Elbrus Expedition Dispatch

August 11, 2008 – Up Early and Starting Our Summit Sttempt

It is 4am Monday August 11th, the entire team; Kate, Michael, John, Vladimir, Karina and I are standing on a snow ramp outside of the Barrels waiting for our snow cat to arrive. We already have our crampons on and we will climb into the snow cats wearing our crampons because 3,000 feet above here at the base of Pashtukov Rocks, when we get off of the snow cat the slope will be quite steep. Our summit climb of Elbrus will be underway and we are going to need crampons and ice axes for the first steps.

Michael woke me early this morning with exciting news “look outside with all of the stars”. We did in fact have a perfectly clear night, no wind. We arranged to have breakfast ready for us at 2:30 am but we couldn’t sleep that long with the excitement and anticipation of the climbing day. We met in Tamara’s kitchen for her porridge which the entire team loves, as well as eggs, toast, a lot of coffee and tea. We then slowly began to get ourselves ready for the climb.

We will be on our way in just moments on the snow cat; I thought I would give you this report as we starting out. Looks to be a perfect day, but I know it is going to be a long, long way to the summit of Elbrus, stay tuned.

Making it through the Saddle of Elbrus

It is about 9 am and the team has made it into the saddle 17, 500 feet on mt. Elbrus. Our snow cat let us off at about 4:40 this morning and we were climbing 4:50 am. We got here just before 9am so it was 4 hours of strenuous, tough climbing to put the team into the saddle.

I just have to say what a different world this saddle is than it was July 31, the last time I was here with the BAI group. This is where the team turned around, at that time they could barely stand in the high winds, we had zero visibility and there was no way they were going to continue to the summit that day. Vladimir and I stayed behind to try to assist with the rescue to help and do all we could to help with a German climber. I am looking now just a few meters away at the crevasse which was so difficult for us to find that day. The rescue party of four, we had to use florescent orange wands to mark our way out back to our start point just in attempt to find this crevasse. Later we tried to use those wands to go looking for the fellow who was bivouac, but the deteriorating weather made it impossible.

Our team has much better conditions and they look strong. They are a little tired from the climb at 17,500 feet and I am looking high over head at the huge clouds growing at a high speed across the summit. We are not sure what the weather will do in the coming hours, but we are going to try and we are going to have a good shot at reaching the summit of Elbrus.