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Base Camp - Sunday, April 16, 2000
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Prittie

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Hello, this is Willi Prittie calling from Everest Base Camp in Nepal. Today was our puja day here, our Base Camp blessing ceremony. A beautiful day for it, we had zero wind first thing this morning, temperature of about 22º Fahrenheit, -5.5º Celsius. The average oxygen saturation is remaining around 82 and average pulse for the group is about 75 or so.

We had a Lama come up from the Pangboche Monastery to conduct the Base Camp puja, or blessing ceremony, the ceremony at Base Camp without which Sherpas really won’t go on the mountain. The purpose for it is to invoke the good will and blessing of the deities for anyone and everyone who’s actually going to be up on the mountain and hopefully work toward keeping people safer that way. It’s a very, very beautiful ceremony, it lasted most of the morning and it involved the Lama doing various types of chanting and blessing, rice and tsampa, which was then thrown on a juniper fire... also involved drinking chang and various other things and it was a very, very beautiful ceremony. Also, the burning of jupiter, juniper, in the fire is a pretty sacred thing.

While any one of our group is on the mountain every morning there’ll be a little bit of juniper burned and the smoke is an offering to the deities, again, supplication to keep everyone safe and healthy up on the mountain. So that was a beautiful morning’s activity and then in the afternoon we all dug out our climbing gear, dusted off the cobwebs a bit and just started checking out, making sure everything was good with slings and ascending devices, things of that nature. We also borrowed a ladder section and set that up between some rocks here in Base Camp so we could actually practice walking on these ladders.

Aluminum extension ladders are often used to cross very large crevasses, which there’s no way around. They’re tied in place to anchors in the snow or the ice and then you have to walk on top of these things wearing crampons and a full pack. It’s a bit tricky, so we decided to practice here in Base Camp for a bit, that practice went very, very well. And tomorrow our Sherpas are gonna be moving up to Camp I and II with our first load on the mountain and we’re gonna be moving up tomorrow for a bit of an acclimation foray to the base of the icefall and the first ladder crossing and then we’re gonna try a ladder crossing for real just to hone our skills on this.

So things are going really well here. Right now outside it’s about 11:30 pm our local time, just a couple of days before full moon and we have a completely, totally clear night out with the light of the near-full moon reflecting like molten silver off of the beautiful peaks around us, everything from Pumori on one side, to Everest, Nuptse and the Khumbu Icefall on the other side. Absolutely gorgeous night and makes one particularly glad to be in a beautiful place like this.

Well that’s all for now and we’ll be getting back to you again tomorrow with an update and be sending more information as things change. So-long for now.

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

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