After one week back in Oslo, I’m now ready for my second Seven Summit: Mt. Elbrus in Russia, the highest mountain in Europe at 5642 meters.
Mr. Nansen and I will take a flight to Moscow tomorrow morning and continue by plane to Mineralnye Vody in the North Caucasus region, close to the border to Georgia, on Saturday. From July 15th to 20th we will slowly move up on the mountain, starting at 2000 m in the town Terskol, and with our highest camp Priyut/Diesel hut at 4160 m, and we will have time for several acclimatization tours. From Priyut it is 1500 meters altitude difference up on our summit day, which is more than we had on both Kilimanjaro (1300 m) and Mont Blanc (1000 m), so this is going to be a tough day. Our schedule has three opportunities for the summit (in case we are stopped by bad weather), so we should reach the top between July 21st and 23rd.
Since the prices for data roaming in Russia are sky-high and I assume that we won’t have a WLAN available, we’ll have to try a back-up solution to update the website (MMS to Klaus, Klaus posting to blog). Anyway, the updates might not be as frequent as on the Mont Blanc trip.