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The clouds have been kind of passing in and out of here. We've been getting a little bit of precipitation — no more than two inches or so, and we've been watching the wind above them, very high, up above 26,000', steadily today.

The good news with the increased precipitation is that the route is actually filling in a little bit. So it's getting a little snow underfoot which actually makes our job of climbing quite a bit easier. But looking out to the north, through the diaphanous clouds to the Southwest Face which is certainly looming large above us, but not nearly as much as it was down in Camp II.

The winds as I mentioned earlier have been dropping off, and it's our intention from this point to go up to the South Col tomorrow, and then begin our climb by roughly midnight, and we hope to be on the summit on the 4th. So please stay tuned. Please climb with us. Stay with us.

I'm hoping that we're going to be able to go to the Col early tomorrow and re-drill a couple of our GPS stations, one of which I drilled in 1994. We're going to be doing a retrofit of that, and also putting up the weather probe for MIT and The Weather Channel. So it should be a pretty exciting day, and we're hoping to actually get some data downloaded telemetrically to Dave Mencin in Base Camp.

But at the moment, we're kind of basking on the inside of our tents. We have these small North Face mountain tents here that are just perfect for Camp III, and we're just kind of taking it easy this afternoon. Bill is kind of taking over the Aunt Jemima job here and is melting some snow. As I look to the summit from through the door to the other tent, I can see clouds kind of happily — I think happily —[inaudible audio]. He's probably going to be feeling so good in about one minute, he's going to come over here and kick my butt, so I'm going to protect myself here. So stick with us... Jeff and Kelly, the only real couple on the mountain this year....[satellite signal failed]

—Pete Athans, Expedition Leader

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