|
K2 WINTER POLISH EXPEDITION NEWS
9 January, 2003
Next letter from Denis Urubko:
My
congratulations - You're very fast. Exactly I send you the message,
and now see it on your site. Ilias and Gia fixed 250 m of ropes on the first steep step. Next day me and Vassiliy continued the job - Vasia lead and make 350 m between seracs. Here I have to explain, that according to idea of our leader we have to fix roupes on the whole route for good safety and organisation of camps. On Jan. 03 team of Polish - Darek, Machek, Marchin and Piotr - worked in very bad weather conditions but managed to haul 400 meters of rope to the highest point and fixed 200 meters. Guia and Ilias started their day on steep seracs and make 100 m more. In the Base camp the temperature is still -30 Centigrade, and not higher than -18 at noon. We are very glad that now K2 massive does not hide sun from us all the time. At 8 AM Vassily and me left the Base Camp for our part of the task. Vasya took the biggest part of our load - we carry tent, karimats, sleeping bags, primus, ropes, pitons. He did it according to our tradition that leader in this day should be free for good work. And I feel it - we fixed 250 m of rope on the ice slope and reached big bergshrund at 6000 m of altitude. Here we build good place for the tent, and established Camp 1. It was a good result of job of our team. It was very good also because Wielicki celebrates his birthday on Jan 05. Expedition members made presents for the leader.
At the moment 350 m more ropes after Camp 1 are also ready. Two Polish
groups made Camp 1 comfortable and continued to work on the route. Gia,
Ilias, Vassiliy and me will now join into one team, since difficulties
of the route increase every day. Tomorrow we are leaving to ABC. Good
luck! Denis 01.08.03, 06-35 p.m. Sponsors of Denis: MANARAGA, SALICE, CSCA of Kazakhstan Translated by Andrey Shiryaev
|