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This is Eric calling from Zhangmu. Right now the expedition has split into two groups; I led the first group yesterday, leaving very early in the morning from Kathmandu. We traveled with members and were able to cross the border and clear Chinese customs and reach the town of Zhangmu which is just inside Tibet, yesterday afternoon. So on Tuesday the 23rd, we entered Tibet.

We are staying at the Hotel Zhangmu, and yesterday we met our staff including the liaison officers from the Tibetan Mountaineering Association and also the Chinese Mountaineering Association who will be at Base Camp this year. Additionally, we met our interpreters and several of our drivers.

We have waiting for us here, three Chinese trucks and six Jeeps that will be moving out with us on our trip into Base Camp. The other part of the group yesterday included Dave Hahn and a couple other of the members who stayed back with the Sherpas and the container trucks which has all of our food and equipment. The truck had to pick up our oxygen which, only just yesterday, cleared Nepali customs. Since they had to do that they were delayed for a few hours and were unable to cross the border yesterday. They got to Kodari which is the town on the Nepal side of the border too late in order to cross both the Nepal border and Nepal customs and then travel to China and clear China customs. So they stayed last night down in, I think they stayed in Tawdapani, which is just below Kodari. Anyway, we expect that they will be up early this morning and will clear Nepal customs and then travel up to Zhangmu and clear Chinese customs and hopefully we will all be here together in Zhangmu today.

Our goal would be to possibly continue on up to Nyalam this afternoon. It is not a very long drive to Nyalam, but it is very rugged. We will be traveling up the canyon of the Bhode Kosi River which is thousands of feet deep and the road is literally cut into the walls of the cliff so the trip to Nyalam is quite exciting and hair raising. While it's only 35 km it takes several hours. We have been told that the road is in good shape which is good news, we were concerned that we might have trouble on this section of road which is where in the past on many expeditions we have had trouble with snow avalanches and also rock avalanches. Apparently the road is in very good shape this year. Largely due to the fact that the Himalayas right now are suffering through an exceptional drought and there is very very little water.

Yesterday I noted that the terrain along the road between Kathmandu and Zhangmu was dryer than I had ever seen it before in my nine previous trips to Tibet. In several places, there are forest fires burning in Nepal, which I had never seen before. It is truly remarkable how much smoke there is in the air and how dry everything is. So that's good from the standpoint of the road conditions but we will see what it means as far as the expedition and the high altitude climbing is concerned, certainly there is very little snow up high this winter, otherwise, everybody is doing fine.

—Eric Simonson, Expedition Leader

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