Hello from Yellow Valley Base Camp!

The Madison Mountaineering Carstensz Pyramid expedition team has arrived in base camp after being delayed for several days before flying over the jungle and to the mountain! It feels good to be back once again after our return to Carstensz last October where 100% of the team reached the summit. Now settled into our base camp, the team is psyched and ready to start their climb! With good weather ahead, the team plans to make their summit push with hopes of topping out on Puncak Jaya, one of the famed ‘seven summits!’ Expedition leader, Garrett Madison check in with this dispatch from Carstensz Pyramid:

Hello! This is Garrett checking in for the Madison Mountaineering Carstensz Pyramid (4884m/16,024ft) expedition – our first trip of the season here in February.

We made it up to base camp today! We were so happy to finally be able to fly up by helicopter from Timika (31m/103ft) airport to the Yellow Valley base camp (4285m/14,050ft) at the base of Carstensz Pyramid. So, we are all here and we are so pumped and ready to get our climb underway! We got our camp set up, we had a nice dinner, all moved into our personal tents. It’s raining hard, but thankfully we have our Mountain Hardwear Space Station dining tent set up where we’re staying dry inside and we have our Mountain Hardwear Trango 4 personal tents staying dry, so that’s good, warm and dry! The rain should let up tonight, so we’re going to go for the summit early tomorrow morning and hopefully summit sometime after sunrise. Then make it back here to camp and then see when we can get back down!

But, everyone’s doing great! We’re excited to finally be up here after a nearly one week delay due to political conditions in Timika between the national park and the military, the police, the tribe, and the local entities. There’s a lot of different stakeholders and factors that can contribute to tricky politics here. But it all worked out, so we’re very happy to be here and can’t wait to climb tomorrow! Hopefully we’ll have a good summit day.

We’ll check in soon. Thanks!

Our Mountain Hardwear Trango 4 tents in the Yellow Valley Base Camp!

Technical skills review in Timika!

Team dinner while we wait to fly to our base camp!

In addition to these expedition dispatches, you can also follow our teams as they make their attempts on the world’s most formidable mountains on:

– Amazon Alexa devices with the Madison Mountaineering Flash Briefing skill:

• Enable the skill and add to your flash briefing to hear our daily audio expedition updates on select expeditions.  Just say, “Alexa, play my flash briefing.“

– Instagram:

• @MadisonMtng
• @GarrettMadison1
• @terray_s