Where does the time go? We're loving a last day of rest. Some folks (Eric, Lee, and Andy) headed toward Camp II today, the rest of us will go all the way to ABC tomorrow and meet them there. Then we aim to have some thin air fun. The eight-man Sherpa squad will follow a day behind for some fun of their own. These Base Camp days have been a pretty good time. We are still enjoying an incredible run of good health.

The weather must, in some way, be contributing to this. It remains unseasonably warm and pleasant at Base Camp. The jet stream is still scraping the ridges up high, but down in these low valleys, it has been tee shirt weather during the days. That is strange, as I've said before, since personally, I can only remember a small handful of days over the years when a tee shirt was a good idea—at the end of May perhaps. Most of the team have been using the time down here quite productively. Clothes washing has been popular, feeding and overfeeding have been a hit as well.

Many of the team have been perusing the technical library in the technical tent. That means they've been studying hard on Mallory, Irvine, and Everest as opposed to the mass market library we maintain in the less cerebral mess tent. That library has our magazine collection, which still passes for news if you haven't picked up a magazine in the five or six weeks since we left the land of news. A couple of people each day listen to the BBC or VOA news on tidy little short-wave radios and then give the rest of us the big picture at our next meal. Either the news is distressingly the same each day or we are getting pretty darn self-centered, because we seem to do a lot more talking about our own gig.

There is usually an hour or two of discussion on strategy for our search for signs of the '24 expedition. We occasionally get embroiled in big speculating battles as to what happened to George and Sandy back on the eighth of June on that final trip. Jochen plays referee for these, making us play fair and stick to the facts when we get wandering too far afield.

A famous mountaineer once advised me not to speculate when it came to other people's climbing accidents. I always thought that was sound advice, although it gets pretty tempting from time to time with contemporary big news mountain events. The trouble with this 1924 incident is that speculation is all we have to play with. So far. We are all getting a little excited at the prospect that we might soon be able to add some real facts to this old mystery.

We've been keeping pretty well to ourselves in Base Camp. There are about twelve other expeditions spread around the valley. This is a bunch of climbers but not quite as many as we'd expected. People must be saving their adventures up for the year 2000 and some more significant season. Fine by us. Most of the trips that are here now are up at ABC getting in that crucial first round of acclimatization. We are quite pleased to be well passed that stage of agony. We know better than to get smug about our big "lead" however, since a few weeks of wind (typical about now) will, in effect, put us even with anyone who has wandered into the game late. It isn't a race of course; we'd just love to be rewarded for putting in our early work.

All for now, feels like a good chance coming along for an afternoon snooze in the sun...never miss a chance to lie down and sleep on a grueling climbing extravaganza.

—Dave Hahn, Climber

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