April 30, 1999

Summit Bid Underway

(Note: Nationalgeographic.com does not research or edit dispatches.)

Hi, this is Pete Athans on the 30th of April at about noon. Just getting back in touch with you after moving up the route a bit. We’ve been very busy getting things up to Camp II in preparation for our summit bid [map]. Charles just walked in about 10 minutes ago and is really enjoying a cup of tea here. We’re getting the team fixed out with all of our equipment, both scientific and personal, so that our summit bid goes well.

We’re hoping to move up to Camp III the day after tomorrow, which would be the 2nd of May, then move up to the South Col on the 3rd. When we get there, we have to do a retrofit of this GPS station that I put in five years ago. So it’ll take a brief walk...run both of those stations with the GPS with Dave Mencin—telemetrically downloading the data if everything goes well. The Sherpas move to Camp III, down to Camp II, and then we’ll all meet on the day that we move to Camp IV, which I believe will be I believe the 3rd of May.

With a little bit of luck, we’ll start at about 10 p.m. I hope to be on the summit by about 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning at the latest. We have a number of agendas to take care of up there. We’re hoping to run, first and foremost, a GPS unit right on top of Everest this year. And actually from the Nuptse Camp I, which we established a week or so ago, it looks like we have higher exposed bedrock than we’ve ever had before. This is maybe not very exciting to all of you, but for those of us who have climbed Everest before, usually Everest is a big snow tunnel, and it’s obviously subject to melting and wind blowing. [If there is] more exposed bedrock, then we can get a much better idea of how high the peak actually is if we run the units for several hours. And in addition to running the unit on the South Col, we’ll have some very interesting synchronous data, but we’ll talk a lot about how and why physically, Everest is still growing.

So that’s basically what we’re up to now. We’re just kind of relaxing here at Camp II. Jeff Rhoads is whipping up some pancakes. I can smell something burning in there. I should probably take a look, but looks like he’s got everything under control. [They’re] not on fire quite yet, but I’m going to excuse myself here and probably go partake in the victuals.

So thanks for tuning in. We find ourselves at Camp II today. Thank you for joining us and letting us be part of your lives. This is Pete Athans, signing off but I’ll be back in touch. Bye for now.

—Pete Athans, Expedition Leader