Elbrus Expedition Dispatch

July 30, 2008 – Wish Us All Good Luck for Our Summit Attempt!

An early morning view of the barrels from the snow cat heading up to Pashtukov Rocks

It is 6:00 pm Wednesday on the 30th of July and I’m getting ready to go to bed. The team has just finished having one of Tamara’s wonderful meals and with full stomachs we are all going to settle down to bed at this early hour because the schedule is for me to wake the team up at 2:00 am. At 2:30 am we will have breakfast and begin preparations and then at 4:00 the snow cat is going to pull out to take us up 4,900 ft to the base of Pashtukov Rocks where we climbed a couple of days ago. From there we will begin our ascent of Elbrus.

The weather is still unsettled. We had rain and hail throughout the day. There are still reports of high winds on the upper mountain. But we are banking on an improving weather trend; I’ve got a sense that tomorrow might be much better. We are going to give it a shot! I told the team tonight not to worry if you hear hail and rain against the barrels when you wake up tomorrow; we are going to load the snow cat and we are going to go up to Pashtukov to begin our climb regardless. We will see what we find when we get out there.

I’ve got to mention, one member of our team, Dave, will not be on the snow cat, (I’ll update you about that some more tomorrow during our climb). Dave has chosen to climb the additional 3,000 ft from the barrels up to the base of Pashtukov by foot. He will be going with our BAI guide, Sasha (if you have followed Elbrus dispatches in the past years, you will know Sasha well. He has been a part of our Elbrus summit team for many years now). Dave and Sasha will be up even earlier than me, getting ready to leave and I will say goodbye to them well before the rest of this team gets on the snow cat.

Stay tuned for our reports tomorrow. If you read this soon please cross your fingers! We do need good weather as we attempt to climb all the way to 18,500 ft to the top of Europe tomorrow.