In reply to Kenton Cool - Dream Guides: Hi everyone! Back in Cham now = beer, macdonalds and all things good! Anyway so here's the low down on skiing Manaslu. Is it a first ever descent? Not sure - the ethics of ski mountaineering are even more complex than climbing! (combines ethics of climbing and skiing...)Anyway we are trying to clarify the start point of the descent and the 'completeness' of the descent by the austrians in 1981. If the discrepencies are minimal, ie they started at the logical skiing point and skied pretty much all the icefall to close to basecamp then they bag the first descent - if not then we do! Anyway, this is not the main point. I reckon both descents are 'way cool' and a great adventure, so I am not getting too bogged down in it.
So what happened? We set off at about 2.30am on 28th sept and summited around 9am. We skied from 15-20m below the true summit (the summit ridge wasnt skiable) at the logical start point. We were using oxygen. Feet were freezing in ski boots (had to thaw them out for an hour on the way down at 7500m). The ski started with a 40ish degree couloir at over 8100m which was cool. The snow down to 7500m was pretty bad breakable/unbreakable crust and i was managing about 6 turns before lungs burst. It's a bit like doing squat thrusts with an ill fitting gimp mask on - fun for a while...
From 7500m oxygen was off and full 60l packs were on and we rattled across some exposed glacial ice onto a 40ish degree pitch of chalky crust (cliff to the left) before traversing well right onto some great snow on a huge face at around 7200m - amazing ambiance and amazing to be making good boot top powder turns so high and so alone. We were a long way from the fixed ropes of the ascent line at this point. To avoid a big bergschrund we traveresd back left to our camp 3 at 6800m.From there great snow (bootop powder over breakable crust) took us to the icefall at 6250m. Here I managed a great wipeout as my right ski got snagged in a loop of buried fixed rope as i crossed a snowbridge, quite alarming.
We continued weaving through crevasses, sidestepping up short snow/ice steps and down hanging slopes to 5800m. A bit like a theme park, but more of a pain in the arse. By this stage we were in white out due to convective cloud building and wet surface snow was sluffing somewhat. But all turned out well as we followed someones old tracks across the final glacier back to base. Got there by 4pm, completely powered down!
I had taken my skis off once at 6200m to do a 5m abseil over a crevasse, as we couldnt see another way round in the white out. Emma downclimbed maybe 250m in the icefall.
So there we have it, a great adventure. Would probably get 4.2 E2 grade overall but hard to tell when so shafted at 8000m!
Thanks for your interest!
Guy