Everest is Buzzing with Activity for Next Window

Excitement is building once again for more summits as team after team left Base Camp for camp 2 on the south and ABC on the north. Their enthusiasm, however, was tempered by talk of monsoons in India; more on that in a moment. There were talks of additional summits for Tuesday, May 18th, but nothing has been reported.

As the weekend summiters return to base camp on the south, more details are coming in of summits. First up is on the north, Julio Bird’s wife Maribel sent me this email:

I just talked to Julio. He reached the top on May 17th at 7:00 am. He is now resting at Camp 2 and will move to BC soon. It took them 14 hours from Camp 2 to the summit. Apparently he was the first Westerner to summit from the North. I don’t have the details but he said “I was the first”. Our connection was not the .

He climbed with Sherpas, Lhakpa Gelu and Lhopsang and the large rope fixing team. His climbing partners, Bill Fischer and 70 year-old Japanese Hoshino Kohei both had left the expedition earlier with minor health issues.

To add an international flavor to my coverage,I want to highlight climbers from countries who do not usually receive a lot of western media coverage:

• The Indian team of Mountaineering Association of Krishnagar (MAK) reported in with some interesting news about the weather on the descent. Apparently they made their summit from C3, not the South Col:
  

  … 17th May at 7.45 am, their summitteers being Shri Basanta Singha Roy (aged 47 years) and Shri Debasish Biswas They had been guided by Pemba Sherpa and Pasan Sherpa who had summitted Mount Everest several times before.  They had made the ascent from the Nepal side and had started from camp no. 3 towards the summit at 9 pm on the night of 16th May and finally reached summit at 7.45 am on 17th May, 2010. While on their descent to camp no.3 yesterday, the duo had run into a terrible blizzard.

• Nepalese  cyclist Pushkar Shah  summitted Mount Everest on Monday(18th May, 2010)  morning. On his expedition, Shah had taken along flags of 150 countries he had visited. He had cycled through all the countries.
• Two Colombians, Nelson Cardona and Rafael Avila, toped out on Monday morning. Of note, Cardona had wanted to climb in 2007, but lost his right leg while training for the climb thus used a prosthesis on his successful summit this year. Talk about determination!!
• Basanta Singha Roy and Debabrata Biswas, two members of the first civilian expedition from West Bengal by ‘Mountaineers Association of Krishnanagar’, also summitted.

Looking forward now, Adventure Consultants’ Mike Roberts has a very informative update describing their climb to C2 on the south. he noted about 150 people heading higher and the recent warm temps are melting out the lower Icefall and heating up the Western Cwm. They left base camp at 2:00 AM to minimize danger:

Today’s early morning wakeup ritual was fairly typical: sleep deprivation; grunting rather than talking; bad humor; suppressed appetite; Ang Tsering praying with his Tibetan rosary beads; hugging the heater for all it’s worth; icefall and summit nerves kicking in; chuck in the odd throw-up for good measure (Tony, you got to hate that); and by 2.00am everyone was rolling clockwise around our puja altar and throwing rice three times for success, safety and luck. Caroline, thanks for getting up at that ghastly hour to see us off and for your wicked summit success art work!

As climbers leave for their summit bid, the Sherpas light juniper boughs that produce a thick smoke. On mornings like today with so many teams leaving, base camp has a cloud of smoke. You walk up to the alter with the smoke, and wave the smoke over yourself three times. Standing still for a moment, you go deep in thought about the upcoming effort – it is a very private personal moment. And then you swiftly leave your base camp home knowing the next week will be the toughest physical, and perhaps mental, challenge of your life.

North teams are also in full motion with Adventure Dynamics and the first wave of 7 Summits Club already to the North Col. Young Jordan Romero has been there a couple of days now.

The world’s media has caught on to this year’s search for the Mallory & Irvine camera from 1924. Multiple reports are quoting Duncan Chessell.

“I was at North Col (7050m) last week and the wind was 150kp/h and it was stripping snow off the mountain which has been there for many years,” he said in his latest message from Everest base camp on Tuesday. There is now bare rock exposed which has been deeply covered for decades in the most likely areas where Andrew Irvine’s body may be. It is my intention to search those areas en route to the summit and take this rare opportunity to find him and, perhaps, the missing cameras. I have studied this matter very closely and am now very familiar with Mt Everest. I believe we have a good chance of finding something.”

As regular Everest followers know, this has become an annual event and this year there is a mystery team making a serious effort to look for the camera and Ivine’s body building on previous years, if not decades, of work. Most keep their effort low key and avoid publicity.

For friends and family monitoring this upcoming summit bid, an interesting story. The wife of a climber on last weekend’s summit push told me she had not heard from her husband for over 30 hours, the last time he called he said he was 10 hours for the summit. Now she was worried. He was an independent climber so there was no home office to contact. Eventually she heard from him and he was fine, in fact had summited safely. It seems, his phone batteries had died. So no news IS sometimes good news.

Of course weather is a huge factor in any summit attempt and by now everyone knows it is primarily high winds that cause problems. And the location of the Jet Stream is the main culprit. However, heavy snowfall can stop things as well and this is driven by monsoonal rain coming up from India. Weather monitors are watching for this activity starting with disturbances in the Bay of Bengal. One of the reason Everest climbs stop in early June is due to the rain and snow starting up; and not stopping until August thus the spring and Fall climbing seasons.

TA Loeffler made this post as she has decided to end her effort this year:

According to our weather reports the weather during that window looks highly variable, and also it appears a monsoon is starting to form over the bay of Bengal so it may be that time is running out for this season on Everest.

And Altitude Junkies is taking a broad look at the overall conditions:

We will continue to check our daily weather forecast from our meteorological service and compare with our friends European service to decide on what day will be for our summit attempt. The predictions are looking good for a May 22-24 window but we need to asses the wind speeds for our evening at the South Col.

Another factor to take into consideration is the two large guided expeditions left on the mountain and their summit plans. We have been told the good days to avoid the crowds so we will decide and try to avoid any possible bottlenecks that were supposedly reported from above the South Summit on May 17th. We are hoping that there will be two ropes on the Hiliary Step, for for ascent and descent, and this hopefully will avoid the problems that I have experienced there in the past.

The talk of ‘large teams’ often dominates pre-climb dispatches due to the concern of too many people on the route. However, almost all the teams with 10 or more climbers (plus an equal number of climbing Sherpas) split into sub teams and ascend on different schedules. It is very difficult to support much more than that at the high camps on both sides. IMG said:

The tentative plan for the IMG is to split the team into two waves, with the first group of summit climbers starting up tomorrow, and the second group starting up the next day.

The effort to return Everest to a pristine state continues with the Extreme Everest effort. Working with the Fishtail Air high altitude helicopter,

After four days of strenuous attempt, we finally removed the Russian boxer Duganov Sergey’s body from the South Col. He was airlifted off the mountain today and is heading homewards to Russia.

Finally, an informative video from Robert Hill, NGNG team, with a tour of his base camp operations on the south. It is very representative of all operations at base camp.

OK, lot’s of activity going on with climbers moving all over Everest. I bet it looks like an ant hill from the Space Station!

Climb On!

Alan