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This is Eric Simonson coming to you from Tingri. Yesterday, we left Nyalam early in the morning and traveled via snowy roads up onto the Tibetan plateau. It had snowed several days in a row, and by the time we left Nyalam, there were several inches of snow accumulated, and as I mentioned before, we were very happy to have eluded the avalanches in the canyons below there. Once we climbed above Nyalam, the snow petered out, and by the time we reached Tsong-la Pass at about 17,000 feet, there was virtually no more snow.

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From Tsong-la, we had some nice views of the Himalayas, but it was a little cloudy so we were unable to see much more than Shishapangma and Mirashangkar. From there, we traveled on to Tingri, which was another couple hours. All together, we traveled for about four hours from Nyalam to Tingri.

Our sherpas arrived in Tingri the day before yesterday and repacked our loads and they left very early to go to Base Camp and start establishing Base Camp. We have spent the day resting here in Tingri at about 14,300 feet, and we went for a hike this morning and enjoyed beautiful morning views of the Himalayas including Cho-Oyu and Everest which were both perfectly clear this morning and really beautiful.

This afternoon the wind has picked up and now it's quite dusty and unpleasant to be outside, so we're inside a tent which is pitched outside the hotel. We've had a team meeting and discussed our plan for going into Base Camp tomorrow.

Our plan will be to travel in four jeeps and accompany a fourth truck tomorrow up and over Pang La Pass and then on in to Base Camp. We expect to leave well before dawn and hopefully be into Base Camp by about noon. So with any luck, we'll have our power supply set up tomorrow afternoon and we'll be able to report next to the Mountain Zone from Rongbuk Base Camp.

So far everything's going real well, and everybody seems to be reasonably healthy so we are optimistic that we are going to make it in tomorrow in good shape. We're really pleased that our sherpas were able to go ahead of us today to start working on the camp and we've heard that the road was in reasonably good shape so we're hoping that they haven't experienced any problems. And that's about it. Talk to you from Base Camp. Goodbye

—Eric Simonson, Expedition Leader

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