Elbrus Expedition Dispatch
July 4, 2014 – Looking Up to the Twin Summits and Perfectly Blue Skies
I am calling you from the elevation of 4200m. We are on Mount Elbrus now for sure. We are at the site of the famous refuge 11 or Priut 11, the historic 3-story climbing shelter we used to stay in that burned down in 98. It was built by the Soviets and had a lot of history around the Nazi occupation in WWII and it was used by climbers for decades after that.
We will be staying at a little bit lower than this at an area called the Barrels. We rode the gondola up today, then finally the chairlift and hiked up a little bit above the Garabashi Barrels. We got a great idea of what it’s going to be like here.
The observatory we hiked to yesterday.
We are returning to the valley to stay at our Seven Summits Hotel again tonight. Believe me the team is thinking about being back down there tonight for one more of our evening saunas after a day of exercise before we come up here for the number of days it takes to climb Mount Elbrus.
I’m looking off now all the way back down to the observatory which was the hike we took yesterday. Vladimir B from the Ukraine took the group up for their acclimatization hike to this observatory site. He was explaining to us that this was built by the East Germans a long time ago and in more recent years has been an area for scientific work on astronomy. The funding for this observatory in most recently has come from the Ukraine, the United States and of course Russia. He is pretty excited about some of the ongoing work that is taking place here starting next year.
It is interesting to have different areas to visit around here, many different places to climb to. It is still pretty low compared to where we will eventually hope to be on the summit of Mount Elbrus in a few days.
The final thing I should mention today is that those twin summits, the east summit and our goal, the west summit, were perfectly clear all day today. We were looking up at a perfectly blue sky and the top of Mount Elbrus before us. Still a long ways up there but it is encouraging to be on the mountain. We have one more night down in the valley before we come up to stay.
We will keep you posted as our climbing continues.
Some photos of the old Refuge 11 that used to be the home base for most climbers attempting the summit of Mount Elbrus until it burned down in 1998.
Our Barrel’s which we will be staying in tomorrow and a few nights after as we attempt to summit Mount Elbrus.
Getting a taste of what our home base will be like as we climb. It’s pretty cozy!
Vladimir Bakhmutov on the tram this morning
The twin summits of Elbrus were absolutely clear today as we climbed toward Priut 11.