Our first team members went up at 4:00 this morning.  There were two members from our core team and six members of the Austrian team who are sharing our permit and camp site.  Their leader, Walter Lasser, was on my team in 2006 and I have a tremendous amount of respect for his leadership.  He works with small teams from Austria and has a stellar record.  In any case today was not to be.  There was a collapsed ladder in the ice fall that sent most everybody back down.  “Everest” means “flexible” in Nepali – just joking.  But it might as well.  This will throw everything back one day but a schedule on Everest is only good for a few hours.

Camp life has settled into a normal routine while we rest and wait.  Today there was a cricket match being played in Gorak Shep.  It was some project to raise money for something.  The match was being played between a British team and a Nepali team.  I was all keen to go, which is kind of funny considering I know absolutely nothing about cricket.  We ended up not going because there were some things that needed to be done at camp before moving up later this week.  The fact that it is a two hour walk one way never even came up.  At home I wouldn’t drive two hours to Atlanta unless it was really something important.  Some days we will walk down to Gorak Shep to climb Kala Patar, an 18,000’ plus trekking hill just to get good photos of Everest.  That is about six hours round trip.

I imagine this is the way our forefathers lived.  I can’t tell you off hand what day of the week but I can tell you the phase of the moon and that the wind has continually been out of the southwest since we have been here.  I can also tell you when morning light comes to BC and when the sun actually first touches the tent: 5:30 and 8:00 respectively.  I can also tell you that mid-afternoon in the tents in BC can be unbearable.  At this altitude the sun beats down relentlessly.  In the Western Cwm (that is not a misspelling – it is a Welch word) it can be below zero before daybreak and when the sun finally hits the valley floor people will be stripping down to their long johns.  Someone said climbing Everest was like being Corning Ware – out of the freezer and into the oven.

Those temperature swings affect your life in other ways.  We have a portable shower at BC.  Imagine a larger version of the bug sprayer you have in your garden shed.  The cooks fill it with scalding hot water.  You pump it up and then open the valve to the hand held shower.  We also have a 3×3 shower tent set up.  All in all it is a quite acceptable system considering the environment.  Most people settle for a couple of showers a week because it would be too much fuel and trouble on the cooks to do more.  Today was my day to get my deluxe Khumbu shower but after lunch it began to cloud up.  You don’t want to take a shower before the day heats up or if it is cloudy.  Of course it might be easier just to chip the ice off than use your towel but I’ll wait for tomorrow.  That’s why at home I treasure the right to take a shower – even in the dark.

The other thing about living in a tent is rolling out of bed.  You do literally roll out of bed because you are sleeping on the ground.  For some reason this really gets old.  Everywhere you go in your tent you have to crawl.  The tents we have here at BC have been equipped with foam pads on the floors, another Dawa Stephen innovation.  It is such a small thing but I can’t tell you the number of times I have bruised my knee when I found a rock under my tent for the first time.  It use to be kind of funny to lay in your bag at night and here people say rather inappropriate things when they found a new rock.  The other major point of contention is “tent exit strategy”.  There are the “butt scooters” and “back outs”.  Both have there advantages and draw backs.  The “butt scooters” have the advantage of seeing where they are going but can occasionally suffer bruises in other locales.  The “back outs,” of which I am a proud member, can occasionally not back out far enough before trying to stand up.  Since the tent is anchored to the ground with big rocks you can become a victim of the “back out face plant”.  This often also results in inappropriate remarks.

Finally, the question I am asked about most when I give speeches on high altitude mountaineering.  What to do with “#1” and “#2”.  The first thing you learn is that inhibitions about bodily functions tend to be the first thing to die at altitude.  Sanitation, not privacy, rules the day and much more so as we go higher.  I remember in 2006 we got to Camp I late and dug a hole and put a trash bag in it for #2.  All was well until the next morning when one of my tent mates was taking advantage of the amazing view we had so thoughtfully picked out for our privy when he became aware that we had built our facility right next to Highway One.  The Sherpa are such friendly people and each one coming by with a load for Camp II made sure to say “hello”.  We moved our facility to one without the view either way.

In BC we have these small tents for #2.  They are a split level with an entrance on the upper level for the depositor and a lower level where the deposit lands in a garbage lined barrel.  The lower level is also where the withdrawer, who we call the “goo man,” periodically removes the barrel and replaces it with a new one.  He gets paid by the kilo hence no #1 in the barrel for #2, #1 being quite heavy.  Got that?  For #1 we have a giant rock perched precariously on a small mound of ice and the guys are attempting to undermine it and send it down the hill below.  Why?  In the immortal words of the great Everest mountain climber George Mallory “because it is there”.