Ania's Birthday! And We're Heading for Camp 2

From Base Camp, Monday May 17th

Sunday was Ania's birthday!

We had another beautiful day here at base camp. We went for a good hike after breakfast and finished the day with a great dinner and birthday cake. Our Sherpa cook team once again amazed us with a beautiful cake complete with frosting and "Happy Birthday Ania" written in Strawberry Jelly. We also had a guest over from the Colombian team, the rest of her team was at the S. Col last night and heading for the summit early this morning. She was monitoring her team on our big base camp radio and sharing some Colombian music with us (we're all wearing out our music
libraries at this point). Ania led everyone in a dance around camp to some Latin Dance music including a lap thru the kitchen tent where all the Sherpas were finishing their dinner. This made for lots of laughs and smiles! It was another entertaining night.

This morning we woke to news that several climbers were approaching the summit, including 2 members of the Colombian team! It was a beautiful calm morning up high, but the winds are picking up as the day wears on. We are all wishing the best of luck to everyone high on the mountain today, and hope they get back to high camp safely this afternoon. It's exciting to hear of the first summits in several weeks. As forecasted, this window of lower winds was quite short, but a few small teams are trying to take advantage of it. The winds are expected to continue to pick up today and continue for a few more days after this.

We are excited to be packing up and organizing today in order to head up to Camp 2 early tomorrow morning! This is the beginning of our 5-6 day push towards the summit. We are looking at a couple of possible decent summit days coming up, and so we are going to start up the mountain so that we will be in position to take advantage of the hopefully diminishing winds. It is still a bit of a guessing game, but we've been pouring over our forecasts and it looks like we'll get a shot towards the end of the week. We've all put a lot of time and energy into getting to the point where we are acclimated, healthy, and fit enough to be heading off for a summit bid.

So it looks as if all the hard work, training and acclimating will all come together over the next few days. We're looking forward to being up high and in position for the summit... of Mt. Everest, only a few short days away!

Scott and Bill reporting from Everest Base Camp!