As of this morning, the fixed lines are all the way to the summit! Many teams have already left, many teams already in place at C2 and even C3. I don't even really want to say this out loud but our team is preparing to leave early early Monday morning (in a about 6 hours) for C2. If all goes as planned the schedule would be:
Monday: Ice Fall, C1, overnight at C2
Tuesday: Rest, overnight at C2
Wednesday: Climb to C3, start oxygen, overnight at C3
Thursday: Climb to C4, rest for a while, leave for the summit around midnight
Friday, May 18th- SUMMIT!
Last year, they made really good time on summit day but they were also basically the only ones out there. So who knows how that will factor in this time but I think it's safe to plan to be glued to the tracker Thursday afternoon and evening for those of us in the US.
For anyone that wasn't here last year I will fill you in on how that day went... I remember refreshing my computer every 5 minutes for hours watching them move up towards the summit. It was a completely surreal experience. I had random acquaintances and friends texting me all day that they were tracking it, people I had no idea were even interested. I guess it's not every day that you know someone doing something this exciting. At 28,700' the tracker just stopped. After several minutes the panic started to set in. Frantic texts to the other family members and to their base camp manager. No answers. For about an hour we all speculated what had happened. Maybe they had hit a weird patch where the tracker couldn't communicate with the satellite? Maybe they had reached the summit but it just wasn't tracking anymore? Did something happen? Please don't say something happened. After what seemed like eternity, the tracker slowly started moving down towards camp 4.
First relief. Then devastation. I knew they would be crushed. I knew he would go back. I knew it would affect him for months. When he got back to base camp after several days (and a lot of extra low points) we were finally able to text freely again. He was depressed to say the least. We were talking about the dog and the flight home and other light topics when he texted, "This will haunt me all of my days." And I said, "No it won't because you will go back." He replied- "I can't imagine ever going back..." and yet here we are! It's like childbirth ;)
So this time around, let's just have an uneventful, right on schedule summit and trip back down. Miraculously, the weather looks good and every report is of there being a nice open window this week. There will be lots of summits over the next few days. They will start tracking as soon as they leave. 123, go team!
PS- Happy Mother's Day to all of you wonderful moms out there! And especially to the Mothers of these four adventure seekers. You have raised some determined, strong men who you can be so proud of... but it can't be easy to watch your babies go do something like this!
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