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News from Friday, May 09, and Saturday, May 10, 2003

LEAVING BASE CAMP FOR THE SUMMIT ATTEMPT

News as of Friday:

The long days of waiting are over. On Friday morning, the team made a decision together with Ngawang Thiele, the sirdar of the expedition. Before, of course the weather report from Switzerland by Meteonews, and other information sources were consulted, amonst others also the Tibetan calendar.

Ngawang Thiele's family is celebrating a Puja ceremony for him and for our team these days. This shall protect our team and give much luck.

The team will go in two parts. The Sherpas will ascend already today and will prepare camp 4 on the South Col at about 8000 m. In camp 2, the mountaineers will meet again. Ngawang will then go to the summit with the second team.

If everythings works well, our Swiss will take the camera of TeleM1 to the summit. We hope the Sherpa will be able to image a great team in best weather.

This evening the packs were completed - although hardly there was anything that was not packed. But it's better to control everything twice or three times. Better safe than sorry!

The last mails and phone calls before the climb are done - now everybody is happy that soon the start will come. Two or three in the days base camp, relaxing, eating, sleeping are great, but our energy bundles are eager to go up and see if they will be lucky to get the gift of a summit climb on Mount Everest.

News as of Saturday:

Late on Friday evening, the team received an updated weather forecast, predicting storms up to 80 km/h on the scheduled summit days. Therefore the attempt was postponed indefinitely. As we got to know from basecamp now, our mountaineers left the base camp for camp 2 on Sunday morning. They would then probably go to camp 3 on Monday, camp 4 on Tuesday, and to the summit on Wednesday. So the weather must be perfect on Tuesday and Wednesday, otherwise the risk high up there would be too big.

On early Sunday morning they left - from now on let's keep our fingers crossed for them. On next Tuesday or Wednesday our team hopes to stand on the top of 8850 m high Mount Everest.

Whoever has a direct line to the weather: Just let the sun shine and switch the wind off around Mount Everest. We are willing to take all the storm, rain, and snow home to Europe if we can help our team.

Let's hope for good news soon!