Today we finally drove over to Mount Cook village. Lawrence Kees
The large living area of our base at the New Zealand Alpine Club’s Unwin lodge was soon covered with STUFF.
The white boxes are for storing ice cores to keep them frozen as they get transported down from the mountain and into a freezer or freezer truck. They are very useful for storage of gear and food that has to be taken up as you can see in the pic. (photo 4)
A few sundry items in the gear list include:
- Flood lamps
- A generator for the electric drill and emergency backup generator
- Hand warmers,
- Radios and satellite phones,
- Snow shovels, snow stakes, ice axes, harnesses and ropes,
- 5 Tents (including spares) , sleeping bags, sleeping mats,
- Bamboo flags for marking routes in blizzards
- And lots and lots of food
The weather forecast for tomorrow looks possible for flying, Lawrence, Paul and myself are all set to get going early with the radar and enough gear to stay put if we get stuck in bad weather. – a basic and highly possible situation with the unstable conditions of recent weeks