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Expedition Highlights: Good Music and Food
Dingboche - Wednesday, April 12, 2000
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Prittie

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Good morning Mountain Zone from Dingboche, in Nepal. This is Willi reporting from the Alpine Ascents International Mount Everest Program. We've got a beautiful, sunny morning here in Dingboche, although our wind is approximately 20 kilometers-per-hour, this time from the north east. Looks like we have a bit of a shift in weather here, so I'm hoping that's going to mean that we'll have a completely clear day, instead of a lot of afternoon cloud build-up and flurries — that's what we've been experiencing the last couple of afternoons.

We took a very nice acclimation hike up towards Chukhung, towards Island Peak Base Camp yesterday, up to about 4600-4700 meters — somewhere in that range. Had a good south wind blow in and increasing cloud and snow flurries over the course of the afternoon. Today things do look a little different. However, there's a tremendous amount of wind blowing off of the summit of Lhotse and the Lhotse wall, at this point, which we have a pretty good view of from our campsite here. My guess is there's probably no activity at all on the upper mountain on Everest today; looks like a very nasty day to be up high.

But like I say, we're enjoying a nice, sunny morning down here in Dingboche. The temperature is -5.5 degrees Celsius first thing this morning, and our oxygen sats are up slightly from yesterday, at about 89 percent, with about 69 average pulse rate. So again we can see, on paper, good, positive results of the acclimation process continuing.

A few words about that process, too, I just wanted to mention kind of FYI for everybody checking in on the Mountain Zone, especially for those of you who haven't been to Nepal or other high altitude areas but are planning to come either in the course of a climbing trip or a trekking trip. It's very very important that you pay attention to your acclimation and that you go slow coming up to these elevations.

We've talked about that in how it relates to our own expedition. We have had two separate reports now of a European woman actually dying at Lobuche, as a result of altitude illness. It's a very sad thing, if that's in fact true. But it happens, and it does in fact happen several times per season here. And it's really...it's unfortunate because there's no reason for it and it's very preventable. It's simply a question of slowing down, taking it very slow and steady, and listening to the signs and signals that our body is giving you and it's unfortunate that many people don't educate themselves in what the signs and symptoms of altitude illness are and therefore there are occasionally people that come to grief over here.

So please, all of you out there checking in, when you do come over here, educate yourself. Climb and hike smart. It's just no fun for everybody concerned when something like that happens.

A few things more on my last cybercast that I'd like to catch up on too is it was really fun thing on our part, on our way up to Dingboche, that we were able to meet our trekking group that was coming down — a Base Camp trek led by Wally Berg. We really had fun chatting with a really great group of people. Got to meet them all, and they had a wonderful Base Camp trek. Of course, it would be pretty hard not to have a great Base Camp trek, given the fact that Wally Berg was leading it. There's not very many people that knows the Khumbu like he does — everything from four summits on Mount Everest, to lots of treks that he has led throughout the region and here, and it really showed. Everybody was having a great time and we're really looking forward to meeting his second Base Camp trek when it comes to Base Camp in early May. We should be well established on the mountain at that point.

A few other things I'd like to mention, also. We've been mentioning a lot of real important high points that have happened to us, things such as having the personal audience with the Rinpoche in Thyangboche, but there's also some continuing high points I want to mention very quickly, one is the food on this expedition. I want to give thanks to Owangchu Sherpa, our chief chef here on the expedition. He has done an outstanding job, and by all reckoning, he definitely has to be one of the best cooks, if not the best overall cook, in the Khumbu region and we're reaping the benefits of that. We're eating a wonderful variety of very tasty food up here. That's a very very important thing on a climbing expedition of this nature because oftentimes it's difficult to keep interest in food as you continue climbing to higher elevation. The more variety and the more tastefulness the food has the more you're going to be stimulated to eat and therefore keep your health on the upper mountain.

Another ongoing highlight that I'd like to mention, myself, is the live music that we've been serenaded with by Vern Tejas. Those of you who have been following the Mountain Zone for a bit of time probably know that he does in fact play a pretty mean violin and harmonica and practically every camp we've had ad lib music sessions that have been great interest to all of us, as well as a tremendous audience of local Nepalese that show up for these things, and it's a real pleasure. Occassionally I'll pull out my harmonica and we'll get to jam together and despite my very lousy, short, amateurish attempt, Vern is able to fill in behind with his fiddle and even make me sound good, so I just wanted to say that that's also much appreciated by the climbing expedition and the locals.

A little bit about the wildlife front, we did think that we spotted a couple of lammergeiers, which are very interesting birds. We'll give you a full update on that on the next cybercast, as well as a full list. Also, we spotted a couple of very small weasel-like mammals on two occassions on our trip up yesterday. We're not sure what the name of them are yet, and one of our Sherpas had mentioned it was the first time he had actually seen these up here. So we'll work on that and include all that in an updated wildlife list in our next cybercast.

At this point we're looking on dismantling all of our camps and we're actually doing the move up to what's popularly known as The Pyramid, or what's also called, locally, The 8000-meter Hotel, just above Lobuche. That'll be about 4900 meters that we'll be going up to today, so that's a pretty good jump in altitude, and we'll be taking our time, nice and slow and steady, as usual, trying to get a good, slow acclimation schedule going here.

So that's the latest update from Dingboche, in Nepal. We'll be, obviously, checking in with more, and sending more photos and more video, as appropriate. Everybody out there, have a great day.

— Willi Prittie, Alpine Ascents Guide and MountainZone.com Correspondent

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