Burleson

Click to hear Todd Burleson's audio dispatch recorded over sat-phone.
From Burleson's Satellite Call:
Hi this is Todd in Everest Base Camp. It's about 10:30 or 11pm of May 7th. We are all together in Base Camp at this time. Everybody is off the mountain. We will be heading down to Pheriche [14,000'] to drop down 2-3 thousand feet to rest for a few days to get ready for summit attempt.

The Alpine Ascents Everest 1997 Team in Base Camp
(Click on the photo for a big close-up shot.)

Leslie will be finishing the expedition now. He went up to Camp III [24,500'] which was his high-point, and he put a really great effort into it. He worked many, many hours and pushed hard up the fixed lines to get up there. Probably one of the oldest people to reach 24,000-24,500', so we're really proud of him.

The remainder of the team will be the five of us: Wally Berg, myself, Greg Wilson, Eric Simonson, and Charles Corfield. So we've got a very, very strong team; we're really looking forward to having a good summit day. Four of the five climbers, as you know, have already reached the summit of Everest. So we really hope we'll have the strength to push up there and do our GPS work and have a great summit.

What's been going on here right now is that several expeditions were up a few days ago and several of them have come back today. Pete Athans, Dave Breashears, Guy Cotter has returned back down with his group. The only people that are up there right now are the Malaysians and John Tinker's team. And it doesn't look like the weather is going to be very good. We've got a forecast -- it starts saying that tomorrow afternoon the winds will start coming 50 to 60 and then for the next few days up to 80, 90, 100 miles an hour. So, the winds are going to be high, and it's a good time to be in base.

What the Malaysians will do because they're really trying to push to reach the summit -- they've got a lot of political things going on and want to talk to the Prime Minister, but to leave their people in Camp II [21,500'] for four or five or six days and then wait for the weather to break will really be very taxing on them, so I imagine that hopefully the Malaysians will come down in a few days.

John Tinker

I'm not sure what John Tinker is doing. He's got about nine members and a couple of guides, and they have devised some method of splitting up into three summit attempts. And I'm not really sure how that's going to work. It sounds really complicated and a little confusing to me. [Click to hear Tinker's audio dispatch.]

The Canadians came down also today. They will rest too, and will try to go back up in four or five days too once it looks like the weather will break. Basically everything is calm in Base Camp.

One thing that this has done is that it's put everyone on a very similar schedule. We were hoping that most of these teams had already summited by the time we were preparing for our summit attempt. It looks like that will not be the case. So, the possibility of too many people on summit day is a very big issue at this time, and I think everybody is quite worried about it. Hopefully, we'll come up with some kind of resolution or that people just realize that they're going to have to move very, very quickly.

Our goal would be to be the first out that morning, and go to reach the summit, do our GPS work and then head on down. Even when you head down though, you often run into periods of waiting while you're trying to descend like the Hillary Step, etc.

So we're trying to work this out. We don't know how it's going to work, but hopefully it will pull together soon. All the sherpa are doing well in Base Camp. They've been down here quite a while, and they will rest another five days -- hopefully go get some exercise while we're down.

That's about it. Talk to you soon. Bye.

-- Todd Burleson, Expedition Leader