We all keep returning to Everest, or Chomolungma, as the Sherpas call it, for our own reasons, but this year we're here to make a film and look at what 50 years of climbing on this mountain has brought to the environment, those who have struggled on her slopes, and to the culture that lives at her base.
Chomolungma is believed by the Sherpas who live here to be a mountain deity.
"Fifty-seven Sherpas carried loads up to the South Col today," we heard the buzz around Base Camp at noon. Pete Athans and I looked at each other incredulously. This could be a record. "This is definitely the 'season opener' on the South Col," said Pete.
The route to our high camp, Camp IV, has now been fixed and the camp can finally be stocked and established. The race is now on for the 12 expeditions here at Base Camp to make their final push to the summit before the climbing season ends on June 1. We've been here for a month, taking strides toward acclimatizing for the upper mountain.
We've passed through the Khumbu Icefall four times, not including two forays just for filming, and the teetering glacial ice blocks have paused long enough in their inevitable downward tumble to let us silently slip past them.
Camp III sits at 23,500 feet, perched precariously on the mottled ice of the near-vertical Lhotse Face. We climbed there in the company of a few other climbers who planned to spend the night there. As we descended, a storm hit and the wind paralyzed the right sides of our faces.
Two days later the storm persisted and a climber trapped at Camp III decided to descend, anxious to get to a lower elevation. The ropes were iced to the Lhotse Face, and unable to clip into lines, the climber, a young man from Great Britain whom I had met days before in the Icefall, slipped to his death, a 2,000-foot fall that has left us all numb with the pain of memories of Everest deaths in the recent past.
We leave at 4:30 tomorrow morning to climb back up through the Icefall and on to Camp II. Our goal is twofold: Peter Hillary, Dawa, and the film crew will climb up to Camp III to spend the night, for acclimatization, before returning to Base Camp. Pete Athans and Brent Bishop will fix ropes above Camp II to the West Shoulder of Everest, where I hope to join them to film them as they forge the rarely attempted West Ridge route on the mountain.
The light of my headlamp flickers, a reminder that in less than five hours we'll all be wrestling with our double boots and harnesses, trying to keep our fingers and toes warm before stepping into the ice-blue pre-dawn light outside our tents.
We'll be gone for four days, returning for the last time to Base Camp before our final push to the summit.
Read an article on the Sherpas of Mount Everest: Go>>
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