Hello To All,
Back down safely at Base Camp after a successful and interesting trip up the mountain. The Khoumbu ice-fall for those of you who were worried about it's well-being is alive and kicking. It truly is some overgrown organic chemistry experiment gone wrong. I was cruising my way through it a few days back when a tremendous explosion jolted me from the right. A truck sized serac had decided it had enough of it's back bending Yoga move and that it was time to take a breather by crashing it's multi-tonne mass down 40 or 50 feet from where I stood. It was the awesome sound like a giant's Christmas cracker going off followed by a train crash that jolted me the most. No sooner had I laughed this off while not so subtly increasing my scurry through this bizarre Escher drawing than a good sized avalanche came charging down the face to my left. I froze like a dear in it's headlights. Truthfully, I could tell right away that it was going to impact the Khoumbu well below me, but for the moment as it picked up a larger and larger mass it was heading right towards me. If it was going to hit me there was nowhere really to go, but regardless, I just stood there frozen watching it cascade down until it crashed into the side of the Khoumbu below me with such force that I felt a tremendous blast and then was immediately covered in a cloud of snow. I must remind you, this is me traveling through the Khoumbu at 7am well before the sun has wiggled it's finger like rays between the cracks in the icepack in an effort to pry something lose. Maybe it was the added acoustic incentives urging me on, but it only took me 3 hours to get though to Camp1 with a heavy pack, which is the same time it took on my first trip though with no weight at all and about 20mins quicker than the last time with a loaded pack. The acclimatization seems to be working. After a good nights sleep at Camp II, Brant, Rick and I (Brant and Rick are the other two climbers that I am climbing with) made our way up to Camp III. It's awesome how you can hear the Jet stream ripping over the top of Everest all night long from Camp II. It sounds like you are sleeping right next to Niagara Falls. Some of this immense power had obviously encouraged the other winds which as we climbed to Camp III, were now tearing at us ferociously. After a quick 45 min hike up the glacier you cross up and over a giant berschund onto the Lhotse face. I had anticipated hard packed snow, which it can be from year to year, but this year it was all bulletproof blue ice. Some of it was vertical other parts around 45 degrees some closer to 55, but the ice gave solid purchase for our crampons. The difficulty was not the climbing (I'm very used to steep and vertical ice), but the wind that was gusting more than 40 m/hr. The gust we're continually trying to rip us off the mountain and occasionally nearly did. At most of the big gust I had to stop and turn my pack into to them and just wait them out. Standing there crouched precariously against the cold I could see the snow-dusted gust, as If errant apparitions of the jet stream, rip past me and without losing any speed whatsoever, tear up the vertical face between Lhotse and Nuptse to once again join their high-flying brethren in the jet stream. After 3 or more very cold hours of battling our way up the blue ice we reached our tent at Camp III. The ledge it stood on was no wider than the two-man Mountain Hard Wear tent itself and was lashed down in so many directions against the wind it almost seemed as if it had been caught in some bizarre nylon spider web, but to these three cold and tired climbers it was nothing but a palace. And given it was one platform we did not have to dig out ourselves and a tent in high winds we didn't have to set, it felt doubly so. (Babu, Lawang and Dawa had dug out the platform and set up the tent the day before. Yeah team!) We immediately crawled into our sleeping bags and began melting ice for water. This is always a laborious process and one more importantly that takes you away from the warmth of your sleeping bag. We had a quick lunch-dinner of Ramen noodles mixed with a packet of tomato soup and started the process of shivering. We were now at an altitude of approximately 23,600 ft. At this altitude there is no other peak on any other continent in the world other than Asia (including Kirzikstahn) that is higher. I think Acancogua in Argentina, South America, comes the closest at 22,857ft . The fact is with three of us in the two-man tent it did warm up fairly well. One of the biggest hassles on all cold mountains, however, is that by the early morning the inside of the tent is completely covered in a layer of our frozen breath so that whenever the sides of the tent are bumped by human or wind, a flurry of snow rains down on you. You also get a patch of ice from frozen breath on the immediate outside of your sleeping bag. Although warm in your bag and although it may not be snowing outside, you are guaranteed to have a covering of snow and ice! on your bag and the rest of your gear inside the tent. It means that for your early start you are putting on icy gear and packing away icy gear. Not the best situation. In the morning we discover the route from Camp III to Camp IV has not been fixed by anyone and as we don't have any rope and don't feel the necessity to go to Camp IV at this point, we have a breakfast of Ramen noodles and head back down to Camp II. What we really needed was a good nights sleep above 23,000ft and to drop off some gear. Mission accomplished. Amazingly in it's degree of change, but not surprisingly, the weather changes for the better part way down and the Lhotse face transforms into one giant ice-mirror and it actually becomes almost unbearably hot. It's awesome what a difference the wind makes. We make it to Camp II quickly, our home away from Base Camp, but unfortunately there is some bad news when we get there . I'll tell you about that later, I need to get some dry clothes on as it has just started to snow again.

I played paintball on Sat. with about 40 industry people from various companies around town (some I knew, most I didn't). There was this one guy (a writer I later found out) who had his own gun and everything (which is fine), but who was screaming at people and just being a general asshole to everybody from minute one. Everyone was grumbling about this guy all day and he was really bringing everybody down. He even went so far as to throw tanturms on the field, throwing his gun down in huffs and stomping around like a little kid. basically, he was a loud bully, and if there's one thing I can't stand, it's a bully. The other thing was that he was cheating and we all knew it. So during the second to last game, my friend Tyler caught him cheating and called him out on the field. He blew up with this huge temper tantrum and came right at my friend. I saw red and I stepped right in between them, stuck my finger in this dude's face and told him to shut the fuck up and relax, that it was only a game. He took two steps backward, adjusted his volume way down and said "I know it's only a game, but nobody accuses me of cheating." I closed the new distance between us and, finger still in his face, I said "bullshit, it has nothing to do with him, you've been crying like a little bitch since game one, 9am this morning. Just calm the fuck down and shut yer mouth, or you and I are gonna have a problem." He shut up and walked away.