Part II: Perfect Conditions at Camp III, 24,000 Feet on the Lhotse Face

Dave Hahn again with Part II of the dispatch from the Lhotse Face. Boy, it was hard getting up here today. I blame our situation for the... first half of the season, not being able to go above advance base camp made it a little harder still, ordinarily we would have had a warm up round up to this height... not enough time for that... It did make it a good hard workout. Also just marveling the whole time on the way up, I just kept looking around, just amazed how the mountain looked without any snow, it's obvious that very little if any snow fell during the winter here so the glacier was in extremely dry condition. And the new snow in the last week or ten days only adds a light layer to the icy mountain, so it's not a real significant layer. We certainly benefited, Nicky and I, in that people have now been tracking up the Lhotse Face, kicking into the ice for a week now. Boy, we must have seen 100 Sherpas go to the South Col today carrying loads, about 14 of them were ours. Doesn't really matter, our Sherpas, anybody's Sherpas, or climbing members, Each time somebody kicks their crampons into that ice it makes a little bit better footstep, so we benefited a little bit by having nice staircase in the ice up here. Great to be sitting here, Right Now I'm still looking out at big clouds over Pumori and Gyangchung Kang, which is just under 8,000 meters, and Cho Oyu. But as usual I'm pretty excited to be sitting here way up on Lhotse, the fourth highest, looking up at Everest, the first. Looking forward to sun down and how pretty it can get up here in the clouds. All for now. Our hope is to go down in the morning. See what the weather does, but we're probably drop down to advance base camp in the morning and base camp the next day. All for now.