Expedition Dispatches
Satellite phone updates from the 1998 American Everest Expedition


Corfield
Old Oxygen Bottles and New Drills
Wednesday, May 6, 1998 — Base Camp (17,500')
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Kancha Nuru Sherpa with one of the oldest oxygen bottles brought down
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(photo: Corfield)
Good Morning Mountain Zone, this is Charles, it is Wednesday, May 6th, 1998. I would like to bring you up to date on a few things that have happened in the last 24 hours. Wally came down yesterday morning through the Icefall in good form and like the rest of us whose ambitions are showering, eating and resting for the first 24 hours, Wally hit the ground running and was just full of energy dealing with this group and running this thing, until late into the evening. We'll see if this catches up with him today.

We were also very pleased be joined by Ken Kamler . He has come in with the MIT/Yale contingent and yesterday came over to make sure that we were all healthy and up to snuff. Ken has been on four previous Everest expeditions. This is his fifth; he is not climbing this year but who knows, maybe in future years we'll see Ken on the summit.

Other things going on, some of the Sherpas have been bringing down oxygen bottles and quite a haul of different varieties and different ages. There was quite an old one which came down, no more paint left on it, just a steel cylinder, who knows, maybe it may be of archeological interest. The MIT/Yale research groups are settling in, setting their camp up, we've have put their weather station up on the mountain and we look forward to seeing what other high-tech goodies they have brought along for us to put up on the mountain. Things continue to go extremely well; of the two Sherpas who have not previously done drilling practice, that is Dorjee and Kaju Nuru, because they were up working high on the mountain, just blew us away yesterday as I told you in another dispatch. It turns out that they are faster with a hand drill than we are with electric drills — go figure. That is it for now and we'll give you further dispatches shortly.

— Charles Corfield, Expedition Science Manager

DISPATCHES