Berg Adventures International: Mt. Elbrus Cybercast 2007

Yesterday, the final two members of our team joined us in Russia and met the rest of the team at the airport in Moscow only briefly before we had to get checked in, pay our overweight fees for all those big duffel bags of climbing gear and clothing for the mountains and take off on our flight to Mineralnye Vody. James flew in from the USA and Francois had flown in from South Africa. When we checked in, we had a stack of passports from the USA, Canada, South Africa & Portugal.

The whole team says hello!

Right now I am calling you from the edge of the Kashkatesh glacier. We’ve taken off on our first hike for acclimatization. We go around to the Djantugan Climbing Base and took off on a beautiful trail through the forest. It’s very sunny today and we are looking at the very vast glaciers all around. We’ve just taken a little bit of a lunch break next to the snow. Now we are going to walk up just a little bit further for some more views and then we will turn around and head down to the bus that will take us to our lodge for the second night. It looks like the weather is going to be good for us here in the Caucasus. It’s beautiful and we have a really enjoyable group. The mountains around us are beautiful in their summer glory with the clear sky’s all around. The final thing I should mention today is that we did get our first view of Mt. Elbrus! Off in the distance, looking massive, were the twin summits. They are very alluring and we are looking forward to getting up on the slopes of Elbrus in a few days. However, for the time being, life is great in our lodge and we know that we have a few days of very scenic and beautiful hiking ahead of us in preparation for us to go high on Elbrus.