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Weather Fluctuates at Camp II
Camp II - Wednesday, May 3, 2000

DISPATCHES

Prittie

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Hello Mountain Zone, this is Willi Prittie reporting from Camp II at 6400 meters on Mount Everest with the Alpine Ascents Mount Everest program. Well we had another of what we would classify as a rest and acclimation day here today. The weather had improved quite a bit over the morning, we had quite a bit of sunny conditions, which tends to stabilize the six to 10 inches of fresh snow that we had all over here.

There are a few people who made their way down from Camp III; it's my understanding now that Camp III is pretty much deserted. Everybody who'd started up to Camp III pretty much turned back at about the base of the Lhotse Face climb due a lot of fresh snow, a lot of very windy conditions.

You're probably hearing a lot of background noise here right now. The weather has deteriorated over the afternoon and the winds have risen quite a bit. I'm sharing a cook tent with about 15 of our great Sherpa staff right now, while we listen to the wind howl and rattle the tent like crazy. So if these conditions continue, obviously we won't be going up. But we're hoping that they'll moderate and we'll have good weather tomorrow so we can continue advancing up the mountain.

So the [Unintelligible] party took a walk up glacier a little bit during the better part of the day when the weather was very good...[transmission fails].

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

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