Climbing Mt Cheget

This morning we set off from our hotel at Azau for the chairlifts at the Mt Cheget ski area, about 5km from where we were staying. Azau was a four hour bus ride yesterday from Min Vody and took us past a lot of Soviet era concrete monoliths! The lifts at Cheget take you as high as 3,050m from where we climbed up to Mt Cheget (abt 3,470m). The climb was a mixture of snow and rock so the snow walking was a new experience for me as well as a couple of others. Fortunately there was snow but no ice, and it was quite warm (prob 10 degrees on top) so it was t-shirts only by the end. The photo is from the summit of Mt Cheget looking across to the twin peaks of Mt Elbrus. Today's climb was purely an acclimitisation climb to get used to the higher altitude.

The majority of our group is from a Slovenian Alpine Club who are an interesting bunch. There are eight others in the group - the four Aussies, two Americans, a Canadian and a Pom. I had great delight in informing the Pommy about England's loss to the Dutch in the in the Twenty20 World Cup!!