The Slovak-Romanian team leaves for the summit tonight, May 10, at 12.00 a.m, local time, on the standard route (N-E).
Slovak Peter Hámor and Romanian Horia Colibășanu were located above C2 (6,400m) on Monday, when Colibășanu called via the sat phone.
They are spending the night at the altitude of 7,100m, where they have built the tent, Hámor’s Facebook page announced later on. The team is now following the standard route (N-E), opened by the Japanese in 1956.
The climb started on May 4, one week after the climbers fixed the route till near C2. But the bad weather – snowfall and lack of visibility – forced them into the U-turn and into waiting, again, for a new summit window.
Peter Hámor and Horia Colibășanu are joined by another Slovak mountaineer, Michal Gabriž .
They don’t use Sherpa support or bottled O2.
Horia Colibășanu has been atop of seven 8,000-meter summits up to now. The Romanian mountaineer successfully climbed Manaslu in 2006, on the same route, with Spaniard Iňaki Ochoa de Olza (1967-2008) as rope partner.
Colibășanu returned to Manaslu in 2016 to team up with Hámor in an attempt to open a new route on the Northside, after acclimatizing to high altitude on the standard route.
If successful on Manaslu, that will account for Hámor’s 13th eight-thousander.
Pictures: Horia Colibășanu, Peter Hámor, Michal Gabriž, Manaslu 2016
