New summit window

April 25th: Just a quick note and some photos. We think we see a summit window and will leave BC the morning of the 27th and summit the morning of May 1st give or take a day. Of course, no guarantees but so far the forecasts agree. We had a resupply helicopter during a snow storm yesterday; henceforth referred to as the deli-copter. I'm pretty sure the pilot had less than 300m visibility in our little canyon but knew he could drop below the cloud right out of camp. Pretty exciting when all we've been doing is bouldering and eating for the past week. Speaking of, attached photos: We've got a dozen boulders with a couple dozen routes around camp and are ready to write the Annapurna I North BC bouldering guide book. I'm learning bad Russian, German, and Italian bouldering directions and supplementing bad Spanish and English. 1st photo should be our mini-climbing-UN 360° photo on a 10m traverse.

The next photo credit goes to the Spanish team from just above camp 2. The avalanche is in the infamous gully between C2 and C3. In my last blog, I mentioned this gully goes every few hours and we watched this river of snow pass just hundreds of feet beneath us. Well, one of the Spanish cameramen at C2 caught this incident I was too busy and wide eyed to get my own camera out for. 

The last 360° photo is right after the snow storm that the deli-copter landed in; sunset lit up the side of the summit and the 100kmph plum of snow blowing off the summit. I have video of this beautiful, fiery cloud in motion I'll share when I get back. Also, you can see my tent serving as an anchor to a set of prayer flags for a friend. Today is the 1st anniversary of the earthquake so we'll be holding a quick puja for fallen friends here. Sending love to Garrett, Alan and many others over at EBC today. 

It has been a long haul but we're all excited to start our push for May 1st. I'll post our progress on my sat beacon as long as it has battery:https://share.delorme.com/MatthewDuPuy
I'll try to repair its broken link to some social media but it looks like it is still posting to MapShare and Twitter just fine.  (@why_mutate_dup)

Chris's blog is here and has been picked up and re-printed by her home town news paper!:
http://chrisjensenburke.com/blog/

Thanks to Altitude-Seven.com and Michael Fagin for weather! I'll check the report tonight and if the post-jetstream snow storm is kind, we're a go!