British mountaineer Kenton Cool has nabbed the first non-Sherpa summit of the year on Everest, just a day after the route was opened. While not a whole lot of details are known about the climb just yet, we do know that Cool is a guide with Dream Guides and that upon learning that the route was complete, he moved quickly to take advantage of a weather window.
According to the Dream Guides Blog, Kenton topped out at 7:30 AM local time this morning, and was back in Camp 4 three hours later. After a brief rest, he was expected to head further down the mountain, an is quite possibly resting in Camp 2 at this very moment.
Not only did Cool grab the first commercial summit of the year, he also sent a tweet from the roof of the world as well. You can follow his tweets at @KentonCool, where you'll find one that simply reads:
“@KentonCool: Everest summit no 9! 1st tweet from the top of the world thanks to a weak 3G signal & the awesome Samsung Galaxy S2 handset! @samsunguk”Samsung was one of the sponsors for this climb, and he obviously used one of their smartphones to send the message from the summit.
It will be interesting to if there are any other climbers who will have a go at a summit bid while the weather is good. I'm still expecting the majority of the teams won't go until sometime late next week, but it all depends on their acclimatization rotation and how long the weather holds out. For now, it looks good though.
Congrats to Kenton on claiming his ninth summit of Everest. Well done mate!
(PS: This is my 5000th post on The Adventure Blog! Thanks to everyone for reading!)