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Everest North Face expedition summited Ama Dablam today
11:19 a.m. EST Mar 14, 2004
Our friends at Mountain.Ru just mailed over a first success for the Russian North Face expedition:
"The Everest NF expedition leader Viktor Kozlov called in to report that today at 2.05 pm local time the first group (Pavel Shabalin, Ilyas Tukhvatullin, Andrey Mariev, Yury Ermachek and Nikolay Zhilin) successfully summited Ama Dablam.
The second group is at 6200m. Today is mostly cloudy weather with fog. Things are progressing well, we are underway and feeling great about that."
Perhaps the most exciting expedition on Everest this spring will be the Russians. A crack team will be attempting Everest via the center of the North Face. This is a severe, technical climb to the left of the Hornbein/Japanese couloir. The guys are going straight up, on a clean and lofty face. The technical difficulty of the route along with the extreme altitude makes this one of the most difficult challenges in mountaineering.
The expedition is a Russian dream team. There are previous Everest summiteers, Golden Ice Axe winners, and many, many 8000m veterans. Koshelenko, who just made the first summit of Nuptse East will be on the team as well. The Russians also have a young 22 year old – Alexey Bukinich – Koshelenko pulled for him, and he made the team.
Image of Ama Dablam courtesy of Michael Brown and the Emmy nominated Serac Adventure Films.
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