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Second wave of summits on Nanga Parbat and more to come!
09:08 a.m. EDT Jun 19, 2003
A second group from the joint Kazakh/International team summited Nanga Parbat yesterday, June 18th, at 1300 hrs (local time): Serguey Lavrov, Alexey Raspopov, Vassily Litvinov and Serguey Bogomolov. Damir Molgachev turned around, but is expected to try again today with some of the international climbers.
Russian climber Serguey Bogolomov has now climbed 10 of the 14, 8000ers. Today Inaki along with Damir and Gerlilnde Kaltenbrunner will be going for their summit push. Gerlinde has just returned from climbing Kangchenjunga with Ralf Dujmovits. Poor weather kept them from summiting this year.
Also today, Simone Moro, Jean-Christophe Lafaille, and Ed Viesturs are starting from BC to go for the summit. Ed is going to follow the Kinshofer route while Simone and Jean-Christophe will attempt to open a new route to the left. The trio plans to meet up at Camp III and continue on to the summit together.
Hopefully all these climbers will make it so they can run on over to their next stop in this summer’s triple-header – Broad Peak. Having been over 8000m on Nanga, the team will be well acclimatized for Broad, and then even further acclimatized for the finale – K2.
On June 17th, a first wave of climbers, Denis Urubko, Dima Chumakov, Maksut Zhumayev, and Vassilly Pivtsov summited at 0830 hrs (local time)
The joint team is climbing the Kinshoffer Route on the Diamir Face. The first part of this route is a steep couloir with a rock step at 5900m. At this point the team will have to climb 60m of vertical, sometimes overhanging, technical rock.
The core group of climbers on this expedition is the Kazakh national team who are going for all 14, 8000ers. This summer they plan on climbing three of them; first Nanga Parbat, then Broad Peak and K2. Many other strong climbers from other countries are also involved for part of, if not all 3 of the mountains. Simone Moro is one of them that plan to go for all 3 with the Kazakh team.
Ed Viesturs, who tried Nanga Parbat back in 2001 is back this year, climbing alongside Frenchman, Jean-Christophe Lafaille who will be arriving in base camp in 4 days time. Lafaille will have a pretty good head start right now as he just summited Dhaulagiri this past spring.
Image of Maxut Zhumayev and Vassily Pivtsov on the summit of Nanga Parbat courtesy of our friends at RussianClimb.com.
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