Elbrus Expedition Dispatch
July 10, 2012 – Getting Ready for Our Summit Day!
Tamara prepared a fantastic breakfast for our storm day morning in the Barrels. We had French toast, cheese, sausage, jam, peanut butter and yogurt. We also enjoyed "cowboy coffee" with the grounds boiled directly in the pot. Mac took over and made additional pots after Tamara served the first.
Now we have set our schedule for the time leading up to our climb 1:00am today: we will have a "light" lunch, which will be one of Tamara's homemade soups. She has already started slicing vegetables for this soup now as breakfast is ending
After lunch if we have a break in the weather we may take a short hike, but the most important thing is to keep our clothes dry for our very early start tomorrow.
Here is our current schedule:
4:00 pm - an evening meal, fresh salad, chicken and potatoes.
5:00 pm - we will go to bed in order to try to get 8 hours rest before our climb begins.
1;00 am - we will wake up and have tea and coffee
2:00 am – Breakfast
3:00 am - Arthur will arrive with the snowcat. We will load the snowcat already wearing our crampons at 3:45.am.
The plan is to be getting off the snowcat at 15,000 feet - we will have 3600 feet to go to reach the summit of Elbrus!
The climb should take us 8 to 11 hours going up and 3 to 5 hours coming down.
We will be starting with 4 guides: Wally Berg, Karina, Vladimir Bakhmutov and Vladimir Kopylov.
Our Barrel this morning
As soon as he heard that we were going to be storm bound in the barrels Mac began to look for projects to do. Wally had commented that his ice axe was too short and that "real men climb with long axes" so Mac built an extension for his ax.
These are long nights in the Barrels but with our improving acclimatization we are sleeping better each night.
We had early morning coffee with the snow coming down outside.