Dispatch 16: Big Snow at Base Camp Inspires Musings on Everest

Big snow coming down today. It started last night, with thunder and lightning after we were all in in our sleeping bags. By morning, about five inches blanketed basecamp, muffling sound and making walking a bit treacherous on all of the uneven rock and ice between our tents. Justin Merle, who spent the night at Camp One with about 8 other climbers and Sherpas from our team, reported the same accumulation up there close to 20,000 feet. Nothing to do but sit and wait for better weather. But that doesn't seem like it is coming today. The snow just keeps on falling.

This isn't what most people would consider to be typical for the Pre-Monsoon climbing season. Sure, it is normal to have basecamp covered with a few inches now and then, but we must be up to a foot deep by now and the forecasts call for it to continue for another day or so. Strange though it may be, it isn't much of a 'set-back' to our summit ambitions. For Merle and the gang up at Camp One, it is just another acclimatization day. They have food and fuel and we tried to make sure the camp got put in an avalanche-free zone. We had a few more climbers hoping to move up there to join them at Camp One, but they will have to wait for better conditions now. There isn't much traffic, if any, going through the Khumbu Icefall today. Not to say that it would be impossible to get through, but the hazards certainly are increased in poor weather. While it might be dangerous and difficult to get someone out of a crevasse on a nice day -should they stumble or topple off of a ladder- on a stormy day such a mishap could get people killed. We heard that the Jagged Globe group that was at Camp One started to come down but had to retreat and retrace their steps back into CI because navigation was too difficult. And there is no sign that either the Alpine Ascents team or the Adventure Consultants team tried to go up today as we'd heard they might.

Most folks are hunkered down, reading or playing games with their big down coats on. We normally depend on the sun to make things comfortable around here, but there isn't a hint of sun today and so it is pretty cold at basecamp.

It is terrible to say, but I'm not so disappointed to see the big snow. For one, I live down the road from a ski area back in New Mexico and I've just spent a good chunk of the winter hoping, on a daily basis, for snow. The fact that it has come a couple of months late and a few continents over is merely inconvenient. I'm not going to start getting picky - more snow is generally better in my view. But Mother Nature making everybody sit down and wait a day or two is also soothing to my impatient soul right now. I'm still on the injured/reserve list as my leg doesn't work well enough for skipping through the Icefall. I have been awfully jealous of every able-bodied climber going up or down for days now. I want to get back into the game, but of course I have to wait - if I have to wait, everybody should wait. Fair is fair.

My good buddy, Mark Tucker told anybody that would listen that I tripped and fell down while drunk - and while that is a fine story and is widely accepted around these parts, and while it is much better than the truth - it isn't true. I'm not a big believer in drinking while at the foot of Mount Everest, simply because I think it weakens one's immune system too much at a time when germs and bugs are just itching to invade. I try to be a health-freak when I'm hoping to climb high. I try to get plenty of sleep - I try to stay well hydrated and I try to eat right - so a week ago in one of our big basecamp dome tents, I was concientously choosing lunch food for my next day's planned climb through the icefall. I still had some of that food in my arms as I lifted my size-14 feet to get them out of the tent. And then I caught the right foot in the door and went flying through the air, landing in a big heap of bumps and groans on the uneven rock outside the tent. I couldn't move at first. But lying there immobile, wondering where the first pain would come from, I snuck a look at my lunch food - still intact, still in my hands - which meant that my arms hadn't done any good in cushioning my fall - which, I started to think, must have meant that I'd put about 190 pounds of falling human (plus lunch) on my RIGHT KNEE! Which, right on cue, began to hurt. I wished immediately that I'd been drunk. Pemba, the world's greatest chef, heard this thud outside of his kitchen tent and rushed out to find me wriggling around like an earthworm on a sunny sidewalk. With his help, I dusted myself off and got up. I limped into dinner and tried to deny that I'd actually hurt myself. But sure enough, when I got up at 4:30 AM for climbing the next morning, my knee was fat and not very joint-like anymore. I didn't go climbing. Now, seven days later, it has shrunk back down to almost reasonable proportions but when I walk it tends to move in unintended directions at inconvenient times. Karl, our orthopeodic surgeon and summit hopeful from the Munich area has been most kind in examining and evaluating my injury. He calls it a 'bone bruise' and has been able to reassure me that despite the ugliness (my leg is blacker and bluer with every passing day) there is nothing broken or twisted. Karl says to give it time. I happen to have a little time. And hanging at basecamp hasn't been entirely bad. For instance, due to my injury, I was exactly in the right place to limp around scooping up chocolate Easter eggs the other morning after the Bunny visited us in the night. I might have missed out entirely had I been up the hill.

Of course if the leg takes too much time to heal, I'll have to do things the 'Apa Way' which I don't have confidence that I'm particularly suited for. Apa Sherpa, who is leading the Asian Trekking group this year, famously did not go above basecamp last spring until the end of May when it was time to try for the summit. Then he clambered all the way up- with little apparent difficulty- for his fifteenth time on the summit of Mount Everest. The word is that Apa plans to lie low and do the same thing this year for his sixteenth. While I admire and respect Apa, I'm hoping that I can avoid doing things his way. I want, when the snow stops and the leg heals, to get up there for some pratice runs. A little traditional load carrying and high-sleeping acclimatization rounds. There is time.

Dave Hahn