Everest '07 - Team Diary

8th September 2007 - Low Clouds, High Spirits!

Before the crack of dawn, the call went up that there was a bit of clear sky! Woop, woop! We were all up and out fast with the Girlguiding balloon and heading up the steep old route climb out of the Namche valley. By steep, imagine walking up steep wobbly spiral stairs for over an hour.

As we climbed, the sky cleared and the sun rose to give tantilising glimpses of high peaks winking at us from within the clouds. Progress was slow and painful at times. This was supposed to be an acclimitisation day with a gentle walk to keep progress. But, with the weather being so fickle, we had voted to have an attempt at inflating the balloon on level land near Syangboche if there was any window in prospect.

But as we reached the top of the hill and stopped to rest, in came the cloud, enshrouding everything in a cold, moist, white candyfloss fog. We pushed on regardless and were rewarded with a handfull of clear spells where the magnitude of the surrounding peaks just caused us to stop and wonder. They all seem so close. And they are.

As we reached just under 4,000m, some of the cloud broke, but the wind came with it. There was no way we could inflate the balloon today.

So we did the Girlguiding thing. We sang, and danced to much amusement of our Sherpas. We sang Guiding songs. We sang Worship songs. We sang silly songs. And we danced like penguins.

After an hour or two, the weather came in bad and we split into two teams. One returned to Namche to sort admin and take much needed sustainance. The other headed off to the Kunde hospital, a wilderness charitable outpost in the mountains. Here, we spoke with the staff and learned about the difficulties of even routine proceedures in the mountain environment.

We will try with the balloon again tomorrow and Monday. But if we acheive nothing else in our time up here, today we have all acheived a Mountain Top Moment.