Everest - Tonight's The Night...
With good weather forecast, an incredible 70 plus climbers are poised at the South Col ready to attempt Everest tonight leading to fears of deadly bottlenecks on the world's highest mountain.
It's Everest summit fever according to leading UK guiding outfit
Jagged Globe. The company says that approximately 70-80 climbers are
now at the South Col poised to go for the summit tonight.
According to Jagged Globe's Tom Briggs: 'The first weather window
of the season has been forecast for this weekend. Over the last three
days, climbers have been making their way up the mountain from base
camp to camp 4, which is located at 8000m in the "death zone". At
these altitudes, the body is slowly dying and it is now a race
against time to get to the summit (at 8,850m) and back down
again.
The huge number of climbers on the mountain will raise the spectre
of the 1996 Everest disaster and, despite staggered start times, it's
inevitable that bottlenecks will develops, particularly on the summit
ridge and, in particular, at the Hillary Step.
Climbers will start leaving their tents at around 9 pm and most
will take around 12 hours to reach the top before descending, those
moving too slowly will have to turn around for their own safety,
though with some clients paying up to $65,000 for the climb, it's a
hard decision to make particularly after two months of hard effort
and acclimatisation.
Jagged Globe has a small team of three western climbers supported
by three Sherpas who are now at the South Col. Remarkably, the team
led by top climber Kenton Cool, are able to send back text messages
charting their progress on the mountains. You can read
dispatches from the team here,
at the Jagged Globe web site. Good luck to everybody up there.
The company is one of the few British outfits guiding on Everest and
has a good success record on the mountain. Check below for an
interesting interview with Jagged Globe's Steve Bell
where he explains just what he's looking for from a potential Everest
client.
For more general Everest updates, see everestnews.com
Discuss this story
Seems to me like there's gonna be a few people dying up there tonight/tomorrow then. I just hope for their sakes, that the weather holds, and another storm doesn't do what happenned in '96(?). It might make some people wake up if it did though. But then again some people will never wake up to the reality of how dangerous it is! Is our lovely Miss Rice (or whatever her name is) one of the 70?
Posted: 14/05/2004 at 17:14
Pssst, Drew - think her name was Annabel Bond (sp). Do you reckon the guides and clients will have learnt any lessons from the 96 disaster? Like sticking to cut off times and stuff? If for some reason I found myself doing something with such a high mortality rate, then I'd make use of all the info available to try and reduce the risk as much as possible.
Posted: 14/05/2004 at 17:17
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