Burleson

Click to hear Todd Burleson's audio dispatch recorded over sat-phone.
From Burleson's Satellite Call:
Hi, this is Todd at Everest Base Camp at about 9:30pm on May 13th. From the north side today, we actually heard very little. All I have is again a confirmation from Russle Brice [in Base Camp on the north side] that there were only five dead [instead of the seven or eight believed earlier]. That was three Khazaks [Alexander Torochin, Nikolai Chevtchenko, and Ivan Plotaikov], a sherpa named Ang Nima from Khumjung, and the German man, Peter Kowalzik, IMC mountain guide service.

Everybody is in Base Camp still. All of the expedition members from all the teams are in Base Camp. The weather report is still quite bad. Though hopefully in six days we see possibly a chance for improvement. Seems that there is an unstable, low-pressure down in India which is causing the jet-streams to stay low here. The winds are very high on the mountain today -- we could see big plumes blowing off all the time. But really there's no movement right now, so some of the other members are getting pretty anxious on some of the other expeditions, but everybody knows not to move up until the weather is better.

We got a forecast today that said through the 18th, it was going to blow hard, but it showed on the 18th that it might drop down to 50 miles per hour, and that's the first drop we've seen on the schedule. If that trend continues, we will go up the day after tomorrow. So, we'll head up on the 15th, and that gives us five days to the summit, so we would summit on into the 19th or the 20th. And that is our goal at this point. That could be extended and delayed, but we want to move as quickly as possible. So do the other expeditions, so there is still the issue of overcrowding and how many people will be going to the summit. I'm guessing there's 60 climbers here and close to 100 sherpa that will want to attempt the summit. That would be far too many for one day, so we're trying to see how we could divide that up, but there has been no solution to that problem.

Hope everyone is well there. Bye.

-- Todd Burleson, Expedition Leader