Edita wrote today and tried to call me on her satellite phone but I missed the call because I was pulled into a meeting and had the ringer off on my phone 😦  She wrote:

“Today we are resting but also packing and doing some gear testing and training. This morning after the breakfast, Phil showed us how the oxygen mask works.  I used one  twice before but it is always good to have a refresher. Some people in the group have never used a mask before.  After that, we checked our harnesses.

Practice time with the climbing gear

You need a safety sling and jumar (ascent) properly attached to the sling and to your harness. You also need a figure 8 for descending the steep sections of the mountain, although Phil said that the hard wrapping technique works as well. It is exciting and scary thinking how we will be going up the more technical parts – mostly from the North Cole to camp 1 and during the summit push – the exit cracks and the three steps!

Yaks are coming tomorrow to carry our first load to ABC. Apparently, yacks need to acclimatize as well! They will carry one load and come back for a second load. We are leaving BC in 4 nights, on Sunday. Phil thinks this is the necessary amount of time to acclimatize and not to get altitude sickness. I am still enjoying my down time, I can’t complain. I am not sleeping too well and do not have too good of an appetite. This is all related to altitude. However, slowly slowly I am getting used to the life here on the footsteps of Chomolungma.

With the help of Tarki Sherpa (I hope he’ll be my climbing Sherpa!), I packed up my gear in a single bag for ABC. We’ll spend quite a bit of time there. It is great we don’t need to carry all our gear up, which we did on Cho Oyu and Manaslu for the summit push! However, we’ll have to stop at the intermediate BC on the way to AC for acclimatization. We’ll spend a night there. We are not looking forward to going to IBC. From what Phil told us, it’s much much worse than Nyalam and Tingri together! It’s a small camp with nothing but yak dung around as yaks stop there too for acclimatization.

Anyway, I am not too worried now and am focusing on resting here at BC. Today I took a bucket shower in my tent which was quite a treat (no picture available) :-).  I avoid the real shower as I do not want to get sick from the chill… The bucket worked just fine!”

That’s all for now from Edita…stay tuned.