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Hello Mountain Zone, this is Eric Simonson calling on May 20th from Base Camp—yahoo! First off, I've got to admit that I lied the other night because when I said it was party time, we only had three beers for the entire group so it wasn't much of a party, but...oh well...everybody was still pretty happy.

We got up yesterday morning at ABC and spent the whole morning packing 90 yak loads, which was quite a lot of work. We had to take down a lot of the tents and a lot of the gear was wet. It was snowing—fairly miserable, but we managed. And then we packed up and hiked 15 miles in the afternoon all the way down to Base Camp and we didn't get down here until dark, and we were all pretty hammered. So, after a quick dinner, we went to bed for a wonderful night's sleep.

Those of you who have been to high altitude before will know what I am talking about when I say after you come down from being up high, the sleep you get down low is just marvelous. We all slept in this morning and woke up to the sun and drank coffee and enjoyed life.

Today we've just been puttering around, packing and taking care of some chores, washing, and bathing, and shaving, whatnot. And very soon, this afternoon, we expect our yaks to make it down. We're hoping that all 45 yaks will show up tonight with all of our expedition luggage from ABC. So knock on wood in the next hour or two, the yaks will be rolling in.

Tomorrow we expect to spend the entire day packing and re-packing and drying, in particular, our expedition gear—all of our tents and baggage from ABC were wet because it was snowing when we packed it. So everything's going to have to be dried out.

We're really happy that we got all of our gear off the mountain, and I want to tell everybody in Mountain Zone land that of the 40 oxygen bottles we took up on the mountain, we brought back 38 of them. And I am amazed that we were as successful as we were.

In addition, our Sherpas carried down a number of bottles that we paid a bounty to them for, for their carrying power, for carrying them down. So we actually walk off this mountain this year taking more bottles with us than we brought on, effecting a net reduction in oxygen bottles, which I'm proud of. If everybody did that, we would, in a few years, have this mountain entirely cleaned up.

We're also bringing down all of our garbage from ABC by yaks, and it'll all go out from Base Camp by TMA trucks. So again, we're leaving nothing up here.

Everything's going well. The only sad note is in regard to an unfolding scenario on the upper mountain that I cannot give you too many details about because I don't know if families have been notified as yet. But there are several expeditions involved in an unfolding saga on the upper North Ridge where climbers appear to have been trapped out overnight and [it] may not well be a pretty story when all is said and done. We should know more later, and we'll let you know when it's appropriate to do so.

Otherwise, everything's going well here at Base Camp, and we're hoping that our Chinese trucks show up tomorrow night. So we're on a roll, and everybody's strong and healthy and looking forward to good food back in Kathmandu.

That's it from Base Camp. What do you say gang? [celebration]...Okay, there you go. That's the word. Bye-bye.

—Eric Simonson, Expedition Leader

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