Icefall Doctors
Today is the 27th of April and the time is about 4:40pm local time. If I sound a bit tired it's because we've just walked down here from Camp 2, we're down at Base Camp.
It was kind of a long day today, and seven of us members are down here together with six Sherpas. We ran into Mark Lusher on his way up to Camp 2. He had spend the night at Camp 1 together with Lakpa Chiri, his personal Sherpa, and they're on their way up to Camp 2 and were doing very well and excited about spending some time at Camp 2 and acclimatizing.
For ourselves we had started the morning thinking we might walk up to Camp 3 and check out the conditions, but it was really cloudy and snowing lightly and we weren't able to guess what the weather was going to do and we were a little worried
about getting up around Camp 3 and then getting caught in a storm in case the weather deteriorated even further.
We walked down to Camp 1 and we found out that the Icefall had collapsed below Camp 1 and there was no one passing through the Icefall either coming up or going down because a big section of it had fallen in and it wasn't passable.
We tried to get an answer from anybody we could about the status of the Icefall and no one seemed able to tell us what we would encounter. At the last minute, at about 11am in Camp 1, we heard a rumor that the Icefall was repaired, the route through the Icefall was repaired by the Icefall Doctors. As we climbed down through the Icefall, lo and behold, thankfully that proved true and the Icefall Doctors had done an excellent job restoring some of the ladders and changing the routes through some broken ice bridges and seracs that had caved in.
Although as we walked through the repaired section of the route we couldn't help but think to ourselves that maybe it's going to need some more work and it didn't look really super stable and there were still some big ice chunks that looked a little bit precariously balanced. But the ropes were fixed and the ladders were there, so we felt safe and were able to cross and get everybody back to Base Camp.
Dan
It was kind of a long day today, and seven of us members are down here together with six Sherpas. We ran into Mark Lusher on his way up to Camp 2. He had spend the night at Camp 1 together with Lakpa Chiri, his personal Sherpa, and they're on their way up to Camp 2 and were doing very well and excited about spending some time at Camp 2 and acclimatizing.
For ourselves we had started the morning thinking we might walk up to Camp 3 and check out the conditions, but it was really cloudy and snowing lightly and we weren't able to guess what the weather was going to do and we were a little worried
about getting up around Camp 3 and then getting caught in a storm in case the weather deteriorated even further.
We walked down to Camp 1 and we found out that the Icefall had collapsed below Camp 1 and there was no one passing through the Icefall either coming up or going down because a big section of it had fallen in and it wasn't passable.
We tried to get an answer from anybody we could about the status of the Icefall and no one seemed able to tell us what we would encounter. At the last minute, at about 11am in Camp 1, we heard a rumor that the Icefall was repaired, the route through the Icefall was repaired by the Icefall Doctors. As we climbed down through the Icefall, lo and behold, thankfully that proved true and the Icefall Doctors had done an excellent job restoring some of the ladders and changing the routes through some broken ice bridges and seracs that had caved in.
Although as we walked through the repaired section of the route we couldn't help but think to ourselves that maybe it's going to need some more work and it didn't look really super stable and there were still some big ice chunks that looked a little bit precariously balanced. But the ropes were fixed and the ladders were there, so we felt safe and were able to cross and get everybody back to Base Camp.
Dan
posted by Laurel Barrett | 4:52 PM
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