Simonson

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Hello Mountain Zone, this is Eric Simonson calling from Advanced Base Camp with an update on the last couple of days. Since we got back down from our trip up to Camp II, the weather has deteriorated once again. Yesterday we had a heavy period of intense snowfall and wind which laid a lot of fresh snow on the upper mountain, which is something we weren't hoping for.

Today is better, but still seems fairly unstable and we've decided to hold our Sherpas down for at least another day, and maybe two, until things stabilize a little bit more back up higher.

Our plan is for the Sherpas to move up to Camp II and help put in the route at Camp III and then we're going to be moving up behind them on our summit bid; so it's kind of a waiting game at this point. We need the right conditions and we need safe conditions up high before we can launch our bid and before we will send our Sherpas up to do their final push into the High Camp.

So, at this point, everything's going well and we're just going to take a couple extra days here of R&R and acclimatization and when the weather gets a little better we'll be launching our final push. So that's the story right now from ABC and I'll keep you posted as things develop. Thanks a lot, good-bye.

— Eric Simonson, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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