A late Friday afternoon report from ExWeb give details on the plans for a Czech team that will be climbing Everest as a warm up for Annapurna.
The South Side of Everest continues to get more and more traffic, but Libor Uher and his Czech team won’t notice, as they are planning to pass on the South Col to try their luck on the Hornbein Couloir instead. Alan Arnette is reporting on his Everest 2009 page that due to the North Side remaining closed though, the Czechs are already working on a contigent plan just in case. Few teams use Everest as a warm up, but that’s just what Uher, along with Petr Masek, Radim Sliva, Petr Valchar and Ján Behun will be doing as once they finish up there, they’ll head to Annapurna to attempt the East Ridge. According to ExWeb, they’ll head to Nepal next Monday.
Meanwhile, Polish climber Piotr Morawski and his Slovak partner Peter Hamor, have plans of their own for the spring season in the Himalaya. Relaunching their “Triptychs” project, the two men will warm-up on Dhaulagiri before attempting a new route on Manaslu’s West Face. At the moment, they’ll share Dhaula with just a single team from Korea, as there are few announced plans to climb that mountain.
Finally, Alan also brings us a good story today about Lori Schneider, a climber with MS. Lori will be climbing Everest with Alpine Ascents and if successful, she’ll claim the last of her Seven Summits.
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According to their information they have sent to me they´ll try it other way – first Annapurna and then Everest.
Vojta, velehory.cz
Hmm… interesting. Thanks for the update.
While Everest is obviously higher, Annapurna is generally considered to be more technically demanding, so I can see why they’d do it either way.
Annapurna is more difficult than Everest normal South col route, however they´ll try Everest via Hornbein Couloir, where I thing only few expeditions have succeeded. And the Everest is their main target. Formerly they wanted to go for Cho Oyu normal route for acclimatization, but after closing Tibet for whole March they had to change it and Annapurna was the easiest alternative (easiest to prepare it as fast as was necessary).
Good point on the Hornbein route. That is a far more challenging way to go up Everest.
They’re definitely going to have a challenging couple of climbs this spring no matter which way they go. Should be fun to follow.