Basecamp life and more outlook

Finally I get to collect some picture about basecamp life. If I describe it in words it is not very impressive ;): It consists mostly of sleeping, eating, lying around, resting, talking, talking smack, discussing weather, discussing outlook for the next days, sleeping again, eating, staring blankly into empty space, listening to music, wandering around basecamp and visiting other teams, sitting around, eating, thinking what the hell you are doing here etc. Repeat ;).

But stop, to my defence, I am not only lying around like a sloth, I started today to deduce manually the formula for the barometric altitude to keep my brain working a little bit, and I even succeeded! So it seems my IQ has not yet shrunk to zero ;). Though I did the formula only with the simplifying assumption of an isotherm atmosphere, i.e., temperature stays the same over all altitude levels. But so I have something to do for the next days, that is, adjusting the formula for let’s say the assumption of adiabiatic temperature change with increasing altitude ;).

And here a little gallery about Basecamp life at Broad Peak:

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Videos coming in the next days, uploads are still very slow and it is getting late today. And some info about Basecamp life at K2 also coming in the next days! Hint: It is not very different to Basecamp life at Broad Peak ;).

Outlook: Delay expected…

A quite typical thing for high altitude mountaineering has happened: Things are getting delayed ;).

At the moment it is not really clear when we can go up the mountain and start the summit push, and it is also not clear which route we are going to take.

On Abruzzi route, the ropes are fixed up to Camp 4, on Cesen route the ropes end about 500m below Camp 4 it seems. Here it will probably take some days until the Sherpas can continue. So at the moment there is some tendency we will go up via Abruzzi route instead of Cesen (as originally expected) as we can hope here to advance faster. But then again, we need to wait for the ropes to be fixed from Camp 4 to the summit, or at least we need support for the tracing. It seems that often there is a lot of snow above the Bottleneck and it is pretty much impossible for a small team to do the tracing on their own as we would get stuck and might have to turn around.

That means that we now have to wait a bit to see when the rope fixing / tracing continues and how we can best fit in as a small team with the big teams. As most of us want to go without supplemental oxygen we have to be careful not to get stuck behind the rope fixing team or slower people as this is usually a no-go without supplemental oxygen, especially during the night. So we still have to figure out our speedboat-strategy. I will keep you posted! But for now quite surely we will not start before the week-end, if at all.