Oct 11 | Shangri-La: Living for the Half Hour

By Jimmy Chin

After staying in camp for three days, observing the weather patterns, the only information we could glean for certain was that the weather here changes every half hour. We hadn’t seen anything super nasty yet, just unsettled waves of rain, hail, snow, thunder and an occasional blast of sunshine. So, on the fourth day, when we woke up to high gray skies and no wind, we headed up towards the mountain. Our plan was to grab our gear stash, carry it up to the ridge and establish camp at around 17,000ft. With light packs, we had reached our cache at noon, loaded up our packs (and I mean LOADED our packs) and set off to put in the boot pack up the 1500ft face up to the west ridge. Once on the ridge, shouldering our cumbersome and awkward packs, we climbed and carefully navigated the knife edge ridge of snow and rock. There was huge exposure on either side. The snowy hanging glacier at 17,000ft seemed like the best place to set our high camp. With a steller sunset and approaching full moon, we chose to spend the night, hope for clear weather and go for the summit in the morning. We cozied up in our tent and started melting water for the following day. We set our alarms for 4am, hoping for a clear day.

More soon.
Ingrid, Giulia, Kasha, Jimmy

Photography: ©Jimmy Chin

Comments

[Cody]

Wow! SO beautiful!! :)

[The north face]

WOW! So COOL!