Bad weather has hardly allowed the expeditions to venture out of the base camps as temperatures plummet up to -30 Celsius with extremely high winds all over the Baltoro. Denis and Bowie have made progress opening up track to Camp-2 utilizing old ropes fixed by the various commercial expeditions in summers. Denis has spent a night in Camp-1 acclimatizing.
“Don and me did hard job just in 2 days I touch ridge 6200! We exhausted in BC’ Denis wrote on his Facebook, “2 days Don and me cut hundreds kg ice- ropes under 10-30cm. My arms are very strong now 🙂 road to C2 is open we are happy”.
Weather is expected to be worse on Sunday night with wind speeds reaching to extremes of 150km/h at the Base Camp. More sunny days with favorable weather is expected for another two days, providing room for more work to be carried out on the track.
Meanwhile, Simone and Tamara have made little progress and still have to reach the high plateau after crossing the labyrinth of dangerous crevasses and icefall on the Gasherbrum glacier. They are also resting in the base camp hoping the scary night would pass without many events.
“Finally” the first real day of bad winter weather” writes Simone and his team on Facebook, “Snow and strong wind, so strong that at altitude, the Mountain seemed to howl. The visibility on the glacier is almost zero and it is difficult to distinguish the contours and depths. Our track is covered but we hope that the flags and the GPS track will allow us to reopen the path as soon as conditions improve. It seems that at least for over the next 24 hours the weather will remain very bad and so we take the opportunity to rest…”
Simone and Tamara have been cutting through the difficult terrain and have made little progress much to their frustration. On January 10, their hard work was halted by a huge crevasse that cut the whole glacier across and with no suitable place to cross over. So the duo decided to head back to the Base Camp and probably borrow the aluminum ladder from the army check post at some later stage. Soon after, the bad weather forced them to stay inside.
The only possible solution
is a metal 3 meters ladder that I remember seeing at base camp near the
military camp in the middle of the Abruzzi glacier.” Simone wrote on his Facebook Jan 10th.
“So we’re back at base camp and tomorrow
we’ll travel 8.5 km to pick it up and then we’ll carry it with us on our
shoulders all the way through crevasses and seracs until the big and hopefully…
the last crevasse.
Hopefully it will be long enough to cross the abyss…”
No updates so far from Mingma and Jon Snorri as of until now they have chosen to stay off the radar.