.

2008 K2 and Broad Peak Expedition

Dispatch Forty-five: July 14th, 2008

Day Forty-five: Snowy Day in K2 Base Camp; Statement from French

Today, I woke up at 10:00am (normally my tent is too hot to bear by 9:00, but today thanks to the bad weather, I was able to sleep in). I went into the mess tent and had the usual leisurely rest day breakfast. After this, I finally received the email with my Thuraya refill card number and within ten seconds, I had credit on my phone (the refill service has been down on the service provider side for days now, so I have had only 2 dollars of credit for quite some time; it’s quite a relief to have a good amount of credit on the phone as it is quite crucial to be able to talk to friends and family when you are forced to sit in base camp in bad weather for around 10 days). I chatted with my friend Simon, Felicia, my sister, and my mother for awhile. After this I finally managed to authorize my iTunes account on Hugues computer (running off my external hard drive) and was able to change the contents of my ipod (the same music for 3 months gets pretty tired very quickly). After all this was done, I was finally able to relax in my tent without the monotony of the same music blaring in my ears. If the weather forecast holds, tomorrow Hugues and I will go up to Camp II and sleep and then, again, if the weather forecast holds and the winds are at most 30km/hr, head up to Camp III and assess the damage to our tent and cache a replacement in Camp III (there’s no need to pitch the tent and risk that the 80km/hr winds that are forecast at Camp III will rip apart yet another of our tents). The rest of the afternoon was gloomy with snow blowing horizontally and the temperature dropping as the weather worsened. We received pictures of our tent in Camp III from Roeland and realized that the language barrier must have caused a slight miscommunication regarding the tent. The fly was pierced by a broken pole, but the inner tent was probably intact. Our things were probably relatively safe and dry, but we will see when we go up in the coming day. Below I have a statement from the three French on our permit (Christian, Yannick, and Patrick).

 

In photos:

Left: The Route close to Camp III on the Cesan Route (K2)

Right: Camp III and the route to Camp IV (Photo Credit: Roeland van Oss)

 

Statement from Yannick, Christian, and Patrick (French)

 

We would like to clarify a misunderstanding. We have indeed acclimatized on the slopes of Broad Peak but not above 6,500 meters.