Downtime at Camp (Hardwear Sessions)

Sunset Over Camp II

By Kenton Cool

May 2, 2008

Well it's been a wee while since the last update; this is due to a bad case of base camp lassitude. Its day 4 of resting today, and most of us have washed all our clothes, shaved, played cards, visited friends, been to the bakery here (awesome apple pie) listened to all their music on their iPods, read all the books in camp and are still a little bored. Its not that bad really in fact I'm really enjoying the down time.

I suppose I better start at the beginning for you all to get a better picture. The team (Rob, Ran , Dave and myself) left BC around a week ago with the plan to climb to camp 2 spend some time there and come down (not too surprising the come down bit really). We left around 6am and had a great run through the icefall up to camp 1. It was all straight fwd and the team did a great job. The afternoon was spent drinking tea and listening to some very funny stories from Ran. The following morning saw us all move up to camp 2. This year the route goes really close to Nupste which makes it a little threatened by stone fall but boy is it quick this year. A mere 2 hrs saw Ran and myself sipping tea at camp 2.

Camp 2 is sat under the awesome SW face of Everest, the face made famous by Chris Bonnington in 1975 and his huge expedition that climbed this "last great Himalayan problem". For teams on the Nepal side of Everest this is our important stage post camp. There are cooks and mess tents here and teams spend days here acclimisatizing in a modest degree of comfort. The views are limited due to the towering walls of Everest, Lhotse and Nupste that hem the camp in, but boy it's an amazing setting.

The plan was to spend 2 nights here before setting off down and that's exactly what we did, The first afternoon saw Rob, Mark (one of the aussies) and myself move a few tents around but other than that little was done apart for lots of huffing and puffing in the thin air. The 1st night at camp 2 is always lousy and I for one woke with a headache, no real surprise as we were at 6400m. Day 2 was spent doing even less than day 1. Dave got a little bit of filming done while Rob shot a few snaps for Mountain Hardwear while I did even less than that. Dinner that night was great and despite the altitude all the team woofed down a fantastic yak based meat curry.

We decided to leave camp 2 early the next morning to beat the sun, so a little before 6.45 Ran and I stepped out of the mess tent and headed down. The trip down to camp 1 went fast but Ran had an upset tummy so we had a short pit stop at camp 1 for him to go to the toilet. Here Rob caught us up, (he had to go back to camp 2 a little after leaving as he left his sunglasses in the tent, what a fool!!!). From here down to BC was pretty slow as Ran was not feeling too well, but he dug deep and kept putting one foot in front of the other. It took quite a while to get down and it was 3 tired sun burnt boys who were finally met by Lakpha who had with him some chocolate and bottles of ice cold coke, what a hero.

Everyone was pretty bushed but a hearty portion of tea (reckon I need a tea sponsor) and cake put us all back on track and Ran as ever seemed to make a quick recovery from the efforts of the day.

That was all 4 days ago and since then Rob and Ran decided to drop down valley to Pangboche. This will help Ran recover as the air is thicker and it also mean a nice change of scene as well as endless amounts of fried chicken. Meanwhile I have stayed at BC monitoring what is happening in Tibet with the Chinese and keeping an eye on when the mountain will open up fully. The current state of play is the mountain is shut above base camp with climbers not being allowed to sleep above BC. At the moment this is not a problem as we have time on our hands but we don't want it to rumble on too long. The good news however, is that there is some good weather coming up so fingers crossed the Chinese will get the torch up, and then we can all get on with climbing on the south side as well.

We wish them all the best!!!!