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 Anderson's call from Everest LISTEN: [RealPlayer] [Windows Media]
You need a FREE media player to listen.Hi Mountain Zone. Since I last updated you at Base Camp, we moved on up to Camp I, where we discovered most of the tents had been flattened, and then stayed overnight at Camp II. Then the next day we moved on up to Camp III, which is about 21,000 feet, just below the North Col. That night was pretty bad again, lots of blasts of wind. Again it flattened one of our larger tents — kind of tears the hoops out of the ends of them and they kind of decompress. The next day, though, even though we weren't feeling great after not too much sleep, we took a hike up to the North Col — quite an unusual experience, just Lhakpa Dorji and myself. We just [Unintelligible] through a rope in my pack and climbed up to the North Col. Not particularly difficult climbing, but a lot of fun, because you can weed your way through a load of tall seracs and kind of pop out on top of the North Col and you can look over to Nepal and see [Unintelligible] Cho Oyu and all the big peaks over there. And of course Everest is just above us from that point of view, so you can almost...you could almost say 'close enough to touch' as you're standing right on top of it. We came down that day and rested and Lhakpa started to feel a bit sick. We've been carrying quite a few loads up the glaciers since we couldn't get yaks up to Camp III, and so he's feeling a bit weary and he hasn't been able to eat in the last couple of days. So in the last — just yesterday, we came down from Camp III down to Camp I and spent the night there. Quite a bit better, quite a bit more air, just making that couple of thousand feet difference. He's still not feeling too good. I think also the trip up and down the glacier we're doing in double boots — it's just too cold for out toes otherwise — it makes it quite a bit more difficult. In the springtime you can practically run up and down in tennis shoes, but it's not possible this time of year. We're going to head back down to Base Camp today, and the main thing now is just to monitor's Lhakpa's condition and see how he feels. I've got two climbing Sherpas, but the Lhakpa's really the one — he's been to the top before and he's comfortable climbing unroped and going alpine-style from the North Col. Whereas my other Sherpa, he's great for carrying loads, but when it gets a bit steeper he prefers a fixed rope. So we'll rest, eat as much as we can at Base Camp and watch the weather. It's quite interesting because it seems to alternate, which is a bit frustrating. One day we'll get good weather down low, and we'll be very happy walking up and down he glacier, but at the same time it looks like the top of Everest looks like it's just about being ripped off by the jet stream. And then the next day you'll get bad winds down below and it looks fairly good up high so we're battling two fronts on the weather here. We'll update you in the next couple of days. Thanks Mountain Zone.
— Robert Anderson, MountainZone.com Correspondent
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