Featured Expedition: 2003 American Ski Everest Expedition
Dispatch 12

Copyright©Jim Gile American Ski Everest 2003 Roger Gocking

Dispatch 12: (Transcribed from satellite phone voice message)

American Ski Everest Expedition: We just got the weather forecast after 3 days at base camp of snow and extremely high winds. The extended forecast is really really good with nothing expected on the horizon for the next week, and the next 2 weeks looking good at this point. We head back up tomorrow to ABC, it will be a huge day with 4000 vertical feet and about 14 miles. But we are very well rested, plus we have already slept there for 2 nights. It should not be as difficult as the first time, however we will not have an intermediate camp.

Apparently talking with the local experts, Russ [Brice], [inaudible], Wickwire, etc... we are still about 2 weeks out from the climbing season, which should explain why the people who were running up the North Col, really got blasted in this last storm. Apparently, in talking with 2 people, 3 tents got completely blown off the Col. The 2 guys I talked with said they experienced 60-70 mph winds, pretty good  snow fall and extremely cold temperature. In the climbing world, we got lucky. We got up, set up phase 1, and got down here [base camp]. Apparently, even the high winds down here are rare. We got our base camp tents from our trekking company, Asian trekking. We did not have out tents down here. What they provided are just not made for those type of conditions, we probably had 40-50 mph winds down here, cold temperatures and 6 inches of snow. They [Asian trekking] did not expect conditions like that.  But we are well rested, everybody is healthy.

We are heading back up tomorrow to start phase 2. We are tentatively scheduled to rest one day once we get up there. Then we will make 2 carries to establish camp 1 at the North Col with our V 45 North Face tents and all the fuel we need. We are looking forward to heading back up tomorrow, we do have the schedule starting out with all 9 members doing the carries. However, we fully expect this will be unrealistic. Some of the members will need more rest. We do fully expect that with at least 4 of us, we will have that camp [camp 1] set up within 4 days.

That is it, we will do another dispatch tomorrow on April 22nd, when we get to ABC. Everybody is happy, everybody is extremely excited to get out of base camp. And to get going with this, and this evening for the first time is about 4 evening, there is a nice calm air, with no wind, and it is not even that cold. Mike

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