2 summits, 60 toes and 60 fingers

2 summits, 60 toes, 60 fingers (just) and heaps of photographs and memories. We're all recovering with respective families, wives, girlfriends and catching up on the monstrous email inboxes.

We arrived back late on Thursday afternoon into Manchester and went straight to a restaurant in Chorlton to fulfil some of the hunger cravings... red wine, mozzarella, duck salad and so on and so forth.

A big thank you to those of you that supported us whilst we were away either through email, text, blog comments or by pledging money to the DEC floods appeal. It was great to hear from you, even though in many cases we were unable to reply.

We saw much of the flood devastation in a number of valleys and support is very much needed for the region. If you still want to donate you can do here:

http://www.justgiving.com/BroadPeakAscentTeam

Who knows what next on the agenda, the email has already had its first suggestion for 2013... http://everest2013.blogspot.com

Here's a tabloid style article about us that made it into the local Islamabad paper (Scott says he didn't say half of it):

http://www.dawn.com/2011/08/05/amateur-climbers-scale-broad-peak-2.html

And finally, the team would also like to pay its respects to Jeff (Chung Wai Hung from Hong Kong) who sadly died in a fall we witnessed from Base Camp on the 25th July. Our thoughts are with the rest of his team, his friends and his family. As we all said on the day: nobody deserves to die following our dreams...

Back in Skardu and on the way home

It's been all quiet on the communication front lately, mainly because we've had a manic few days getting out of the Baltoro.

 

With the weather looking only so so for any summit attempts in the near future and the already succesful summits in the team we took the deicision to leave BC early.  There is only a small Taiwanese team and some Iranians attempting a new route left and breaking a new trail would be very difficult with only a few people, following the heavy snows we had towards the end of the month.  We managed to get a flight change to the 4th of August however this left us 5 days to get from BC to Islamabad.

 

Under normal conditions we would have been able to get out of the gondogoro la pass in 2-3 days however the weather prevented us going over the pass so we had to make to decision to "run" down the Baltoro in 3 days.  So what took 7 days on the way up has taken 3 on the way down.  Some sore feet, broken shoes, mardy mules and heavy packs, but we made it down.  It felt a bit like doing 3 marathons in 3 days, which in effect it probably roughly was in distance terms.

 

We're now in Skardu, having showered for the first time in a month and shaved the ridiculous beards off.  Now time to leave on the bus back down the KKH as there were no available seats on the flight back.  Fingers crossed for a better journey back than the 40 hours up.

 

Then off to the Marriot for a beer then home…  See you all in 4 days!