Teams Can Climb Without Restriction

Hey, this is Dave Hahn with part II of that dispatch from Base Camp. So Nicky and I started down this morning with Sanduk Dorje. We left our ABC at 6:40 in the morning and in less then an hour we were down to Camp I and we worked our way through the icefall finishing up at about mid-morning. There's been a few more collapses in there, a few more ladders thrown in but the route is still working. We had minor slow downs waiting for other climbers to come up, but for the most part we had it to ourselves and came down nice and smooth. Both of us feeling good and healthy, and looking forward to a couple days of rest down here at Base Camp. We got down here, ate lunch, and yeah there's quite the electricity in camp, all through Base Camp now as things feel like they're finally on the move. Our hope was that our guys were going to be able to work at fixing rope along with a number of other teams on the Lhotse face and my understanding was that the guys did get the go ahead for that and went to work on that project so that's good. That's key. And this afternoon the Army Majors and the officials from the Ministry of Tourism called a 3:00 meeting to thank everybody for the cooperation in this weird situation and to announce that all restrictions were off now and that teams could climb as they wished and communicate as they wished. So we're all pretty happy with that. And we're hoping that the timing works out for us to still have our good shot at the top. OK, I'll be talking to you a lot more and be sending you a whole lot more content in the next few days. Bye for now.