As a follow-up to the last post here is a news update on the climbers in Pakistan. Apparently, one climber was saved thanks to his ability to access GPS coordinates on his Thuraya. I am not certain how the coordinates were used but it seems as if he may have been sending his coordinates to his fellow climbers via SMS.
11:32 pm CDT Aug 02, 2008
(K2Climb.net) Norit expedition leader Dutch Wilco Van Rooijen has incredibly survived 3 nights exposure on the high slopes of K2.
He is currently in Camp 3, together with Cas and Pemba Sherpa. Yesterday, Wilco was located between camp 4 and 3 on the Cesen route thanks to GPS coordinates on his Thuraya sat phone, and later people in BC spotted him coming down very slowly under his own power.
It is for this very reason that I blogged about Twittering from Thuraya some months ago. The more easily people in the field can relay there location back to their support team the better.
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