Monday 28 February 2011

Intro

In just over a month on 2 April, I will be flying to Kathmandu to attempt to climb Mount Everest.

If all goes to plan, this will be the third time I have climbed over the fabled 8000m mark and after a near miss last year I am hoping to go a little bit higher and reach the top of the world some time between 18th May and 31st May.

I will be climbing the North East ridge route with Adventure Peaks.

I will be using this blog to share the experience and keep friends and family updated of my progress, live updates will also be available on the Adventure Peaks website news section and I will post the link once it is live.  I will be able to provide progress updates while I am at base camp and advanced base camp and will also update on preparations before I leave the UK.  Unfortunately will be unable to post any photos of this years expedition until my return, we will be relying on a Bgan Satellite connection to keep in touch with the outside world and the cost of sending a single photo over a Bgan link is well over £100 so afraid you will have to wait for those.

I have included a live weather feed and GPS tracking of the teams progress on the Blog pages which hopefully people will find interesting and many thanks to Greg for setting the GPS link up.

I have also included a detailed kit list, training and preparation and trip reports from my previous high altitude climbs, as much as a record for myself as anything else, but hopefully some people will find them interesting and useful.  The trip reports were all written well after the event and are pretty dry, the mind has a natural tendency to "forget" the bad bits (otherwise none of us would be here or so I am told!) and feelings at the time so I am hoping that by keeping a live account this year I will be able to get some of these experiences (both positive and negative) across a bit more vividly.

I am still working the other blog pages, so they are very much "in draft" but expect to complete them in the coming weeks whereon I will circulate the address.