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The faces of Russian Everest
13:01 p.m. EST Mar 9, 2004
The team has put together some headshots of the Russian North Face Everest team along the trek to Ama Dablam. You can sometimes tell a lot about a person from their picture – if that’s the case, we’d want the dude in the lower right to have our back in a bar-room brawl. He’s got that crazy look in his eyes.
By now the team should have arrived in Ama Dablam Base Camp and are getting everything set up. A commercial expedition plans for about 8 days to get to the summit and down to BC. The Russians will most likely knock a few days off 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 is 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.
Collage of the team created by ExplorersWeb, originals courtesy of our friends at Mountain.ru.
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