It smells like summit successes on the eight-thousanders. No matter whether on Mount Everest, Lhotse, Dhaulagiri, Makalu, Kangchenjunga or Cho Oyu and Shishapangma – everywhere a three-to-four-day weather window with low wind speeds is expected in the summit area above 8,000 meters from Sunday on – even though snow showers are predicted too. Mingma Gyalje Sherpa, head of the Nepalese expedition operator “Imagine”, announced today that his Lhotse team will leave the base camp on Friday for a summit attempt.
Part two of the “Project Possible”
Also on Dhaulagiri the signs point to summit push. Nirmal Purja and his team have set themselves the goal of reaching the highest point at 8,167 metres on Sunday. If the 36-year-old climber from Nepal succeeds, he will have scaled his second eight-thousander this season after Annapurna. As reported, “Nims”, a former soldier of the British Gurkha brigade, wants to climb all 14 eight-thousanders in only seven months. After his success on Annapurna, part one of his “Project Possible”, he was one of the rescuers of the Malaysian Wui Kin Chin, who later died in a hospital in Singapore.
Most difficult part of the new route mastered
The two Romanians Horia Colibasanu and Marius Gane along with Slovakian Peter Hamor are also climbing on Dhaulagiri. The trio wants to open a new route in Alpine style – i.e. without fixed high camps, Sherpa support and bottled oxygen – via the still unclimbed Northwest Ridge. “We finally finished the first, but technically most difficult part of our first ascent. We climbed the wall and the chimney of the ridge’s entry tower,” Hamor writes today on Facebook, adding that they were “slightly bruised” but not seriously injured by falling stones and pieces of ice: “If the weather gets better, I believe we can reach the summit in the upcoming days.”
“Last chance” on Langtang Lirung
The Polish climber Adam Bielecki and German Felix Berg are still acclimatizing. They are planning a new route through the rarely climbed Annapurna Northwest Face this spring, also in Alpine style. If the conditions are right, they want to scale the 7,227-meter-high Langtang Lirung at the weekend. “If we want to go to Annapurna (we want!), this is the proverbial “’last chance’,” Adam writes today on Facebook. “Keep your fingers crossed for the weather, the rest we would manage ourselves.”
