Altitude: 5300m
Atmospheric Pressure: 558mbar
Trek: 0km
It’s cold this morning, -12DegC, and luckily, the sun
eventually manage to shine pass the top pf the peaks surrounding us to warm the
tents. It’s good for warmth, but also has the downside of transforming the ice
on the inside of the tent into droplets of water, and I stay hidden in my
sleeping bag until we have to get out for breakfast at 8am.
Today is a rest day, when we find out who will be heading
off for Lobuche tomorrow for the next rotation.
Luckily, I make the cut, and I will be joining the 6
soldiers from Walking with the Wounded, with their 2 cameramen (for the
documentary) and the press representative.
In the group, there is also Mark, and ex Marine and Sergey,
a Russian who skied down Manaslu at the end of last year.
I spend the morning doing some “admin”, washing clothes and
shaving. I’m hoping the sun will help drying the washing, but the cold wind
seems to freeze my wet socks rather than dry them.
Also, all trekkers are going down this morning, so we’re
down to just the group of people doing Everest, until the group of people going
up Lotse arrive that is.
It means the atmosphere is a little more “specific, with all
the day briefs just for us and we’re also more aware that we’re here for much
longer, to do something “special”!
After lunch, we get together in the white pod to review our
gear for tomorrow, harness, jumar, crampons and boots.
The rest of the afternoon is spend trying to update the
blog, again, but this time with success, even if I decide to shy away from
uploading pictures, as they seem to use up quite a bit of data transfer, and at
4 Euro per Megabite of data, I need to be careful and more selective.
As the afternoon passes, I also feel a cold coming. 4 of the
guides have been suffering quite a bit in the last couple of days and I guess
it’s my turn!! Just in time for the next loop of acclimatization!
The timing for the next few days is:
-
14th: Trek down to Lobuche base camp (4850m),
depart after lunch and this should take us a couple of hours only.
-
15th: up to Camp 1 on Lobuche (5300m) for
the night, and only 2 hours to reach it.
-
16th: Summit
of Lobuche, then back to Lobuche base camp
-
17th: Rest day
-
18th: direct to summit from base camp, sleep
on summit
-
19th: “rest day on summit of Lobuche.
Nothing to do but drink to avoid headaches!!
-
20th: Back down to Lobuche base camp then to
Everest Base camp to recover
-
21st: rest day
-
22nd: ladder training and rest day
-
23rd: Rest day
-
24th: Puja ceremony, meaning we’re OK to go
up on the mountain afterwards!! Next, up through the ice fall!!
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