23-04-2012 – Everest Base Camp – rest day

Altitude: 5300m

Atmospheric Pressure: 558mbar

Trek:0km

Slept well, but not as deeply as I was expecting from being back in base camp.

It’s definitely colder up here, I went to bed to -13DegC in the tent.

Rest heart rate this morning was 64bpm, so still quite high, and I think I’m getting another cold…….. we’ll see.

I’m still coughing, and this should take a few days to go away, if it ever does!!

The mission for today is to get the washing done and benefit from the sun to do the drying. The problem we have at this altitude, is as soon as the sun goes, the clothes freeze!! Same goes if the wind becomes too strong, it doesn’t dry the clothes, it freezes them!!

As we were having breakfast, we saw Adrian coming back from his 1^st trip to Camp1 this year, and through the icefall. He’s set off at 3:30am with the sherpas, with “only” half a load of 10Kg.

He was not happy and quite “excited”. It would look like the crossing of the icefall is one of the easiest he’s seen, technically, but very, very exposed to seracs fall. It also seems to be very impressive!

It sounds like there will be a push by all the teams on the mountain to convince the icefall doctors to find a less exposed route. Luckily for us, we only need to go through it twice as we’ve acclimatised on Lobuche, everybody else need to go through it at least 4 times, including the slow 1^st and 2^nd times.

With the Puja scheduled tomorrow, and Lobuche behind us, we know that our next rotation will be on the real thing, and it’s not long before people start counting the “theoretical” number of days before summit if all goes to plan.

If the 1^st group sets off on the 26^th, for 6 days, followed by 4 rest days before summit attempt, we could be back down by mid May!! We can dream, can’t we!?!?

Still, we’re all excited!