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Surrealistic Landscape of the Icefall
Base Camp - Monday, April 17, 2000

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Prittie

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Hello Mountain Zone, this is Willi Prittie reporting for the Alpine Ascents International Mount Everest Program. Today we enjoyed another beautiful day. Our Sherpas moved out somewhat before 5:00 in the morning to head on up the mountain for the first carry to both Camp I and Camp II. We left a bit later about 7:00 or so in the morning to do an acclimation for a part way up to Camp I. And we did a very beautiful trip through the beginnings of the Khumbu Icefall, the lower part. It's always a very beautiful surrealistic landscape to get in an icefall with all the serac blocks and crevasses and variegated blues and greens and the colors that you see in there.

We were also able to hone our skills for real on some ladder crossings. We encountered three types of ladder crossings over crevasses that we were able to practice on a bit, went a bit less than a thousand feet up or so. We also began meeting streams of Sherpas coming back down from our team and some other teams on the mountain. It turned out that just below Camp I there'd been a collapse in the icefall which had taken out one of the ladders so nobody was getting through until this afternoon.

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So, our Sherpas dumped their load there and headed on back down to continue that carry tomorrow, probably. We headed back down, got back to Camp about mid-morning or so, gorgeous morning outing. The weather was starting to warm up in nice, warm, late-morning sun, it had been about minus seven degrees Celsius or so when we'd gotten out of bed in the morning. But we had predominantly clear conditions until very late afternoon, early evening today.

It's an interesting experience to actually climb over these ladders spanning these crevasses. Let's just say it's a very different experience than using the same ladder to clean out the leaves out of the gutter at home.

So tomorrow we'll be continuing acclimation, also sorting food to make up some more loads for Sherpas going up. In the next few days we'll actually be heading up the mountain for the first multi-overnight stay above Base Camp. We need to make sure we have all our food and fuel and those sorts of things all in place and ready for that. We've also been in the evenings checking out our oxygen systems, fitting oxygen masks, and learning about the use of the regulators and the Poisk oxygen systems that we have here.

So it's a pretty busy time right now doing final preparations for what's going to be our first acclimation foray up the mountain, like I say, in a few days.

We're looking forward to another good acclimation outing tomorrow, probably to Pumori Base Camp in the opposite direction, although I think I'm going to be dealt, well, I'm off to KP [Kala Pattar] tomorrow in final organization of some food stuffs while everybody else goes out on the acclimation hike.

So things are going very well, people are feeling very well, oxygen sats and pulses are approximately at the same level as they were the previous day. But in general I think the acclimation process is moving along very well and people are quite healthy.

So that's all for this day from Mount Everest Base Camp, but there will be more to come, bye-bye.

— Willi Prittie, Alpine Ascents Guide and MountainZone.com Correspondent

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