The Madison Mountaineering Ama Dablam expedition team has arrived in their base camp at the foot of the mountain! Widely considered one of the most beautiful peaks on the planet, it’s not a bad place to call home for the next few weeks… The team moved strongly and swiftly up the trail from Pangboche, even collecting some trash along the way as we kick off our cleanup efforts. After dropping our bags and settling into our tents in camp, the team came together for the pre-climb puja ceremony, which is an important piece of our expeditions in the Himalaya and Karakoram. It’s good to be in base camp! Expedition leader, Terray Sylvester checks in with this dispatch from the Himalaya:
Hello! This is Terray calling in for the Madison Mountaineering Ama Dablam (6812m/22,349ft) expedition 2026 edition. Today is the 27th of October.
This morning, we left our lodge in Pangboche (3985m/13,074ft) around 8:00 a.m. and hiked up to Ama Dablam Base Camp (4600m/15,100ft). It took us just about two and a half hours to get here. Overall, our team is really strong and they made great progress today. Ama Dablam Base Camp is about 4,500 meters, but temperatures were really nice when we arrived. It was another clear, sunny day.
We had some ramen, some tea, rested a bit, and then we had our pre-climb puja. Today’s a very auspicious day for ceremonies, according to the Tibetan calendar. So we had our regular expedition puja to ask the mountain for safe passage. That went really well! And then we’ve spent the rest of the afternoon resting. We’re about to have dinner and then we’ll head to bed. We’re expecting a beautiful night tonight! The skies are clear, so the stars should be really brilliant this evening.
In other news, we started our cleanup effort today. We collected trash as we hiked up to Ama Dablam base camp, just what we could find along the trail. It was good. We got two small bags full and we’ll continue that in the days to come as we do our first rotation on the mountain and then possibly during summit push. But our crews will head out tomorrow to begin picking up trash above base camp.
We’re going to partner with Sagarmatha Next for this. In the past, we’ve donated old fixed-lines and other gear from Ama Dablam and other mountains to Sagarmatha Next. And when we visited them while we were in Namche (3440m/11,290ft) on our trek up the valley, they said that they can definitely use some more equipment, which is excellent material for their resident artists! We also partner with the SPCC on these cleanups, the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee.
Okay, we’ll be in touch tomorrow!
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:
