Valery Rozov’s: "we, at last, started to work on the route!!!"
Valery Rozov’s messages were delivered with the satellite phone provided by BASK:
29.06.04
Hi, everybody!
We have got two significant events today. The first one is Arcady Seregin's (in the photo) birthday. With all our heart we congratulate him and wish to live in clover and to visit mountains. I'm going to finish the message and to run back to continue our celebration. And the second event - we, at last, started to work on the route!!!
Yesterday we managed to make route reco and to choose the route. It is the first day of normal weather today, and we at once began fixing the rope after a lot of infinite conversations how and where to climb. Finally we chose the west face for our ascent (in the photo). In our opinion, there is no logical route from bottom site up to the summit via the northern face. Any possible variant means a huge bolt work especially in the bottom third of the wall. Plus, in its average part the wall is less abrupt, that basically calls opportunity of B.A.S.E. jump into question. We plan to lay a new line between Spanish and Czech routes on the west face. Upper two thirds sites looks logically enough, the bottom third (that is typical for all the mountain) has extremely poor surface not readable from below.
Today we could made 3,5 pitches via the bottom belt of not so abrupt, but ice-covered rocks. We hauled up the gear and got organized to lead further. The wall seems to be not such terrible any more if to stand near by. But its sizes and extremely poor relief are simply amazing! We are in excellent mood and healthy. Well, I have to finish and our celebration is waiting for me...
28.06.04
There is bad weather in mountains, bad weather...
Yesterday all the day long we stayed in the camp, the snow did not stop falling for a minute. Today since the morning we had a trip under the wall aimed to haul the rests of the gear, to try to fix some ropes on ice and to make out local rocks. On distance the bottom part of the wall looks a continuous monolith, without cracks as far as eye can see. But a snow-storm started again and did not allow us to look close the wall, and we had to go back with nothing for our pains.
The abnormal bad weather of the last five days still does not allow us not only to begin fixing the wall, but also to be defined with our route.
The good thing: a generator is repaired, but we don't know how long time it will work: when working it sounds suspiciously. A correspondent and an operator of NTV, Denis and Andrey, stay here and today they finally managed to put on the air via the videophone the real picture and sound directly to Moscow. The guys speak that nobody has managed to do that in such conditions before.
All of us are healthy.
Valery.
Translation by www.mountain.ru 29.06.2004
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