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Base Camp Birthday
Base Camp - Friday, April 14, 2000

DISPATCHES

Prittie

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Hello, how are you folks out there in Mountain Zone? This is Willi Prittie reporting for the Alpine Ascents International 2000 Mount Everest program and we are here — we are at Everest Base Camp, a very large milestone on our way to what we hope will be the summit.

We had a really good walk today in predominately sunny conditions, arrived here in Base Camp at about 2 o'clock or so in the afternoon and by about 3 o' clock or so in the afternoon it was snowing with pretty poor visibility so we had that timed pretty good today.

Everybody's feeling pretty good, their O₂ stats down again a little bit this morning at about 82 percent average, pulse up slightly at about 72 percent — that's 72 per minute, excuse me — that's to be expected again, this early in the acclimation process. We'll — on tomorrow's cybercast — we'll actually give you a lot more information in terms of the exact location, elevation etc., here.

There was a fair amount of distance we had to cover today through some pretty rough, morainal type terrain — that's moraine for all you folks out there, especially the school children. What a moraine is, is it's material that is left over when a glacier grinds its way down into a mountain and it can be pushed up along the sides of a glacier; it's therefore called a lateral moraine. It can be pushed up, down at the end of a glacier, and it's therefore called a terminal moraine. It can be on the surface of a glacier, which case it's called a surface moraine and that occurs when all the material that is in the ice is concentrated on the surface as the ice melts in the lower reaches of the glacier. It can be spread around all over the ground, in which case it's called a ground moraine when the entire glacier disappears. And the final other type of a moraine, if you see photographs in books of very large glaciers in certain high latitude places, especially, you will see glaciers coming down with multiple black stripes — longitudinally down the glacier — and those are termed medial moraines, and each one of those is where two large glaciers come together and the resulting lateral moraines turn into medial moraines.

So we had a lot of morainal, very tough, bouldery-type things to go through today, and we were about seven hours or so on the trail getting here. So the good news is Kevin's birthday — a great time here at Base Camp tonight with a great dinner. So that's all for Base Camp for now.

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

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