Dispatch: Successful Ski from the Summit of Urus
Base Camp - Thursday, June 29, 2000

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Fox

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So, after our rest day, we went for what was to be a warm up climb and ski up Urus, which is a peak, if you could see from Base Camp here, actually directly above our tents. It's nearly 18,000 feet and it turned into pretty much a full-on summit bid and a pretty great ski on the way down.

We started off on a steep moraine for about 1,500 to 2,000 feet, pretty damn steep, it was quite a grunt to get up there. We left Base Camp at about 3am. We got up at 2am, packed up all our stuff, Tarivio and Manuel helped bring some photo gear and ski equipment. Top of the moraine, we rested for a bit, switched into climbing and ski boots and got onto snow from there on.

Jake, Moss, Bissell and I roped up and practiced some more technical alpine climbing up around a bergschrund and up a little bit of ice, and Jake pounded some protection in, so we could sort of try that out, see how we all worked together as a team, and that went really very well.

And from there, we just grunted up to the summit, which was quite a push. It was, for two of the team members, Bissell and Moss, that was the highest they had ever been—for Moss, by 7,200 feet. So, that was a really new experience for everybody.

But we persevered and made it to the top with all of our ski equipment. On top of the mountain, we saw four or five friends that we'd made from Base Camp; they had happened to climb it on the same day. Hung out there for about 15 minutes or so, took some pictures and donned our ski gear, and that was really the best part of the whole day.

It's good to be back on skis, and we skied right off the summit, down through one pretty steep, but short, snowfield, and then hooked right into a couloir that we had scoped out from camp. That was pretty steep—it probably approached high 40s, almost 50 degrees at the top of the couloir, and then flattened out to about 45 for the rest of it.

Shot down into a basin, Bissell and Moss skied that while Wade shot it, and then Wade and I skied around the opposite side and worked a couple of features over there and then met them. We all skied down together. Probably...that was probably almost a 2000-foot ski descent, and then we switched back into our climbing gear and downclimbed down the moraine, which was a pretty hellish event after climbing and skiing all day. Carrying our heavy packs down the steep trail was pretty tough, but we all made it back to camp by about 1pm, everyone crashed out, fell asleep.

Everybody was pretty worked after that summit bid on Urus, and so we ended up having dinner with our porters, Manuel and Tarivio, and then we took them over to the refuge, which is a really, pretty beautiful mountain chalet that has been built sometime in the last year and a half. It was actually built by a church group, and the profits that come from feeding mountaineers—and they have a couple rooms there where you can stay, trekkers can stay—all those profits go to help elderly and disadvantaged people in Huaraz. So, it's quite a good cause and we took them over there, had some beers with them.

It was pretty funny, you could tell they don't drink beers very often, and Moss and the crew were telling them how to pour a beer into a mug. At this elevation, you get quite a head on your beer. We used our college drinking techniques to show these guys how to pour a good beer, and stayed there for a couple hours while the church group that was actually visiting at the same time were singing songs and conducting prayers.

It was pretty interesting, it was a very similar to— it seemed to us, anyway— similar to what it must have been like in the missions back in the 1500s, because there were people from, it looked like, America and Denmark, Caucasian folks leading about 100 Peruvian teenagers in prayer and teaching them things. It was almost like a Sunday school, which was very interesting because we were sitting in the corner ordering round after round of beer. So, that was quite a night, and we came home and had a great sleep.

And then we're going to rest, oh, let's see...on the 30th, and then we're going to start our summit push for Toqllaraju, which is looking a lot more technical and difficult than we expected, but still doable. And we're just going to give it our best shot. So we'll check in on our rest day. Hope all is well there. I want to say a quick hello to my family, friends, parents, grandparents, brother, sister and my doggy Jack. Hope all is well. Bye.

— Porter Fox, Senior Editor for Powder Magazine, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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