A game of patience

The weather continues its fickle game with our summit plans.  Following some heavy snows over the last 36 hours we have decided not to venture onto the mountain until it stabilises further.  This means we cannot make the good weather window of 2nd Oct.  The decision making conference was punctuated by the roar of avalanches of Niake the peak next to base camp, which added an extra poigncy to the discussions.  Even as I type this some 16 hours later the roaring of avalanches continues although they are so common now we dont even pause in our card games.

For folk in the UK, have a think how often the BBC gets the forecast wrong at 24hrs out, so predicting mountain weather at 8000m 7days out is incredibly difficult. We have included a meteogram so folk can gain an insight to our decisions.  Marc (our weather guru - weather4expeditions) has been brilliant so far and his forecast below delayed our summit bid from the 4th Oct, as we would have been on the summit plateau above 7500m in poor weather.  We are looking now at the 6th or 9th but will await further forecasts.




A few folk have emailed some questions about why we did not make a summit bid earlier with some other teams.  The answer is simply that we were not all acclimatised.  We lost a day on the walk in due to a porter shortage in Sama Goan and then had to evacuate two team members.  This put us just behind where we needed to be.  Some local operators made their clients rush the acclimatisation to make the weather window which resulted in a very low success rate and some runs down the mountain with sick clients.  Some operators only quote the success rate as the prcentage of climbers who left Camp 4 and made the summit, ignoring the many that could not acclimatise rapidly, so check carefully any statistics pushed out!

Another commonly asked question, is what is the summit plan.  Ideally this is to move through the camps with a night at each, (C1,C2,C3,C4) and return to C2 from the summit if our legs allow.  This however may change with the weather.  From BC - C1 is a short day, but from C1-C2 is a long day through an active icefall which makes it more of a challenge to make C2 from BC in one day and then head on to C3 the following day. C2-C3 is relatively short, but C3-C4 is a monster.  Reports say that the summit day is reasonably short (especially as we will be on oxygen at 4L/hr).

Tomorrow we will give an overview of BC so folks can see how we are whiling away time waiting for good weather.  For EMRT it's like perpetually goalhanging at base, but a lot colder and without Bart to take the mick out of.

The team is happy to answer any questions especially as we are now bored out of our skulls and looking for anything different to do.  Patience is indeed a virtue when high altitude mountaineering is concerned.