At the Summit

Ascending towards the top

Descending back towards CIII

Sept. 23 - ABC
    
What a ride it was the past couple of days. We are all back in ABC safe in sound this Thursday morning. Last night we all slept soundly but peed a liter of what looked like unfiltered Pale Ale and felt as though our throats had been scrubbed with a wire brush. That is to say, everything is normal. We’ve returned dehydrated and with sore throats from our successful summit bid. Everyone is today now packing up camp while getting rehydrated and looking at photos from our summit push. The whole team is in great spirits and celebrating the good time of reaching the top.

Our summit day started out a bit questionable. We awoke at 1 a.m. to heat water and assess the weather. Lakpa and I thought the visibility was dismal. There were gusty strong winds and we couldn’t see far. As the hour progressed we were able to see stars through the spindrift and snow indicating the cloud layer wasn’t thick. After gearing up and downing a hot drink we headed out just before 4 a.m. Even though a team had left an hour and a half earlier we were breaking our own trail to the base of the yellow band. At the top of the yellow band the visibility was still dismal and the going slow in soft snow but as we gained the ridge the clouds blew out and we could see down to CI and CII. It stayed clear but windy as we gained the summit plateau and we remained above the clouds. The proper summit was being blown by a long plume that we had to stand in. As we took the obligatory photos and celebrated we got 2 or 3 short glimpses of Everest, Lhotse, Pumori and Gyachung Kang standing above a blanket of clouds covering the Khumbu valley. Thankfully our descent was uneventful. The reports from ABC were that as we neared CIII the entire summit was capped by a large lenticular cloud. Many people have told us they have great photos of our descent and we’re hoping to get a hold of them later.

So the remaining part of our day will be spent finally opening our champagne- everyone was too tired last night as we arrived in ABC. Tomorrow in the early a.m. we’ll start our walk to Chinese BC and then jump in jeeps to Tingri. The following day we will drive the spectacular route to the border town of Zhangmu and celebrate that night with our staff. On the 26th we’ll arrive in Kathmandu and have a few more toasts to a good trip.

We’ll be in touch in the next couple days.

All our best,
Dave and the team