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At 3am on 3 August Sam, Dave and Wim (the usual suspects) plus myself and Kees t Hooft arrived at our base camp at c.4200m, Papua.
Continue reading "1 August 2007 Carstensz Pyramid. The Seventh Summit." »
On 13 May we had gained sufficient support from the conflicting weather reports to hope the weather would turn good. It was looking like the winds would drop by the 17th. But they were predicted to rise again on 19th. Willie Benegas was planning to fix the remaining ropes from the Balcony to the summit on the night of the 16th. We left base at 0430hrs
Fate is perverse. There is no doubt about that.
After Guy Cotter's letter about the ice fall (see previous blog), the Ministry of Tourism instructed the SPCC to employ more ice fall doctors.
The SPCC sent one more fairly soon after the instruction. People said it was still difficult to see where the accumulated ice fall fees were going. I think they suffered from a lack of imagination. So, the ice fall is going to be safer. A bit.
A few days ago Guy Cotter (Adventure Consultants) wrote a letter complaining about the state of the fixed ropes in the Khumbu Ice-Fall.
He used the word "dire" several times and most of the expedition leaders including this one agreed with him. To understand what the fuss is all about it is worth looking a little at the history of this part of the route.
I am back in Kathmandu for the start of the 2007 Everest season. We will be the same team as for Cho Oyu last autumn, with the addition of James. Sam, Dave, Doug and Wim arrive tomorrow and the next day. We will be six in all, plus of course, our especially wonderful sherpas.
It has been a long time since the last blog, and a lot has happened in between. The last piece left us in Shigatse six weeks ago, en route to the road head camp for Cho Oyu. Our little team of five (including me) had joined up with friends for the shared base camp. I won't list them all here, we were fifteen in all, of which five were medics. Three of the medics were British 30-somethings, part of the "lost tribe". This is apparently the official term for those who have fallen through a strange gap in the NHS career scheme. They were educated in the old training scheme but cannot get further without the new scheme, which began after they had passed through the old sytem, and which of course they have now missed. I seem to remember in my day this was called 'catch 22'. There were also several teams led or guided by friends; Adventure Consultants with Luis, AAI and Vern, a team of 20 doctors with Johhny Morgan and many others.
Shigatse Temple, our third Tibetan temple in two days, is a magnificent sprawling edifice with one huge Buddha. The man next to me whispered to himself "The bigger the Buddha the better" and caused a small ripple of chuckles. I guess the statue was twenty or thirty feet tall. It was cool and smelled of yak butter candles in the dimly lit great hall.
