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Wally Berg |
A Good Day For Reading
Sunday, April 26, 1998 — Base Camp (17,500')
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Hi Mountain Zone, it's Wally Berg calling you Sunday, April 26th from base camp. We have settled into a couple of days of watching it snow both here at base camp and by radio contact with our core group of five Sherpas living at Camp II, we know it is still snowing up there.
It's a stage of the expedition when the tasks ahead of us are starting to present themselves with more immediacy everyday, but in terms of climbing right now, we're kind of shut down.
Yesterday, we got up in the morning, and I watched Charles hold court in a very impressive manner with a group of our climbing Sherpas about the various GPS tasks that we'll undertake on summit day and elsewhere on the mountain. He had a very attentive audience. Got a great deal of information across to these guys, and I enjoyed photographing this class or production that he held out in the early morning sun we had here at base camp. After that, it began to basically rain for a while. It was sort of a freezing rain, and it soon turned into big blobs of wet snow, and we all sort of retired to our various tents and got some shut eye; it was good weather for that. Good weather to do a little reading, get some shut eye yesterday afternoon for the bulk of our Sherpa team and the climbers here at base camp.
Today we awoke to gray overcast skies and the feeling that certainly the rain-snow is going to continue throughout this part of Nepal — pretty big weather system here right now. It won't affect us over the long haul but has things shut down at this point.
I've already talked to Camp II, and things are kind of on a holding pattern up there as well. I'd like to have more than just a few Sherpa cooks up there in case some real severe weather does occur, and we have more hands up there to help hold down tents, re-rig if necessary and keep our camp in place. Right now Dorje, Kaja Nuru, and Nima Tashi are the three climbing Sherpas who are living out of Camp II. Those guy have the extra burden of living in more austere conditions up high. It may be an advantage for them acclimatizing as well, but we decided to hold them there for awhile to support the camp, keep the two Camp II cooks company, and we know that they will be in position to move up onto the Lhotse face when the weather does allow.
— Wally Berg, Expedition Leader
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