Berg Adventures 2013 Everest Expedition Dispatch

April 22, 2013 – The Boys Are Back in Base Camp

It is Monday, April 22, 2013 today. We have been back in Base Camp for a couple of days. We finished our five day rotation up high on the 20th. We got up at 6am to bad weather and we decided to wait a little bit to see if the visibility would improve. We’re at the start; on Saturday, we’re at the start of a three day storm that has left a meter of snow at Camp I. So we made the right decision by leaving Camp II at 21,500ft at 9am due to the stormy conditions because we would have been stuck up there for the last three days, and in fact there are some people at Camp I that aren’t able to come down in this condition. Nonetheless, we moved across the glacier in limited visibility, working our way from one to one and crossing crevasses, and got to Camp I, which we had (understandable) in one of our tents and we brewed up with some tea and worked our way down the icefall.

So it took us about 5 hours, 5 1/2 hours to get from Camp II to Base Camp, which is a little longer than normally should be when you are coming down, but we didn’t have ideal conditions, we had a lot of snow that we were fighting through and poor visibility.

We’re back at Base Camp resting, and really happy to be here. It’s ironic that even at 17,500ft the air feels a lot thicker than what we are used to for the previous five days. But at any rate, we’re resting and we’re just watching weather. It’s going to storm in the site for three days, nobody is moving on the mountain. We are ahead of all the other climbers having our first rotation in and we’re just waiting to go back up.

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