Message to be patient and wait till our mountain is ready

Everest Diary/Grania Willis: From hope to despair, from despair back to hope

Everest Diary/Grania Willis: From hope to despair, from despair back to hope. But still there's been no window in the weather sufficiently large to allow Russell Brice's Himalayan Experience team a crack at the summit of Everest.

After two weeks at base camp, we returned to advanced base camp (ABC) hopeful that we would be poised, ready to take advantage of the slightest break in the weather.

But, for a commercial outfit like Himex, narrow windows don't provide enough time to get the clients up the mountain and safely back down. So, although several teams opted to have a shot at the summit this week, the Himex members sat, increasingly frustrated, at ABC.

The summit remained out of reach, however, even for the strongest teams. The steady stream of climbers heading up the hill on Wednesday was reversed the following day and even the Finns, climbing without Sherpa assistance, turned around after an extended stay at the 7,900 metre camp three.

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The Norwegians only got to within shouting distance of camp two before they also turned round and have now dropped right back to base camp before a planned regroup for a final attempt on the summit with just six of their original 12 team members.

The lack of summits has produced a considerable degree of controversy on the north side of the mountain this week, with a number of expeditions blaming our team leader Russell Brice for their failures. The New Zealander's Sherpas have put in fixed lines - the ropes that climbers use to provide a safety line on the mountain - up to high camp at 8,300 metres.

A further 1,000 metres of rope is sitting at high camp, awaiting a suitable break in the weather to fix the lines to the summit, but Brice won't risk his Sherpas in the current conditions and the teams that were aiming for this week's fleeting window are not happy.

The Himex team met last Wednesday, when Brice informed the members that the weather window was very small. "There's too much risk of losing digits and even lives and I won't risk your lives or my Sherpas", he told us. "There'll be temperatures of -30 and 60kp/h winds. You guys wouldn't last 10 minutes in that if something goes wrong." That was shattering enough - but then he dropped the real bombshell. "I can't guarantee that we'll get a summit attempt this season."

Devastation. We've been here eight weeks and now he's telling us we may not even get a chance at the top? Apparently, the Tibetan calendar for 2005 has two Aprils and no May, which explains the unseasonable weather conditions. Normally, by now, temperatures would have started to elevate and there would have been an early summit window, but not this year. After breaking the bad news to his clients, Brice then had to go and face the climbing equivalent of a firing squad - angry expedition leaders who felt that Brice alone should have completed fixing the ropes to the summit and, even more unreasonably, that he also should share his hugely expensive weather forecast with them all.

The Indian Air Force representative was particularly vociferous, but Brice stood firm and said that he would not risk his Sherpas in the current conditions, effectively giving the other teams part of the forecast they'd been clamouring for.

The meeting, which was held under the chorten built for the Himex Sherpa puja last Sunday, was rapidly reported on one of the Everest websites. Brice was vilified by an unknown assailant, but he has pledged to remain focused on his goal of getting as many as possible of his Himex clients to the summit - weather permitting - and has no intention of letting the rope row get in his way.

He's told us to stay calm and be patient. "Let me do the worrying," he said. But it's hard to be either calm or patient when the month of May, even if it officially doesn't exist in Tibet this year, is rapidly galloping to a close.

At lunchtime yesterday, Brice was talking about the very end of May or the beginning of June for a possible summit attempt. The mountain just isn't ready for us yet.

But the departure of Chuck Dasey from the Himex yellow team yesterday morning had nothing to do with impatience. The American had finally decided that his deteriorating health was never going to improve at ABC and has opted to head for home.

There was no such option for Italy's Christian Kuntner, a colleague of our Italian friends supporting Bruno Brunod's attempt to do a 24-hour sprint up and down the mountain from base camp.

Kuntner, who was on his final climb to complete the world's 14 mountains higher 8,000 metres, was killed in an avalanche on Annapurna, the world's tenth-highest mountain in Nepal earlier in the week.

Maybe it's a message to us to be patient and wait till our mountain is ready. In the battle between man and mountain, the mountain will always win.