Four New Zealand climbers, including Ben Dare (29), of Queenstown, are preparing to tackle a remote, unclimbed peak in the Himalayas.
Anidesha Chuli, or White Wave, is 6800m - 2000m lower than Everest - but expected to offer some considerable challenges.
Expedition leader Rob Frost, previously of Fox Glacier but now living in Christchurch, told the Otago Daily Times yesterday he expected the six-week expedition would be ''pretty strenuous''.
The mountain is in a less accessible part of the eastern Himalayas, requiring 11 days' walking just to get to base camp at 5000m.
Mr Frost said they would face obstacles similar to those faced by the 1953 British expedition that put Sir Edmund Hillary on top of Mt Everest.
''It's an unknown peak, so we are going to have to be figuring out a lot for ourselves.''
''We are going to be using porters to get to base camp like they did, yet above base camp there will be just the four of us.''
His expedition had the advantages of better transport links and they had been able to explore the mountain - 115km east of Everest - using Google Earth.
''That does help a lot. But even where you have extremely high resolution images, there are still some things that you can't tell without being there, in terms of where a likely route up the mountain will go; where's going to be easiest.''
Mr Frost said they would approach the mountain from the northeast and appeared to have the choice of attempting the north ridge, east ridge or east face.
''We are going to spend about a week, as we are acclimatising, trying to gain some vantage points to look across at all the potential routes, and we are going to be observing where avalanches frequently come down and identifying areas to avoid.''
Mr Frost said there was ''always the possibility'' a decision could be made to abandon the attempt.
''We're not just going to go all out and go for the summit, regardless of the risks.''
However, he considered the climb ''looks achievable''.
''So far we haven't seen anything that would turn us off wanting to go.''
Mr Frost believed the reason the mountain had not been climbed before was that it was very remote. It was also overshadowed by it neighbour,the world's third-highest peak Kangchenjunga.
Mr Frost came across Anidesha Chuli in a 1976 book written by New Zealand mountaineer Graeme Dingle, who described the mountain as ''amazingly beautiful'' and believed it may have been named White Wave by an international expedition in 1930, because from the north it appeared to be ''crashing towards the right''.
Mr Frost said the expedition's intention was to leave nothing on the mountain except footprints, and to take nothing but photos.
Mr Dare, a structural engineer for Holmes Consulting Group, moved from Auckland to Queenstown in 2008. He has been alpine climbing for six or seven years and devotes ''almost all'' of his spare time to climbing.
He was one of the organisers of the inaugural climbing festival in Queenstown last year.
The other expedition members are Andrei van Dusschoten and Scott Blackford Scheele.
The expedition expects to make its attempt on Anidesha Chuli in early or mid May.
The expedition is backed by the 2013 Sport New Zealand Hillary Expeditions.
