Adam Bielecki after spending a night in camp 1.

• Report of January 27, 2012, Friday
• Wind at 6,000 m above sea level – 30 km/h, at 7,000 m above sea level – 45 km/h (yesterday at 6,000 m it blew with 45 km/h)
• Cloudiness 100%; clouds’ level – 6,200 m above sea level
• No snowfall (approx. 15 cm of snow fell at night)
• Temperature in the base camp is -20°C (yesterday at 6,000 m it was -30°C)

Adam Bielecki after a night in camp I

Yesterday at 4:30 PM local time, Adam Bielecki together with two high altitude porters, Ali and Shaheen, established camp 1 at 5,930 m above sea level. Today at 6 AM local time Artur and Janusz have set off to transport a part of deposit to camp 1 and tomorrow they are going to make a reconnaissance of a route towards camp 2. Today Adam, Shaheen and Ali have descended to the base camp at approximately 2 PM.

Adam describes yesterday’s set off in the following way:

We set off at 6:40 AM and already at 9:30 AM, after a fast march, we reached the place, where we left our deposit two days ago. It turned out that the deposit place was only 30 minutes away from the so-called lower plateau, through which our route led. The route was not very difficult despite the cracks covered with snow. However, the next glacial barrier turned out to be difficult in terms of finding one’s way and very dangerous – each of us fell into a crack at least ones and Ali even experienced a 4-meter fall into one of them. A route through numerous brittle snow bridges and ice walls led us to the upper plateau. Its terrain seemed technically easy – almost flat snow surface, however, it turned out that the plateau was transected with very wide, parallel cracks that forced us to weave our way and follow our footsteps back in order to walk around the cracks. It was impossible to walk around one of them, thus we had to walk down to its bottom (approx. 40 m) and search for an exit on the other side. We managed to find it after approx. 300 m of walking on the bottom of the crack!

Weather conditions were gradually worsening during the day, what basically meant increasingly stronger wind. Camp 1 was reached at approx. 4:30 PM; we put up a tent while copying with a very strong wind. In practice it meant a constant fight with possible frostbites; after every single activity we had to warm up our fingers. At approx. 6:00 PM we could rest in our sleeping bags; we were too exhausted to eat.

Although today in the morning our footsteps have been partly covered with snow, GPS has helped us to find our way back without problems. At approx. 11:00 AM, halfway through the lower plateau, we have met Janusz and Artur, given them the GPS with the marked route to camp 1, wished them luck and after three hours reached the base camp; on our way we have also rigged the ropes next to two especially nasty cracks.

At the time of writing this report (4:40 PM), Artur and Janusz are approx. one hour away from camp 1.

Dodał marek karnecki dnia 28.01.2012