Friends in the High Places

Time to get this party started!  I had hoped to start posting on this blog earlier but training has been taking priority.  Training for what you say?  I was originally planning to post about preparing to climb Cho Oyu, an 8000m peak on the border of Nepal and Tibet.  We had planned to arrive in Kathmandu on 11 April 2011, and cross over into Tibet to try the “standard route” up the north side of Cho Oyu, but the rumors were flying that the Chinese were likely to close Tibet in the spring.  Rather than take the chance of getting shut out at the border, we decided to change our objective to Lhotse, which is completely inside Nepal and thus not affected by whatever happens in Tibet.  Lhotse is right next to Mt. Everest – actually the “South Col”, a saddle between Everest and Lhotse, connects the two mountains.  For more information on Lhotse, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lhotse

While I’m not a fan of last minute changes, now that I’ve had a few weeks to get travel switched over and look at the route, I’m actually pretty psyched.  The original plan was to try Cho Oyu, which is the world’s 6th highest mountain, as a test run for attempting Everest next spring.  Climbing Lhotse essentially means we’ll be sharing most the climb with this year’s Everest teams.  We will trek into base camp together, and the Everest and Lhotse routes share camps 1, 2 and 3, before the routes split between camp 3 and the high camps of Lhotse to the South and Everest to the North.  So I suppose we couldn’t have much of a better opportunity to prepare for Everest than this.