Hugh and Harry

The attached photo shows summitclimb.com Ama Dablam expedition members, Harry Thomas and Hugh McGilveray standing in front of their nemesis, 6812 metre high Mount Ama Dablam. I took it today, at 2:00 pm in Pangboche village.

Our Everest and Lhotse team members are down here resting in this pleasant 4000 metre yak and potato farming village with a lovely river and birch-rhododendron forest.

Taking a low altitude rest in the "forest zone" was a Russian practicing a acclimatization technique first introduced by my dearly departed friend, Anatoli Boukreev. We first climbed Everest together in 1991. For more about that awful expedition, please search on "of friends and romans" on www.everestnews.com

While Lhotse team member Bruce Manning and I were sitting outside enjoying the first rain-free day we have had in some time, Hugh and Harry appeared mysteriously out of the cloud.

We regret to inform that Hugh and Harry's summitclimb ama dablam expedition ended in total failure with gobs of snow, cloud, and the very sad daily phenomenon of the ropes being snowed over, then frozen into the ice. Each morning, the team was treated to the horrid site of the ropes frozen into inch thick blue ice, and they were unable to chop the ropes out for neither love nor money.

All 4 teams that tried, have withdrawn from Ama Dablam's normal route (the southwest ridge) this Spring. Infact, no one has summitted the route this spring.

In well-deserved abject disgust, Hugh and Harry went off and climbed a few other local peaks, including Island and Pokalde, and reached both summits in total fog and cloud. On their post Ama Dablam failure trek, they crossed the famed Kongma-La pass, saw a few lovely lakes, and visited the tiny Sherpa village of Lobuche.

I guess climbing is like that sometimes, leading you down twists and turns in the road, into dead ends and one-way lanes, and out the other side in disheveled order.

Hugh and Harry told funny and charming stories about their expedition to Ama Dablam, with a team that worked well and laughed and climbed safely together, led by veteran summitclimb leader, Jay Reilly.

The pair stomped off into the sunshine headed for Kathmandu at 2:30pm today. Overall, they seemed fairly happy about the way things turned out on Ama Dablam. I suppose bittersweet would be more apropos.

In any case, because all of us at summitclimb.com feel badly about the weather being so awful, we would like to extend them a 50 percent discount on their next expedition to Ama Dablam, the grandmother mountain of the Khumbu valley.

For now, we wish them all luck in their next goal: the Anna Purna circuit in a weeks time with their father.

Nota Bene: In the photo, maybe you can see a bit of Ama Dablam's summit, but quite a bit of it is obscured by cloud. As you go off to Uni this autumn, Hugh and Harry, I hope you will be able to appreciate both the clouds and a bit of the true summit shining through.

Best wishes from Dan Mazur and all of us at summitclimb.com