Hi it's Alix.
So Valerio climbed to Camp 4 on the Cesen Route today, thus completing it and reaching just over 8000m. He and one other climber, a Sherpa from Nepal called Ming Dorje I think, are completely alone on the mountain as all other teams and climbers on both routes returned to Base Camp this morning. As the seasons on the other 8000ers have finished I'm pretty sure he's the highest earth-bound person on the world for the next 12 hours...
It's very hard to hear him on the Sat phone but this is what I understood:
Everyone has been battling through extremely heavy snow from around 7800m and have struggled to lay ropes. It's impossible to get close enough to hard ice or rock, and the danger of avalanches is just too high. So no one has managed to get higher than Camp 4 on the Abruzzi (at 7900m).
However Valerio was still feeling strong, and the weather is ironically perfect, so when the team, still at Camp 3, decided to descend this morning he and Mingwa decided to at least complete the Cesen trail. The accomplished this and hit 8000 at around 2pm.
I'll let him correct all my mistakes and write his own account in a few days time. I have attached a random picture from Google for now.
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