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Fri, April 2, 1999 — Lobuche, Nepal


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Good afternoon Mountain Zone, this is Charles Corfield here. Today is Friday, the 2nd of April, and I'm making this dispatch from the Italian Pyramid at Lobuche, which is just above where the main teahouses are. The teahouse area itself is well worth avoiding. It's something of a cesspool. However, ten minutes up the trail, at the research pyramid, there is a lodge, and this is where we've decided to stay tonight and possibly tomorrow night.

The NBC television crew is here as well. They have been shadowing us on the way up to Base Camp. And this is their first real night of noticeable altitude, and they seem to be feeling it. Everybody on the Everest Millennium Expedition is in good shape and healthy, and we're looking forward very much to getting into Base Camp, which we might do either tomorrow or the day after depending on some projects that we want to do in the local area.

The weather here is quite pleasant. Today, it has been breezy, sunny, intermittent clouds: great hiking weather. We stopped off at Dugla. Just above Dugla, there is an area where there are sherpa chortens and indeed, now a memorial chorten to Scott Fischer, the climber who died in 1996 and known to a number of people around here, so it was good to see that there is finally an appropriate chorten for Scott, to his memory. The world is a poorer place without Scott's presence in it.

And then after that, we made our way up onto the moraine and into the valley next to the Khumbu Glacier and hiked on up here.

When we get into Base Camp, we will have access to the B-Terminal [satellite phone] again and that will improve our ability to send videos and digital images and other interesting stuff including some of the 360° panoramas that we've been working on.

That's it for now, and we'll be in touch again soon. This is Charles Corfield signing off at Lobuche in the Upper Khumbu.

—Charles Corfield, Climber

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