Dispatch 5: 17,600′ Basecamp/Day 9

div class=’posterous_autopost’span style=”FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial; FONT-WEIGHT: Normal;”Six thousand feet overhead sits a wave of windswept snow breaking over an eastern aspect. High in the sky, this tiny corniced perch has captivated my attention for nearly 700 days. It’s the summit of 23,390′ Baruntse. We will stand on it in the next two weeks. p /We are in basecamp today, we trekked for 9 days to arrive here. The scene is in a massive bowl surrounded by a 360° cirque of 6000m peaks. For those unfamiliar with the rest of the worlds fascination with metrics, that’s a toothy and continuous ridgeline that renders no real estate in sight lower than 16,000′ and as high as 27,000′. Dramatic, holy, humbling…Himalayan.p /Today we actively rest our well worn heels in our midnight colored dining tent. Intermittent sounds of filing our sharp ice tools and cramp-ons pierce the air where Talking Heads, Paul Simon and Pink Floyd set the mood. Sure, we are in the middle of nowhere and perhaps bringing pop culture agents like sat phones, pocket pc’s and ipods blunt the Emersonian impression of us in the wilderness but we’ll have plenty of sensory deprivation up highp /The next four days will be spent exploring on skis and developing our route to the summit. There are several options to gain a broad shoulder, ice, chossy granite or a standard line through a snow choked and protected gully. We’ll likely take the latter. p /We have a solid preview of the route from basecamp, but snuck in some time last night with a Chilean couple to fill in the holes. They summited three days ago and agreed that despite the technical difficulties present on the knife edge ridge that straddles two 6000′ faces, the sticky soft snow would reward us for bringing our skis. p /More to come on that as we enjoy our time at altitude and savor the days here engaged by the possibilities of all the terrain that will show us the way to the top.p /Live the dream,p /Ben Clark/span p style=”font-size: 10px;” a href=”http://posterous.com”Posted via email/a from a href=”http://skithehimalayas.posterous.com/dispatch-5-17600-basecampday-9″skithehimalayas’s posterous/a /p /div