Friday morning, June 20th
We arrived at base camp Tuesday, all happy to have finally reached our staging ground for GII. Everyone on the team is healthy and feeling well. Unfortunately, 16 loads of our gear is still yet to arrive. Included in that gear is the majority of our camera, computer, and satellite communications equipment, some of our personal gear, most of our base camp cooking fuel, and all of our high altitude fuel canisters. These loads were last accounted for Monday.
Every day we wait anxiously, hoping that they will arrive. At this point we have enough fuel to stay in base camp for one week. Our local liaison, Karim, left Thursday to hike down the glacier and account for the missing gear. We hope that he returns soon so that we can put all of our energy towards the objective ahead of us – climbing and skiing GII.
In the meantime, we have begun the initial stages of our climb. On Thursday, we wanded a route through the ice fall. The weather has turned overnight and we awoke this morning to one and a half feet of new snow.
We hope to send another dispatch soon but will be out of communication until we recover our missing gear.
Kristoffer Erickson via satellite phone from base camp.
