Nicholas Rice: K2 and Broad Peak Dispatch

2008 K2 and Broad Peak Expedition

Dispatch Thirty-seven: July 6th, 2008

Day Thirty-seven: Rest Day in K2 Base Camp; Photo of Cesan Route

Today, after a blissful night of sleep, we woke up at 7:00am, ambled around for a bit, and had a long, delicious breakfast, just the four of us; Qudrat, Karim, Hugues, and I. Afterwards, I had Fazal prepare some water for washing clothes and got busy on laundry so that the clothes could hopefully dry before the bad weather that was forecast began. After this, Qudrat and Karim had showers and shaved, and our base camp became new again. We spoke last night to Gerard from the Norit team for quite some time. We discussed logistics for fixing to the shoulder and above, and of our plans to team up with the Serbians on the Abruzzi to equip fixed lines and break trail above the shoulder. The Serbians have three high altitude porters and have 24 bottles of oxygen in Base Camp. If they use oxygen, they will be able to work very efficiently when fixing the lines in the bottleneck, and this will help us all; on the Abruzzi and Cesan routes (as they join each other at the shoulder of Camp IV). Gerard liked this idea. We also spoke of Pemba, Qudrat, and Karim working together on the Cesan Route to fix the final 250 meters of ropes to Camp IV (or the shoulder). Hugues and I had a big lunch, and then we went to see who the new arrivals in base camp were. We went through each others’ photos and picked out the ones we wanted to trade (mostly of each other on the route). We also took one of my photos and painted on the Cesan route, as there are very few good accurate photos with this route illustrated. After we finished this, we continued our rest day routine of reading in the tent and updating our websites. Also, we saw headlamps late last night high on Broad Peak. We wonder who these people were and whether they reached the summit, as they were quite close to the coluoir at around 11:00pm. We expect the weather to remain bad for quite a few more days, so we will probably remain in base camp until the summit weather window begins.