, Alan and Adrian are the two celebrated, famous and somewhat notorious twins from Britain. Although they certainly get a lot of barbs aimed at them, they are certainly amongst the best climbers in the world, chiefly because of their longevity and I think incredible humility and really sixth sense as to when to turn around and when to learn to fight for another day. Certainly many of their generation are no longer around to make that same claim. So it's great to see Alan still out here running around, still full of stories about having to break trail from [Unintelligible] into the Khumbu in five feet of new snow that feel three weeks ago. So it's an incredible story there and I'm sure at some point you'll probably be hearing about it.
Not much else to report. We'll try to send some images to you. Having some problems with the technology, so at 2400 baud rate we could probably send it over two tin cans and a wire a little faster. But we're moving forward; hope to talk to you again soon. Good night.
—Pete Athans, MountainZone.com Correspondent
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