You are here: Everest Home >>South Col Climb >>Dispatches >>Dispatch

Feeling Acclimatized and Philosophical
Base Camp - Sunday, May 7, 2000
Get the Latest Weather

DISPATCHES

Tejas

Hear Vern's Call LISTEN: [RealPlayer]  [Windows Media] (Requires a FREE media player to listen)

Good morning Mountain Zone, this is Vern Tejas for Alpine Ascents' Everest 2000 climb. We're down here in Base Camp. Al and I descended just the other day. We got here at about lunch time, in time for pizza and to be reunited with the group of trekkers from Alpine Ascents that came in to meet us at Base Camp.

It was quite fun to see new faces and old faces from other climbs. We sat around, chatted, and they got to breathe the rarefied air and we got to breathe the thick air. So for mountaineers coming down it was fun because all of a sudden we were giddy, drinking in the thick, potent oxygen mixture down here at Base Camp.

Unfortunately, a lot of the trekkers were still feeling the effects of coming up to 17,000 feet, and let's just say they were a little under the weather. But it was fun because we got to rub it in just a little bit, feeling quite acclimatized. But anyway, that was great fun to see them, and also Wally Berg, who's been on Everest many, many times — the leader of their group. It's good to see an old friend here up at Base Camp.

For the time being, we are as a team now reunited, and we're resting and recuperating here at Base Camp, having now completed our second series of the cycle of acclimatization. We're now set up for the rest period of that, and then we're going to be fully honed and tuned for heading to the summit. This has been a formula that's been worked out over the last 10 years of guiding on Everest, and it seems to be very successful and we'll basically stick with the game plan and spend probably about a week or so down at lower levels before we reascend.

This morning, we were blessed with a great philosophical discussion over breakfast, led by Al Hanna himself, who happens to be the chief emcee of philosophical discussions on the mountain. Funny, for our group, we've actually acquired a bit of an intellectual status here, if you can imagine that, because we talk about other things besides bodily functions at breakfast.

The plan is, if all things go well, to move downvalley for several days to suck in even more O₂ and put a little more fat on our bodies — we've all lost weight, all the climbers have. So that's what's in store for us in the next couple of days.

For those of you interested in numbers, we've greatly improved our oxygen saturation, as one might expect now that we're down here at 17,000-foot Base Camp level. Average for the climbers is now 85 percent oxygen saturation, with an average pulse rate of 69. Now, you contrast that to a couple days ago, when Al and I were up at Camp III, or at close to 7000 meters, we had an average oxygen saturation of 62-65 and our pulse rate was much higher — in the high 80s — so you can see that all this time spent trying to get acclimatized is actually starting to pay off.

A couple other numbers that are significant is that the temperature has improved from 20 below at Camp III, to now 5 below centigrade, and that, of course, has made us a lot happier. We can move around without all of our heavy down gear on and actually have some warmer temperatures.

The upper mountain right now has been loaded with snow, and we're hoping that the jet stream's winds will come up in the next few days and blow some of that away. Several expeditions have actually tried summit attempts, but they have been turned back by either the deep snow and the high winds. So we're expecting, hopefully, to get a window here soon and have some of these other climbers start making the summit. We'd like to actually have the crowd in front of us, if you will, so that we're not waiting around on our summit day.

Thanks for tuning in, all you Zoners, and as we say, that's all from Nepal. Ciao for now.

— Vern Tejas, Alpine Ascents Guide and MountainZone.com Correspondent

Email this story to a friend