4/23.   Hey All, Been a very busy and  stormy few days here at Everest Base Camp. The team has been settling into base camp life, out doing acclimatization hikes and training in the bottom of the Khumbu ice fall. Always busy with helicopters and now drones (a bit of a problem), and traffic up and down through the ice fall.

Our camp is on strict Covid protocols, no mixing with other teams, so it’s been less social than usual and real news is hard to come by but rumors fly as usual. The ice fall has been closed for a few days with over a foot of new snow and a small collapse. Today the weather is better and teams are starting to move again.  Our Sherpa team is waiting another day for things to settle before making a push up through the ice fall to Camp 2.  Our climbers are planning to move up to Camp 1 on the 26th for their first rotation.

The 21st and 22nd definitely have been stormy at all levels and have more or less put a hold on all teams for a couple of days, but today the sun is out and spirits are high!!  We’re triple checking all of our systems for Camp 2 making sure the solar power, radios, oxygen and everything is ready to go.

We’re still patiently waiting to get our communications really working here at basecamp, the camp-wide Everest Link internet infrastructure has had some challenges with the weather limiting their solar charging and their main down valley link getting serviced.  We do expect that to all be working soon and hope to have solid internet service in basecamp for the rest of the expedition so we can send out pictures and regular updates.

There’s been regular rumors of Covid in basecamp, but so far it’s just rumors. We’re all healthy, doing great and maintaining our distance from other teams in our little pod.

We’ll keep checking in and hope to be able to send pictures soon!

Scott Woolums