Karakoram Summer 2009 expeditions wrap-up : Nanga Parbat, G3 and G4 summit push updates.

(K2Climb.net) “Die Welt von morgen gehört dem, der heute eine Vision hat!!“ The world of tomorrow belongs to the person who has the vision today. …

These words were posted on Gerfried’s board – as the Austrian climber fights his way up a new route (image) up Nanga Parbat.

On G3/G4, Don, Guy, Billy and Bruce have reached the cwm at 7000 but David sustained a knee injury and was evacuated.

Nanga Parbat

“The New Route Team (Günther, Louis, Hans, Sepp and Gerfried) has reached 6,300meters after leaving the most difficult sections behind,” Göschl’s wife Heike reported yesterday. “We had to climb 800 vertical meters in 50&60º steep ice – it was exhausting,” Gerfried told Heike over sat-phone.

The climbers’ plan was to climb another 1000 vertical meters today, but they had to settle for 600. We’ve pitched our tents at 6,900m,” Ger said in a later call, “we now expect to reach the summit on Saturday.”

Meanwhile, the climbers on the Kinshoffer route reached C3 yesterday. “The climb from C2 to C3 was steep, and entirely on hard ice,” Giuseppe Pompili reported. Tomorrow the Koreans’ Sherpas will fix the route to C4, with Miss Oh and Miss Go following. “As agreeded in a meeting on July 5th, it was Joao Garcia’s task to carry ropes to C3 – he’s a true Gentleman, who had to make two trips to C3 for it,” Pompili said. Joao, climbing with Pakistani Amin Ulal, is also aiming for a Friday summit, wind permitting.

“As for us, our third camp s a bit lower than usual,” Pompili noted. “Tomorrow (today) we’ll have a tough climb to C4’s 7,200m.”

K2

“On Tuesday we made a13.5 hr round trip from Base Camp to Camp 2,” Sean Wisedale reported. “It was my first push up to 6450 meters – an altitude gain of 1350 meters. Fabrizio was fixing line as we went, breaking trail too. There’s a lot of snow and it’s exhausting getting through it. Camp 2 is now established and we have a healthy cache of rope, hard wear, tent and stoves up there.”

Gasherbrum III/IV

“Don, Guy, Billy and Bruce have reached the cwm at 7000 and are contemplating their next move,” home team Camilla Tengborn-Fält told ExplorersWeb. “If the weather forecast stays stable they will attempt a top-out G3 or G4. David sustained a knee injury at a crevasse-fall – he has been evacuated to Skardu.”

Gasherbrum I

Bulgarians Nikolay Petkov, Doychin Boyanov, Boyan Petrov and Nikolay Valkov set up Camp 2 (6500m) on GI on Tuesday, Peter Atanasov told ExplorersWeb. On Wednesday, the climbers hoped to climb further up to 6,700m before returning to BC.

That’s exactly what Veikka Gustafsson and Kazuya Hiraide did. At the end of the day they reached BC for a 3-4 days-long rest before launching the final summit push.

Gasherbrum II

“Gordon, Ian and myself decided to climb to camp one and descend later the same day,” Phil Crampton reported yesterday. “Upon reaching camp one, Gordon, John Furneaux from the Canada West expedition and myself proceed to break trail to the start of the fixed ropes that lead to camp two. Both Gordon and John are professional ski patrol guys and have extensive avalanche experience. We found a suitable steep slope and dug an avalanche pit to assess the snow pack conditions. Both the experts decided that the conditions required a few more days to consolidate.”

“Our Sherpa crew and Jagged’s HAP’s plan to dig ut buried fixed ropes tomorrow,” Phil added. “If the ropes are buried too deep the crew will re-fix the route where necessary. We are expecting the jet stream to make a dramatic appearance tomorrow for a few days. If all goes to plan, it will leave as suddenly as it arrived and allow us to get high on Gasherbrum II with manageable wind speeds.”

* Previous story  : – https://himalman.wordpress.com/category/karakoram/

* Read these stories – and more! – at ExplorersWeb.com

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My Vertical World: Climbing the 8000-Metre Peaks – by Jerzy Kukuczka.

MY Favorite book …..

My Vertical World: Climbing the 8000-Metre Peaks.
By Jerzy Kukuczka, translated by Andrew Wielochowski
August 1992 edition, Mountaineers Books. Hardcover, 189 p.

My Vertical World is Jerzy Kukuczka’s autobiography, translated from his native Polish into English. Even translated, the book reads like some heroic Norse saga with Jerzy striding through it like a doomed Odin.

In the beginning of the book, Reinhold Messner says of Jerzy, “you are not second, you are great”. Great praise indeed for the second person, after Messner, to wear the ‘Crown of the Himalaya’, a title for those who have climbed to the top of all the fourteen 8000 meter peaks in the world, all in the Himalaya. Jerzy did them all and that too by either blazing new routes or in the winter, and always without supplemental oxygen.

The book is divided into chapters, the first, typical of Jerzy, it seems, describing his early days in Poland in a very brief manner. Then the next fourteen chapters describe his successful summit ascents to each of the 8000 meter peaks, from Lhotse, his first to Shish Pangma, his last.

The press played up the artificial race between him and Messner to be the first to do the 8000 m peaks. Jerzy is always humble and regards Messner as his superior. He is no jock mountaineer in search of glory, nor does he go into complex reasons that make him want to climb. He just seems to love to climb the high peaks, the Himalayas more than another.

Jerzy talks about being a young man desiring to travel to the far away Himalaya to climb. He describes the incredible privation and hardship that he had to undergo to scrounge money and food in the days of the Solidarity movement in Poland where he was in danger of being considered a food hoarder. However, all he was doing was salting away food for his next Himalayan trip. He talks about how he and his climbing friends would raise the precious zoltys by offering to paint rusting chimneys of factories and saving on the cost of scaffolding by using climbing ropes instead.

To me, the most incredible climbing done by Jerzy is his winter climb of Dhaulagiri. Here he describes his solo descent into a village in an unknown valley with feet rotting away from infection and frostbite. The villagers simply would not believe his story because no one had ever been in that valley before. Then without much rest, he met up with the Cho Oyu expedition and blazed a first winter ascent of Cho Oyu via the unclimbed South East Pillar.

A summary, in his own words, ‘There is no answer in this book to the endless questions about the point of expeditions to the Himalayan giants.
I never found a need to explain this. I went to the mountains and climbed them. That is all.

*Reviewed by Arun Mahajan – http://peakclimbing.org/

* see – Jerzy Kukuczka – famous Polish climber /Version polish and english/

** Previous story : – Books.

** zapraszam na relacje z wypraw polskich himalaistów.

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