April 21, 1999

West Face of Lhotse

(Note: Nationalgeographic.com does not research or edit dispatches.)

Hi, this is Pete Athans, 23,500 feet (7,168 meters) on the West Face of Lhotse.

It’s been a beautiful day, and we all got up here no later than 3:30 p.m. Bill got up here I think about two hours ahead of that. The rest of us fellows, Jeff, Kelly, and myself, are all enjoying a beautiful afternoon here. It’s nice to feel we’re actually up high on the mountain looking over the top of Pumori and at the top of Nuptse, which we’ve been checking out for the last couple days.

Bill and I went over to Nuptse yesterday, and we were kind of scouting out the line for our ascent up [map] Nuptse, which we hope to do once we’ve concluded with Everest here. We’re just trying to figure out exactly what the summit is, and from 23,500 feet (7,168 meters) here, we actually think we know where that is.

That route was first done in 1977 by Doug Scott and party. Bill and I were just kind of marveling about the fact that by walking just a couple of hours and carrying about a thousand feet of gain above Camp II on Everest, we were able to get over to a place that no one had been to in more than 20 years. It was really quite a unique moment.

Download the Western Cwm QTVR panorama (160K).
Download the Base Camp QTVR panorama (167K).
(You will need the QTVR plug-in.)

We’ll be sharing a lot more with you as time goes on. We’ll be dropping back down to Base Camp. Thanks very much for being with us tonight, and we’ll be talking with you all soon. Ciao.

—Pete Athans, Expedition Leader