Saturday April 9th, 6pm. Everest Base Camp, 5,350m
(EST is 9 hours 45 mins behind Nepal)

We join climbers from around the world.

It’s a grey, cold, inhospitable day at Base Camp. We woke in the night to the sound of distant avalanches and ice cracking under the tent, but we’re in no danger. We have found it much easier to work today as our bodies are becoming slowly acclimatised to this strange environment.

There are 60 to 80 climbers at Base Camp, all hoping to climb Everest from the south side this year and we have met many of them. We have met climbers from Iran, Nepal, Switzerland, Denmark, Singapore, US, Korea, Lithuania, Britain, Belgium and even Montreal. All have a dream, like Sean, to summit the world’s highest mountain. Along with the climbers are many hikers, like myself, and we’ve even met a couple of hikers from Belgium who plan to marry at Base Camp on Monday! I’m not sure where they’ll be going for their honeymoon, but it won’t be anywhere fast. Base Camp is a little political with some very territorial groups so we let the sherpas guide us on where we can park our stuff.

We had our first hockey practice this morning. The yaks had safely transported our sticks and goals to Base Camp and Chris, Gerry, Norm and I took shots on our home-swept rink. We were having so much fun that we almost missed breakfast. I don’t think it’ll be a fast-paced game next week. Any give-and-go’s will be mostly “give” and let someone else “go”! We still have a lot of work to do on the rink and Gerry and Norm spent time this afternoon preparing it. The penalty box is a very neat crevasse – not too deep, mind you.

The team from Brown University arrived this afternoon and they will have dinner with us. Brown University is working with NASA to look at how different parts of the brain contribute to the stable function of various parts of our cognitive and motor repertoire and they are using the Kanatek HP ProCurve wireless network to back up their files on to the server. Over the next day or so we’ll establish the back up link to Ottawa and get all the files saved back home. Already, we have been accessing email and there is quite a line-up of people wanting to check their accounts. We want to send a big thank you to all the well wishers that have sent messages. Please keep them coming as they are great to read. We have received them all and we will start responding in the next day or so. In the meantime Katie says “hi” to her mum!

Harold is much better now, thanks to Dr Burgess, and his appetite has improved. For a while there we were worried about him but he shows no ill-effects. Gavin Lumsden, the Rogers Television producer who is a part of our expedition, has been awestruck by the power of the scenery and at one point commented, “I’m so emotional that I could cry, but I’m just too dehydrated”.

We are planning to officially ban the use of all zippers in future. They are almost impossible to operate here, and it takes hours to sort yourself out.

We are getting ready for our schools broadcast on Monday and talking to children from across Canada. I hope it will open their eyes up to a very different environment and inspire some of them on to great things.

More later.

Terry