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Show 9 December 2009 Russell Jacobs uh .. .the snow conditions were very hard. They had solidified to a point where some of it was so dark blue that we couldn't even penetrate, uh , with our ice axes and crampons. MD: Um-hum. RJ: So we had to skirt around some of it and find easier ice to .. . that would accept our tools. And then the other formations that were exposed to the sun were big sun dishes that were ... basically, you could, uh, you know, you could put a small dog in each one of them and it was incredible to see. I'd never seen anything like it. And I haven't seen anything like it since. It was very .. .it was very unusual. So we made that, uh , you know , we made it to eighteen thousand feet, I think, on that peak. We felt pretty good. We came down and we regrouped, uh, to do the twenty thousand foot Tocllaraju. Uh, and ... so Jorasmo knew that he'd be staying there for three days by himself. Um, and we set out. .. actually, we set out one day to just kind of go up to about sixteen thousand feet just to look at ... get a closer view at the mountain and then come ... and leave a few things, sleeping bags and stuff there, and then come back down and then the next morning go up . And so that's what we did. And we camped in the rocks, uh, under the stars at sixteen thousand feet, um, and left at. .. before dawn. And traveled up, uh, and not knowing what we were going to be heading into, uh, we figured we had good weather. But it wasn ' t very long, uh, after sun-up, we realized the sun wasn't coming up. There were clouds. And it was dense clouds. And it was thick. And, uh, somehow, well, not knowing at the time, we were off route. We weren't on route and we had the storm coming in and we had managed to make it up, oh, I'd say two thousand, maybe twenty-five hundred feet of seventy degree ice. Uh, two of us, two roped parties. I was the lead climber. John Metos, uh, was my second, and he belayed me. And there was Terry Lien and Les 9 |
