April 15, 2013: We are climbing.... rope fixing preparations
Peak Freaks are up at 3:00am tomorrow morning, grab some breakfast and head out to begin climbing at 04:00hrs. Everyone is super excited to be getting the acclimatization rotations underway before the big push.
Here's the plan:
Tomorrow Camp 1, they can stay over night here now because they slept on top of Kala Pattar the night before. If they had not done this they would have only been able to handle a day trip to Camp 1 and would have to return to base camp to allow their bodies the time needed to adjust to the higher altitude. We approach the climb this way to lessen the time spent in the ice-fall, only one trip through it up to again acclimatization to Camp 2.
April 16: Climb to Camp 1 - sleep - April 17: Day trip to Camp 2 - return to Camp 1 sleep
- April 18: Climb to Camp 2- sleep 2 nights here
- April 19: Return to base camp and wait for the rope to fixed to Camp 3 and then that rotation will take place. The last one before the summit push.
ROPE- An essential piece of equipment for climbing mountains. Today the Sherpas worked on preparing the rope for fixing the route up the Lhotse face and to the summit. The 10mm rope comes on spools, we take it off the spools and cut it in sections for carrying up the mountain by the Sherpa teams. They are cut into 200m and 100m lengths and put into bags.
The bags are then numbered and will be checked out before it goes up the mountain and checked back in to make sure all bags are accounted for so we know it has all been used properly and nothing has been missed.
The Sherpas will carry the 200m bags at the lower elevations and save the 100m bags for higher up where the air is thin. These bags get heavy the higher they go with the thin air.
Time to sleep, early start tomorrow.
We'll report back here when the team is all settled at Camp 1.
Over and out... Tim
Photo: Sherpas carrying heavy loads.
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