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Korean Team Summits
Base Camp - Tuesday, May 16, 2000
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Hello Mountain Zone, this is Willi Prittie reporting from Mount Everest Base Camp for the Alpine Ascents International Mount Everest program. We are at Base Camp kind of doing final preparations and readying ourselves to go up for our summit push. We will probably, weather cooperating, be leaving tomorrow to head up to Camp I and to stage all the way on up the mountain. So everybody is psychologically getting prepared for that. We've had a pretty good boost to that psychological preparation: today the first team has actually, finally, summitted Mount Everest, of the season, on today the 16th of May. The Korean team that summitted about 11 o'clock or so in the morning. We understand there are two teams still behind them on their way to the summit. So this has finally opened the route and opened the way through some difficult conditions up there and I'm sure there's going to be a lot of people moving up in the next few days to take advantage of this, and hopefully our weather window will remain good.
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It actually snowed lightly here at Base Camp last night, there were low clouds predominately at and below the Khumbu Icefall, so the upper mountain was pretty much clear all day today. It sounds like they had good conditions up there. So a hearty congratulations for the Korean team, certainly, for summitting. We are hoping to be up there ourselves in the next few days, and hopefully we can have a good, safe summit. We all have our fingers and toes crossed in that regard.
Also it was a little bit of a sad note this morning on our expedition: Jack and Stacy actually left to head on back down. All eight of us, I think, over the course of the expedition have gotten...it's more than just a climbing expedition it's definitely...there's a lot of new friendships here that have kindled and been cemented by being together on the mountain. So we definitely wish both of them the best on the way out and also congratulations to Stacy's daughter for her graduation — that's his predominate reason for heading on down and going back home.
So hopefully in the next few days it'll be our turn. And we are definitely getting excited and, like I say, psychologically and physically prepared to head on up the mountain. So that's all for now, probably subsequent cybercasts are going to be through radio patch or perhaps somebody from Base Camp doing them from radio information on the mountain.
— Willi Prittie, Alpine Ascents Guide and MountainZone.com Correspondent
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