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 Anderson's call from Everest LISTEN: [RealPlayer] [Windows Media]
You need a FREE media player to listen.Hello MountainZone. This is Robert Anderson calling from Kathmandu on the Everest Millennium Climb. It's Monday morning in Kathmandu. I flew in on Friday afternoon. I saw Everest, the yellow band was glowing in the sun, but above that it looked very black and cold, as one would expect for this time of year. It's still summer in Kathmandu though. There's a few tourists around wearing shorts. The early morning breeze has kind of wafted away the Third World smell, which makes it a bit more pleasant. I met up with Elizabeth Holly yesterday. She's the correspondent for Reuters here and keeps track of all the climbers. She reported I've got two more meters to climb according to Brad Washburn, which makes us all happy I'm sure. Everybody's pretty much left the high mountains now this season. And interestingly enough she reported that no one got up Everest this fall. There hasn't been anybody up since the spring expedition. I was just thinking that two months ago today I was on the top of Shishapangma with the Jagged Globe Expedition summitting with Paul Morrow and Ron Holt. We seem to be to be very fortunate with the weather as it got really came down a bit later on and certainly built up a lot of strange snow. Which is probably part of the reason there was such a tragic, tragic disaster with Alex Lowe and David Bridges on the south side of Shishapangma. I've met up with my Sherpas. The climbing Sherpas are Lhakpa Dorje, who was on the David Breashears IMAX film team, and also Plisan Gombu [Unintelligible]. They've both climbed a number of 8,000 meter peaks, as well as Lhakpa Dorje has done Everest a couple of times. The good thing about a small expedition is there isn't actually a whole lot to organize. We went out and bought the food yesterday and it took about 45 minutes. And deciding on oxygen and the climbing equipment took probably another 20 minutes. The other Sherpas will pick that up and we will be leaving a bit later in the week. Tentatively planning to depart Kathmandu on the 20th of November and take a couple of days to get into Base Camp. I'll be in touch before I leave Kathmandu, but otherwise, the road conditions look good up to the border with Tibet, and then on around to the north side of Everest. So we're looking forward to hopefully making a rather uneventful ascent into Base Camp. A couple months ago, no it was only about a month ago now, there was a big cyclone here and a lot of people got helicoptered out from the mountains and my trekking agent said "do you really want to do this? Should I send the deposit?" And at that point I kind of took a leap of faith and said "okay, let's do it, let's come anyway." Now that the weather's good and we haven't had any snow; it looks like we should hopefully be able to at least make it to Base Camp, which is a good start.
— Robert Anderson, MountainZone.com Correspondent
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