The Mountain Company Summer Newsletter 2007

Everest
This year has been another bumper crop for the Everest climbing season, as of today there has been 500 summits (and also 5 deaths).

The season started off on April 30th with five Sherpas from Himex summitting Everest followed by a bold oxygenless climb by Kazakhs, Maxut Zhumayev & Vassily Pivtsov. The Kazakhs were pushed to their limits and spent 48 hours without food or water. Their gamble paid off although they had to accept help from other teams on the way back down the mountain.

The huge Chinese team was up next, this was a trial run for taking the Olympic torch to the summit next year. On May 9th 17 climbers from their team stood on the summit and apparently also successfully lit the torch!

English climber David Tait was hoping to be the first person to complete a double traverse of Everest going from Tibet to Nepal and back again! David and Phurba Sherpa stood on the summit on May 15th and from there successfully reached the Nepalese base camp. He decided to quit while he was ahead and stick with the achievement of a single traverse and not climb back to the summit and over to Tibet. For more information have a look at his website http://www.davidtait.com

From May 16th to May 22nd waves of people reached the Everest summit taking advantage of the stable weather and low winds. There are still a number of team hoping to reach the summit over the next few weeks such as Project Himalaya and also the Altitude Everest expedition who are re-enacting Mallory and Irvine's climb (Leo Holding is Irvine and Conrad Anker is Mallory!). For more information check out their all singing and dancing website at http://www.ueverest.com

Kangchenjunga
Kangchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world, has only one team climbing it this year. It is a small Spanish team led by Oscar Cadiach, you might recall Oscar from his successful expedition on K2's Magic line in 2005. It is not clear at this stage whether or not this team have summitted Kanch yet, the last communication received from this team was on May 16th.

Manaslu
On May 19th Ralf Dujmovits' Amical team summitted Manaslu making this Ralf's 12th 8000m peak. There was a lot of snow on the route this year so Ralf and Hirotaka Takeuchi both had to break trail from Camp 3. They roped up in order to cross a snow cornice to reach the rocky summit. Ralf and Hirotaka arrived to the summit in the morning and the rest of the team arrived a little later.

Dhaulagiri
There was sad news on Dhaulagiri when two Spanish climbers, Santiago Sagaste and Ricardo Valencia, were killed by an avalanche while they were at Camp 2. Other tents in the camp were hit by the avalanche but Javi Serrano and Austrian Gerlinde Kaltenbruner were luckily able to escape.

Annapurna
There was a strong collection of climbers on Annapurna this year. This peak is known as one of the difficult and dangerous of the 8000m peaks. On May 23rd the climbers spent the whole day trying to find a way through the serac band on the route to Camp 4. At this point six of the climbers decided the risks were too high whereas Andrew Lock, Ivan Vallejo, Serguey Bogomolov and Fernando Gonzalez Rubio decided to climb on and reached the top on May 24th. This is Andrew's 12th 8000m peak and it is looking like he will be become the first Australian to climb all 14 with only Shishapangma and Makalu to go.