the view from our goggles…

The ColdAvenger has been everywhere this spring! It has climbed big ‘ol mountains and assisted two separate teams on their quest to summit  Makalu; teams Shared Summits and 2010 Makalu Expedition Valandre each were supported by the ColdAvenger.

ColdAvenger athletes Dr. Eric Meyer and Chris Klinke climbed with team Valandre to Makalu’s summit.  The team had a great trip with a successful summit, but not without some difficulties. Here is an excerpt from Chris Klinke’s blog about the trip and the final push to the summit:

The Summit of Makalu is really only about 3 ft wide and it is proceeded on either side by a little tiny ridge that drops off on both sides for thousands of feet. It is covered by ice and corniced snow and you have to traverse past a false ridge to reach it. It is very tricky to reach.

I finally reached the summit at 5:59 pm! Alexia and Sandrine summited before me, and I was followed by Phillipe. Yeti had  made the decision to turn around prior to reaching the summit ridge based on weather conditions which was probably one of the smarter decisions of the day.

As we started making our way down the mountain the weather progressed into real nasty storm. Now we were descending the ropes that we has put up and to add insult to injury, they were difficult to find under the snow that had just fallen. We finally reached the bottom of the couloirs after about 2 hours of descending into a worsening storm. We were all aware of the crevasses that we had passed over to reach the couloirs but none of us were sure of our ability to spot them in a white out in the dark. So we roped up and started our descent. It took me until almost 10:45 pm to reach our Camp 4. And along the way there were a few issues, but in the end we all safely reached our Camp 4 by midnight. Everyone was safe.

In the morning, I headed down to ABC. Being completely wiped out a journey that had previously took me 6 hours ended up taking almost 12.

What a great adventure! To get the full scoop on Team Valandre’s expedition to Makalu check out their blog here. Congratulations team! Now get some rest.

John B. Sullivan aka ColdAvenger Pro

Tags: Chris Klinke, coldavenger, Dr. Eric Meyer, Makalu, Talus Outdoor Technologies, Valandre

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 5:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.