Don arrives with the latest weather forecast. Today is unpredictable. The forecast calls for wind and snow. Sun is not predicted. The weather window is clear for the 4th and 5th of May, but from May 6th on, there may be more moisture moving in. Today’s forecast called for clouds, which ended up being true. There were thick clouds over the summit, but somehow I could not believe the weather report, which is a bad sign, and was surprised that it had come true. Despite what the forecast calls for, the weather will still take place outside and not in an office in Bern. But the office in Bern is a great help! Without those meteorology reports I would not have attempted Shisha Pangma. Read More
Cho Oyu Ascent Wrap-Up
“Miss Hawley told me: ‘If you can’t see Everest, you are not on the Summit!’,” Ueli Steck wrote in an email sent over the weekend from Tibet. “Funny, I just kept thinking of that sentence up there, the words of an old woman…”
News of Steck’s successful ascent, with Don Bowie, of the normal route of Cho Oyu, the sixth highest mountain in the world, came just 18 days after he made a solo ascent of nearby Tibetan 8,000er Shisha Pangma. “I’m happy,” the thirty-four year old alpinist writes. “Cho Oyu was a beautiful mountain.” Read More »