When the group arrived at Camp III the guides started up the stoves right away to start making hot water for hot drinks - tea, cocoa, hot Tang, and sometimes up there even just hot water tastes really good. And guess what? There's no water faucet up there to turn on to fill up the teapot. The guides go out and collect snow to melt over the stoves. (If you try this at home, be sure to have a little liquid water in the bottom of the pot along with the snow. If there is only snow it will burn - true story!)

Hot drinks are followed by dinner, served up while folks are staying warm in their sleeping bags. A lot of times climbers lose their appetites up there, but Willi reported that he had finished off all the lunch food he was carrying and was "starving" by the time they got to camp. I haven't heard of him stealing anyone else's dinner, but you never know...Usually they have foods that are easy to digest, such as ramen noodles, macaroni, or mashed potatoes with some kind of tasty sauce.

Today the climbers are continuing up the mountain and should arrive at Camp IV at the South Col sometime this afternoon. I wish we could watch them through binoculars, but Base Camp is too close to the mountain. We can only see the end of the West Ridge and up to the top of the Khumbu Icefall. We can't see the upper part of the mountain at all - for that you have to move a little farther away by Pumori or Kala Patar.

So I will be sitting by our Base Camp radio for most of the day listening for news from the mountain. A lot of times I don't hear anything for several hours because the team is busy moving up the fixed lines and they don't have an extra hand to get their radios out. Also they don't want to use up their radio batteries by talking unless they need to. That would be terrible to have a dead battery later on from talking too much now.

What we are watching is the weather - particularly the jet stream. Mt. Everest is so high that when the jet stream curves down into this area, the top of the mountain literally sticks up into it. The jet stream has been in this area for the last several days, creating winds of 60 to 70 knots at the summit - not a good time to be up there. These high winds don't come down onto the lower part of the mountain, so the team has been able to move up to the lower camps even while it is blowing like crazy higher up. The plan is to be ready to shoot for the top when the jet stream swings back to the north and the winds die down. So far we are right on schedule.

On a sad note, we are saying goodbye to Jeff "Soup Boy" Mathy today. Jeff caught some kind of intestinal bug almost a week ago. He has been sticking it out, and even made one attempt to join the rest of the team up at Camp II, but he just isn't getting better up here at 17,600 feet. So he has made the decision that to get better he needs to descend to the lower elevation of Kathmandu. Jeff has been one of our strongest members and we are all disappointed that the expedition is ending this way for him. He has worked hard and is a credit to his Lipton sponsors, and we hope to see him back on Everest or another mountain again soon.

So that's the news from Base Camp for today. We'll have more as the climb continues.

— Ellie Henke, Alpine Ascents International Base Camp Manager and MountainZone.com Correspondent

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