This morning we had a fine breakfast of peanuts, eggs and French fries in the vastly improved Zhangmu Hotel. Good though it was, it wasn't enough to keep us in town. We had our hearts set on getting farther up valley to Nyalam. The low end of Zhangmu is at about 6,000' while uptown is probably around 7,500'. It is a one street town on a mountainside, most of it hanging on for dear life. The mountainside likes to routinely visit the river down below. We had high hopes of slipping through town and up the canyon without either being visited by the portable mountain chunks or by making the big undesirable left turn over the edge and into the river far below.

Things seemed promising for us as the season was so dry that the road hadn't yet washed away and snow avalanches hadn't piled onto the road-cut. The norm is definitely to get bogged down by such inconveniences and the need to hire porters to traverse the un-truckable sections of road. Not so today, we headed out of Zhangmu as the sun started to find its way down into the depths of the gorge. Our little caravan, comprised of three trucks, a bus and a jeep made it through the town mud-slide and pushed steadily higher. One is usually somewhat torn between conflicting emotions on this bit of road. Personally, the little boy in me, is crazy about such a ridiculous road clinging to the crumbling cliffs and slide-paths. I love the way it goes under huge overhanging rock bulges streaming with runoff water. If I were making a sand fortress, I'd build the approach on such terrain so that I could roll rocks down on unwanted visitors. It is the old man in me that isn't so hot on the road. That world-weary side that pictures carnage and carwrecks at the most inconvenient times. Even the old guy in me had to admit that things were going smoothly today.

My pulse raced a few times as the uneven dirt path would sometimes get things leaning over the big abyss before rocking us back toward the mountain. The one little problem that came up was that it snowed up high last night... and now we were "up high" and so the road got slick and a little sloppy. But we had great Tibetan drivers who seemed to value life to a fine extent (one of them stopped his bus full of people to honk his horn and then actually got out to "shoo" away five pigeons who were slow getting off the road ahead and were in potential danger of getting tired out). Also, being early birds ourselves, we'd picked a time of day when very few vehicles were coming down the valley... those meetings would definitely have made the old man in me incontinent.

We did just fine and rolled into the neat alpine confluence of valleys that is Nyalam in bright 12,000' sunshine. Under a coat of four inches of new snow, Nyalam was looking fresh and clean and had us psyched at the prospect of two days acclimatization at the good old Snowland Hotel run by our friend Tashi. We had a fine lunch, some good easy walking and a generally relaxing afternoon of chatting and snoozing. We are the first expedition to pass this way so far this year, but we certainly won't be the last. In fact, by evening, a Norwegian team bound for nearby Shishapangma was sharing the cozy little dining room Tashi has put together. We had a fine dinner of tea, rice, potatoes, green beans, fried onions, a few awesome mystery meat plates and some cauliflower, not forgetting the egg-drop soup and the scrambled egg/tomato dish.

Conversation is getting better and more natural with each day together. At first, there were hours and hours of Mallory and Irvine details and little-known facts being bandied about... after-all they are the glue which has bound us together in this enterprise so far. We have all been blown away by the amount of research Jochen Hemmleb, our lone German member, has put into the matter of the disappearance and the early history of the mountain. He has won most team debates hands down... and so now we are trying to switch the conversations to things we figure we might know more about, like fast food drive-through eateries back home and the like.

It is night now, and my typing is surely irritating my roomies; Eric, Jake, and Conrad. They are all deep in their down sleeping bags tonight since the world is once again a cold place. Nyalam is settling down with only the odd Yak bell banging distantly and a dog or two getting riled up in the dark... but that is if you have successfully blocked out the sound of the Karaoke disco a few doors down. It started snowing lightly again in the afternoon and so we may get to make some fresh tracks tomorrow morning when we get out hiking. All is good and all are healthy... what could be better than this?

—Dave Hahn, Climber

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