Blume

Click to hear Fred Blume's audio dispatch recorded over sat-phone.
From Blume's Satellite Call:

100mph winds blow plumes of snow off the summit earlier today. [Click for bigger image]

This is Freddy Blume calling from Everest Base Camp at 8pm on Thursday, May 22nd. All of our climbers safely and strongly reached Camp III [23,500' on the Lhotse Face] today and are asleep right now in preparation for tomorrow morning's probable move to the South Col [26,300']. I say probable because it depends a lot on what happens tonight.

There are four or five teams -- let me go through them: a Canadian one, Guy Cotter's New Zealand team, David Breashear's NOVA team, the Malaysians, and John Tinker's second summit group from OTT [British]. So there are five teams sitting there at the South Col tonight, all which have decisions to make on whether to start their summit attempt around midnight at the customary time. [Click here to see a map of the summit route.

[Click for bigger image]

Todd and I have a 5am our time [4:15pm PST] radio-chat scheduled at which time I will tell him who has done what and gone where. At this point I've gotten certain responses from the Malaysians and from the New Zealanders that they will be going for the summit tonight because the weather report, as well as the actual weather on the South Col has been improving steadily for the past 24 hours. You'll see my pictures that I took from the summit of Kala Pattar [18,300'] this morning that show very high velocity winds, and now the latest report is below 20mph winds and forecast to stay low for tomorrow.

So that would mean early tomorrow morning, our five climbers [Todd Burleson, Wally Berg, Charles Corfield, Eric Simonson, and Greg Wilson] would move from Camp III to Camp IV, and the Sherpas, who are all at Camp II right now, would move all the way up to IV and meet them in preparation for our summit bid.

The weather report for the 24th, which is our summit day, is kind of nebulous. Right now they are telling us that the jet-stream has moved north, and we can definitely feel that, but they're predicting a potential move back down over us in the next two or three days. So, how that affect us, well, that remains to be seen.

It is 8pm right now, and if there's a more spectacular place to be -- a moon-rise -- I can't imagine it. To see the moon poking over the Ice Fall and lighting up the snow-white faces of Pumori and Changtse just lights up this place like daylight, and it's definitely one of the things I'll never forget about my stay here.

Anyway, the sky is looking nice right now. In the meantime, signing off for now. Talk to you soon.

-- Frederick Blume, Team Scientist