Dave Hahn

This is the hard part. Waiting. The jet stream is playing with Mount Everest. When the two of them get together, the rest of us find other things to do. Like holding tents down.

At base camp, where many of us are right now, the conditions aren't so bad. Not too cold, certainly not with the sun shining, and just nagging gusts of wind that stir up dust and dirt. We have a ringside view of the jet, having already dragged the tops off Nepal's cumulus clouds, now trying to re-arrange Everest's upper regions with those same bedraggled clouds.

You can sit with a stopwatch and time a bit of cloud to get a likely wind speed. Figure it is a mile from the peak to the pinnacles on the NE Ridge. If a cloud gets there in a minute, that is sixty mph... which would mean that the speed has dropped by about forty mph, which is not the case.

If you had your Camp VI in (we weren't lucky enough to get it there before the jet came) you can now spend a good deal of your base camp time with a telescope in your eye, trying to see if your gear has migrated to Bangladesh without you.

Our guys at ABC, Craig and Richard, reported a fairly hellish night up there. Winds in the seventies which wreaked a little havoc on the tents of some of our neighbors. Ours did OK... but of course, this is all a work in progress. What if it tries for the eighties tonight? I asked Craig to scrape up a telescope or binoculars for a survey of our Camp V, almost a vertical mile above ABC on the North Ridge (not visible from base camp because Changste is in the way). We need that camp, which is why Panuru put it in a relatively sheltered spot with a cargo net over it and a length of climbing rope holding it to the world.

Camp IV at the Col I'm assuming is somewhat buried just now... which is OK with me. Those are some of Sierra Design's and Mountain Hardwear's toughest models, and I figure the snow won't collapse them. And what doesn't kill those suckers will just make them stronger. Bury them and the wind won't bother them anymore.

Tents and gear are important. I think ours are going to make it through this jet play session. People though... that is the tricky part. This is just the time when all our team wants to be having a perfect rotation up the hill in preparation for a summit bid. Physically they need it to put the finishing touches on the high-altitude acclimatization. Mentally they need it because most folks go bat-shit nuts sitting too long in a dusty base camp when they came to be buff-gnarly climbers.

But the word is that the jet stream likes it just fine here for a few more days, at least. Go for a hike? Read a book? Crosswords, music, sleep, talk about politics (old politics... we have no news of the world). Talk about the color of your expectorations, talk about best-selling Everest literature, watch Pemba make your next meal (don't get ideas about helping because you will most definitely be in the way of such a hard and fast worker). Just wait...

We met some nice Chinese surveyors yesterday who are working with the South Side GPS expedition to measure Everest. They hadn't been able to make contact with those scientifically inclined climbers and were desperate to know just when they'd summit. My boss Eric [Simonson] being on that trip, we've been chatting regularly with them on the radio, so I put the Chinese surveyors on to them..."When will you summit?" they anxiously asked. "When the wind stops." Came the southern reply... I could have told them that... just wait.

— Dave Hahn, International Mountain Guides' Expedition Leader

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