More from Pakistan

Another quick update this morning from Dave Watson on his way to Broad Peak and K2…

The team is now in Skardu, a remote city of 200,000 people. It took about 30 hours of driving along the Karakoram Highway to get here from Islamabad. We were lucky to get here when we did as the road washed out behind us. We noticed some very light rain, but it must have been pouring up high because there were landslides that blocked the road in a few places. We have just finished sorting out the gear, creating 50lb loads for the porters to carry in. We estimate that we'll need about 70 porters to handle all of the gear and food.

Another issue we are sorting out is the laptop/sat phone connection. Ideally we should have sorted this in the States but we bought another computer the day before we left and the phones were 1000 miles away with one of the other team members. We have got things pretty well dialed, but are making small tweaks to improve data transfer rates and reliability.

Tomorrow we leave for Askole (8-hr drive). From there we start on foot, trekking along the Baltoro Glacier until we reach Broad Peak basecamp. We'll start our acclimatization on Broad Peak as we believe it is slightly safer and easier than K2. However the guys are all super stoked for K2, so it will be interesting to see how patient we can be.

Having fun in lovely Pakistan,
Dave

Click on the K2 Tall Mountain label to see all the dispatches from Dave's trip:
http://wherewillyouski.blogspot.com/search/label/K2%20Tall%20Mountain