Gabcast - April 29 - Back to Base Camp

Gabcast! Mt. Everest 2010 #37

Namaste everybody from Base Camp.

Today is April 29 and it's Simonne's birthday, my baby sister so everyone who knows her, just give her a call and wish her a happy birthday.

So today was another really good day. We got up at about 5:00 in the morning, quickly packed up all my gear tried not to wake up my tentmate, Carina, because her plan for today is to go up to Camp 3, what we did yesterday so I wanted to let her sleep in a little bit. We ??? and ???, packed up all our stuff and headed back down to Base Camp. So it wasn't very long to get from Camp 1, er from Camp 2 to Camp 1, and I was moving pretty fast 'cause I was pretty cold. We probably left around 7:00 by the time we got to Camp 1, the sun had started to hit the tents and and stuff and hit the area so it got nice and warmed up and waited for a couple other teammates to come. I got some nice pictures on the ladders and stuff. It's amazing: you know I can't change a light bulb in the house, I can't step on a step ladder in the house and yet I'm kind of flying across these horizontal and vertical ladders. Of course I do have some ropes on the side, so that does help. As we started down into the icefall though, there was a small avalanche just to our right and so we just waited a few minutes for things to settle and then everything was good.

And so headed back down, got down to Base Camp probably at about 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning - enough time to wash up, do a little bit of laundry and have some good food, and breathe in the really oxygen-rich air down here. So we had a kind of a lazy afternoon and then we watched a movie.

So it's about 9:30 at night right now so I'm heading to bed and I will call you tomorrow. So everybody take care and see you then. Bye.