Photo: Greg Healey Collection
Friday the 13th, a full moon and Ben's 31st birthday. With Ben already sporting a beard that would do a werewolf proud it was always going to be a strange day.
We're still waiting patiently at base camp for our summit opportunity. Surprisingly every other team on this side of the mountain has followed each other up to ABC aiming for the 16th or 17th May despite a pretty windy forecast. Additionally the CTMA rope fixing team are a day behind aiming to fix to the summit on the 18th. Strange goings on.
Potentially we now have the situation where all 33 teams on the south of the mountain will have mounted their summit attempts before the route is opened on the north! The current small weather window is rapidly drawing to a close and we expect most of the teams to continue to basecamp to continue the waiting game.
The AP team are baring up well to this enforced stay at basecamp. We're seeing a lot more wildlife as the temperatures rise with plenty of Tibetan Snowcocks (aka Sherpa chickens) and marmots around and yesterday a large herd of small deer wandered through the camp. We have a large library of trashy novels which is keeping most people amused (I'm on my 18th book) and Chris is managing to sleep for 23 hours a day. Finally Reuters have just published a great article on the custodian of Himalayan climbing records, Ms Liz Hawley which is worth a read:
http://m.trust.org/alertnet/news/interview-elizabeth-hawley-worlds-everest-expert.
