Click to hear Leslie Buckland's audio dispatch recorded over sat-phone earlier from Base Camp.

Leslie Buckland, who is on a guided climb with Eric Simonson and Greg Wilson, turned 68 today.

From Buckland's Satellite Call:
Hello, this is Leslie Buckland, and I have two or three thoughts that you can use or throw away, entirely at your discretion of course. There've been a number of questions about cold. Well, we haven't really been into desperately cold weather yet. But one does spend most of the afternoon in cold weather -- you have to get up in the cold. One of the things that happens when you get into cold weather is that the nails separate from the nail bed, and the finger tips crack quite deeply. And this happened to me in Antarctica, and it happened to me on McKinley, and someone recommended an extraordinary remedy which seems to be working wonderfully for me: you simply glue everything with super glue! So I'm running around here with my fingers all sealed up solid with super glue.

It's common to talk about the remarkable sherpas. They are relatively small individuals, and a lot of different things can be said about them. But the most extraordinary thing to me is they have so little compared with me, with most of us, all westerners, yet I have never ever met anywhere such a happy group of people. They are smiling all the time. They are laughing. They are giggling. It's an inspiration.

They move with incredible speed -- truly unbelievable speed. Today when there was a collapse of an area on the ice fall, where there needed to be new ropes and new ladders... the sherpas that could not move up because of this fall, they literally ran through the Ice Fall! And here I am, picking my way up, step by careful step, path by careful path, and these fellows are running with their crampons. They are like mountain goats. Quite an extraordinary group of people.

We started out this morning at 2:30am. The sherpa in charge of the base camp gets up an hour earlier, sees that we have a cup of coffee at our tent and lights the juniper smoke, and gathers us around the altar there. He gives us rice, we throw the rice on the altar, we put some of the rice in our pockets. I, as a Christian, am very, very moved at the intimate way in which the religion, Buddhism, is built in to everything they do. If only I did everything as spiritually thoughtfully as these sherpas do, I think my life would be different.

Another item... One would expect some very deep introspection on climbing because one has so much time on one's hands. At one point, one of the guides said to me, because I was moving very slowly, 'Leslie, you've got to prove you can manage this mountain. You've got to prove you can climb this mountain' -- as a stimulation, as a motivation. And the personal insight that came to me at that point was, and without any boastfulness, you know... I don't have to prove anything. Climbing this mountain won't prove anything. That's not what it's about.

Oh, I think that's probably enough for now.

-- Leslie Buckland, Climber