Mt. Everest 2010 #45 - I did summit and everything's good!

Gabcast! Mt. Everest 2010 #45




Namaste everybody from Camp 2.

Sorry about the delay in ?? I tried to do that about 12 hours ago, I think I talked a bit too long.

Anyways, as most of you know, I did summit and everything's good. I'm feeling good now. I had a few issues. What happened was we got to Camp 4, Domhnall and I got there together, ate and drank and hydrated and stuff for about 5-6 hours. Got up at about 6 o'clock in the evening we got everything ready and ready to go by 7:30 and so headed up. I think I knew this but it is completely uphill: there is no relief, no traversing, the whole time it's uphill and so we started off, but at least it's in the dark, so you don't really know how much uphill it is and it's pretty straight uphill. So headed up. I was feeling pretty tired. I hadn't eaten a whole lot the day before, on the way to Camp 4. No breakfast, no drinking, so I was a little bit low on fuel. I was feeling quite tired and kind of slowed down the group.

When we got to the summit, we got to the South Summit just as the sun was rising so that was really nice. After the South Summit, it still took us a couple of hours to get to the real summit. The Hillary Step was a little bit interesting, not too bad, and then of course the summit ridge, which was long! And then you get to the top and all of a sudden, all of a sudden you're there! The view was the peaks of the mountains and a fair bit of clouds covering probably below 5000 metres. But it was beautiful up there, really, really nice. We didn't spend a lot of time up there. We took off our oxygen and my big mistake is that I shut off my oxygen and so it was frozen. So my sherpa, Tshering, was very nice and gave me his oxygen but then his mask was way too big. So after Domhnall and I kind of split up; he headed down 'cause the forecast was really nasty weather and we were trying to get down and quickly as we could. So I took off my oxygen mask and within, we were still pretty high we were about the South Summit. It didn't take very long that I didn't have any energy at all: I didn't want to stand up. So, we had a lot of fresh snow which made the climb up kind of difficult and long but so what I started doing was sliding down, and I've kind of torn up my seat. My poor sherpa Tshering didn't really know what to do. Tried to mount up a rescue but I was still talking, coherent, just didn't have much energy, and so eventually I put the oxygen mask back on and started walking down. We did some sliding, the both of us together, because it is so much faster than walking down. Anyways, we made it down, we made it down to the South Col where the other sherpa ?? met up with us and then we made it all the way down to Camp 2 last night. So it was a long way, a long day, a couple long days but certainly well worth it!


I want to thank everyone, everyone who's supported me, everyone who's encouraged me, everyone who's made comments on my blog, just everything. I don't know when I'm coming home. I'll probably be changing my ticket 'cause I'm coming home earlier than early June but we'll see. I'd love to stick around and see how the rest of my team does but I don't know how much longer I want to be staying here staying away from home.

I will continue to make podcasts, for the next, probably the next week or so and keep you up to date and maybe some more tidbits and about what happened. Keep listening.

Love to you all, take care. Bye.


(Ted) Unfortunately, the Spot tracking got turned off accidentally at the South Summit, causing many of us to worry a bit.