Mt. Everest 2010 #21

Gabcast! Mt. Everest 2010 #21




Namaste everybody from Everest base camp. This is Lucille calling in with a report for April 13.

Well we woke up this morning to about two or three inches of fresh snow, but the sky was blue and the sun was shining and it was nice and warm and we had a really good day.

Now a grade 6 Logos class asked about the equipment that I have to take with me, so I'll explain a little bit about the equipment that we need to travel on the glacier because that's what we're traveling on.

So we have crampons first of all which is what we put on the underside of our boots kind of some spikes, and that helps us to keep our grip and allows us to walk on the ice. We also carry an ice axe with us, so sometimes we use that as a cane, sometimes we use it as sort of a pick to kind of help us get up kind of a steep embankment, that sort of thing. The next thing that we have is a harness. So we wear a harness and wear that fairly tightly, and on that we have some equipment to attach us to the fixed ropes that are there. We also have to have a device called an ascender, or a jumar, and what that allows us to do is we attach that to the line, the fixed rope that's there, and then we push it up (the rope) and it prevents it from moving back (on the rope), so it gives us a bit of a help so that we can climb up kind of a steep embankment. That's kind of the pieces of equipment we were playing with today out on the icefall.

It's snowing right now, so I'm not sure what we are going to be doing tomorrow. If the snow stops fairly quickly, then the plan is for me to leave at 5 o'clock in the morning and go through the icefall. Watch the spot; if it doesn't move then you will know that it snowed too much and the risk of avalanche is too high for us to be in the icefall. If it does move, then you'll know that's where I'm at!

That's it for today. Hope everybody is well. My cold is getting much better as you can probably tell, and everything is going well here.

Love you all and take care. Bye.