November 12 - Enjoying Hamburgers at 15,750 ft

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It’s November 12th and I’m calling you again from Lobuche Base Camp, one of the most beautiful camps in the entire Khumbu area.  We look across at two of the great peaks of this area, Tawoche Peak which Grant was checking out as he saw a number of lines he was interested in climbing some day as we walked up here yesterday.  Also Cholatse Peak , many of you will remember from the Ama Dablam Berg Adventures trip two years ago that it was the season Maegan skied the North West face of Cholatse Peak .  This year it is special to us because Jennifer’s husband Greg is attempting to climb Cholatse as we are doing our climb.

We woke this morning after the sun came, so we could get up and really enjoy lounging around camp, drinking coffee and having a late breakfast.  Then Grant set up a rock climbing course with the fixed lines so everyone could practice for Ama Dablam.  We put on our harnesses, double boots and all of our gear and we practiced using the ascenders to aid us as we climbed the rock.  It’s not really the way we climb rock at home but it was a good warm up and shake down for what we will be doing on the Yellow Tower pitch on Ama Dablam.

The afternoon got a bit cloudy and cool, we just finished having our afternoon tea and we are all taking a break before dinner time.  If you are wondering what we are eating here at this elevation, I can report that Bal, our cook is still turning out fabulous meals.  Last night we had what had become a favorite for the last trekking and climbing group here.  Leila had helped Bal develop a hamburger meal.

Now hamburgers up here are not really a problem because we have plenty of Yak meat, but we didn’t have fresh buns until we discovered that the Monks at the Pangboche Monastery had that bakery and they could actually make fresh buns for us.  So we carried up some fresh hamburger buns, had hamburgers along with fresh green beans and carrots, an excellent salad and roasted potatoes with cheese sauce.  So you can tell we are still eating well and living well.

Tomorrow we will move to what we call late camp, the high camp for Lobuche Peak and the day after tomorrow we will be climbing Lobuche Peak , health and weather permitting.  We will keep you informed about the progress for that as it gets closer.  So the report from Lobuche base camp tonight is that everybody is happy, loving the view and feeling good about our skills and our conditioning and we are ready to go for some climbing soon.