Elbrus Expedition Dispatch

August 6, 2008 – Team Enjoys a Beautiful Sunny Day!

It’s 2:00 p.m. on August 6th and I’m calling you from 11,300 ft above sea level from our viewpoint on Cheget Peak. Today was completely different from yesterday. When I woke up at our hotel very early this morning I looked out and saw perfectly clear skies and knew we had the weather change we were hoping for today’s hike.

We came to the base of the Cheget ski area and met up with Vladimir and Karina. We noticed that the chairlifts weren’t running so we asked around and discovered that there had been a power outage down the valley and thought it would be some 2- 3 hours before the chairlifts were running. Vladimir told me he thought that this was fortunate because if we walked all the way to the top of Cheget, it would be excellent conditioning. Vladimir has two sayings which have really stuck with this group. Yesterday when we hiked and got pretty tired he said that the day’s activities were going to help us “sleep like a stone” and in fact we did after yesterday’s exercise. Vladimir said today, we will all appreciate and remember today’s hike because we climbed 4,500 ft from the base of the ski area with no lift service support at all – it will be “good for our power”. This is good for the conditioning and good for the acclimatization.

As a matter of fact, when we first took off from the bottom I saw that the group had ascended the first 2,000 ft of this climb in only 1 hour and 20 minutes.

We are doing great, developing our power and now we are going to start down. As you probably remember from previous dispatches, we always enjoy eating BBQ lamb at our favorite grill down at the bottom of the ski area. No doubt, we will have some friends stop by. I expect that Vladimir’s wife, Larissa and his daughter Natalia will be there and who knows who else will show up to help us enjoy a Caucasus afternoon and relax a bit after a perfect day of power conditioning.