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Rare Chopper Medevac
Base Camp - Tuesday, May 16, 2000
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Tejas

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Good morning Mountain Zone, this is Vern Tejas with Alpine Ascents and the Everest 2000 climb. Boy has it been exciting around here. Why, just yesterday we had a chopper fly in and do a medevac, take a guy out who had a blood clot in his leg and he was from another team.

So worry not, but it was pretty exciting to have a chopper in here. They usually don't fly this high. Due to the fact that they've had two crashes in recent years, they rarely come up here unless it's an emergency situation, which this was, because you can't walk somebody with a clot in their leg. It appears that it might move; it might migrate to other parts of their body and that would be a major problem. So he's now safely in Kathmandu and we're getting very stoked, very excited.

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Several people made the top today. Several different teams actually summited and I understand even the day before that the Russian team perhaps made it from the north side, so several people have made the top of Mount Everest this year in this century in this millennium, if you will. And so everybody's getting summit fever.

We've been packing crazily here, just getting all of our gear ready. We're fully acclimatized, of course, we're just waiting for a break in the weather, which looks like it might be coming sometime next week so we start moving up the mountain. Tomorrow morning, we go up to Camp I and start our final rally if you will, final assault on the mountain itself.

Unfortunately, Jack will not be joining us, he is leaving, he has some personal reasons not to continue on with us. So we're are very sorry he will not be joining us on the climb. We're going to miss him sorely of course, but at the same time we're going to carry on in his memory. He went down today with Stacy; they're going to fly out from Lukla in a couple days, so they went down with a couple yaks to move all their gear down.

And for those of you who are interested in the numbers, today we have relative saturation of 85%, average for the group for oxygen. And then we also have our average resting pulse rate is 71. You can see that we are fairly acclimatized and looking good. The weather has been trying to cooperate with us but then today it stayed overcast all day long and actually spit snow on us so this morning actually early last night. However, the temperatures are warming up. We like that. We've got about a -1 degree centigrade and we're currently at 5325 meters above sea level in Base Camp but tomorrow we're getting up bright and early. At two minutes to 4 o'clock we'll be getting up, eating breakfast and heading out here trying to get out on the trail up to the Icefall by 4:30. So stick with us, and join us again. That's all from Nepal, and wishing you the best from Everest. Ciao for now, signing off.

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

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