원정 개요

C1 at North Col
C2 at NE Ridge.

Italian-Spanish Dhaulagiri I led by Merelli - Spring 2007

After occupying C2 during the night of 7 April, all members went down to BC on the 8th. They spent the next days stocking C1 and C2, and then came a period of bad weather with strong winds.

Finally on 25 April a summit push was launched by Bellingheri, Dalla Longa, Magri and Morotti, who climbed to C1 that day and to C3 on the 26th; Merelli, Panzeri and Quesada joined them in C2 on the 27th by climbing directly from BC.

On 28th all set out from C2 to establish C3 and to make summit bid on the 29th. However, Quesada turned back at 7100m; she was very tired from the previous days climb, and immediately ahead (from 7100m) was a 100m high wall of hard ice. She returned to C2, while the other six went to C3.

On 29th Bellingheri and Magri were having altitude problems. They descended that day all the way to BC, and as they passed through C2, Quesada went down with them.

On the 29th Merelli and Panzeri remained in C3 because of strong winds, but Dalla Longa and his wife Morotti, together with members of other teams (Catalans Josep Noguera and Roger Sellent; an independent Italian, Renzo Benedetti; 2 other Italians, Giampaolo Casarotto and Cristina Castagna; and German-Swiss pair, Richard Brill and Gianni Goltz) decided nevertheless to go for the top and began their ascent at 6:00 am. After about two hours, the German, Brill, turned back at 7800m but the rest continued up. At about 7700m the party made a traverse to the right away from the NE Ridge and up towards the top.

Morotti stopped about 30m below the top. Dalla Longa, her husband who had been ahead of her, fell when he was perhaps only 5-10 meters below the summit and passed her as he continued his 200m fall into a minor couloir. She has no idea why he fell. She went down quickly to where he lay at the bottom of the couloir (at about 8080m altitude). He was dead, and his body remains there. She returned to C3, where Merelli and Panzeri still were. All survivors of the summit bid were back in C3 between 9:00 and 11:00 pm.

Merelli and Panzeri were to go for the top on the 30th, but instead they escorted down two badly frostbitten climbers, Benedetti and Morotti. Both had become frostbitten on 29th high on the mountain and had to be helped to descend and to be cared for. Morotti's ten fingers are frostbitten (one thumb not very much, the others are black but expected to heal), her nose and one toe are also frostbitten); she can do very little for herself with nine bandaged fingers. All members from all teams descended from C2 to BC on the 30th around 7:00 pm in what was that day "a very long trip, very tired," as Morotti described it, but they wanted to get to BC as soon as possible to begin medical treatment, to have more and better food and drink, to warm the places where they were frostbitten, and to get to much lower altitude. Most of them came to Kathmandu on 3 May by helicopter from BC to Pokhara and plane to Kathmandu.

Morotti said she saw two bodies near the summit. One was at a small col on the ridge that leads eastward to the top; it is, she says, the body of the Spanish climber, Quico Dalmases, who went missing in 1989. The other was slightly below the Col (and is perhaps a German).