Somehow we kept busy all afternoon at ABC yesterday. Seth Waterfall figured out and fixed problems with the solar panels that the radio "base station" was dependent on. Then he figured out how to make the antenna and base station talk to each other a little better so that ABC could dependably have radio communication with anywhere else on the mountain. Kent Harvey then suggested a little foray out on to the ice just west of camp, which Seth and I found quite interesting. As I've said many times, there is little or no snow from the past winter on Mount Everest. The glacier surfaces are down to old snow and ice; everything is melting out and exposed. Within just a few minutes of poking around, we were finding old and intact oxygen bottles from the 1960's and 70's. Treasure. I have to catch myself every now and then… remembering that not everybody has an oxygen bottle collection… but I do. I love finding old bottles and then matching them to legendary expeditions and climbers of the past. Some of the bottles I've found over the years will eventually be in museums, none will ever be on eBay… they mean too much to me (although they severely challenge my living room décor). As Kent and Seth and I continued to crunch around the glacial surface with our crampons and heavy boots. I came upon a cardboard box, looking… a lot like a damp heap of trash on a 21,000 ft glacier. But when I folded over this particular trash, it said in big black letters "1975 British Everest Expedition". While this wasn't the kind of treasure I could reasonably burden my living room with, it was none-the-less very special to me… in a trash-picking sort of way. I'd already been thinking of the 1975 British Everest Expedition… all day, in fact, as we'd gone for our hike under the great Southwest Face that the '75 BEE famously climbed. All morning I'd been straining to understand again how Chris Bonnington's boys had managed to get up something so steep and foreboding. And out there next to that soggy box I began blathering on about Doug Scott and Dougal Haston and Peter Boardman and Pertemba and that post-monsoon hardman climb, until I could see Kent and Seth's eyeballs rolling back in their heads.

We trudged back over the ice-rolls to our ABC and an afternoon of minor chores in camp. Word came via radio that Nga Tenji had reached the South Col with the rope fixing team and was figuring out a place for our highest camp. He reported strong winds up there, and that certainly seemed to be the case by the time Erica, Seth, Kent and I gathered for dinner in our big dome tent. The strong winds were finding their way down into the Western Cwm. We each went to bed knowing that it would be a noisy night.

And it was. There was the noise of great waves of air periodically rolling down a mountainside… then the frantic flapping as a wave would crash on the 50 tents just uphill from us, and finally the noise of the wind blowing on our own tents and trying to flatten or remove them. But while we couldn't exactly sleep through it all, we could at least relax in the knowledge that we'd diligently done our chores in anchoring and properly securing our strong tents. Poking our heads out into the gusty morning at 5:45 AM, we could see many surrounding tents that were radically different in shape from the previous evening, but our camp had been largely spared. I told Erica not to worry too much about the sleep she'd missed out on in the night. We were going to basecamp… land of good naps. We geared up and crammed a little breakfast and coffee. The wind still whipped around us as we climbed into our crampons. I was interested to see high cloud covering the sky at just about the level of Everest's summit. We've had so many days begin with nothing but pure blue skies that it seemed eerie and frightening to have a sudden change in the pattern. As we thanked our chef and walked out of camp, I could see a silver lining to the cloud cover. I knew that it would make our time down in the Icefall a little more comfortable by blocking out the morning sun… perhaps it would even make things safer.

Ang Kaji, Kent, Seth and Erica let me lead on down the Western Cwm. We passed plenty of the usual "Sherpa Army" moving loads all the way from BC to ABC and then running back down empty. And we began to pass our own gang as they made their way up from BC to take our places up high. Ed Viesturs, Jake Norton, Peter Whittaker and John Griber each seemed to be making fine progress after their 4AM start down low. We moved through Camp I and then down into the chaos of the Icefall itself. I knew it hadn't been just the wind keeping me awake in the night -there were also plenty of wayward thoughts of things that could possibly go wrong with our descent. It would be another big test for Erica's skill and stamina. I didn't let her take the test alone, of course. I pestered her to clip this rope and unclip that one, step fast on that ice chunk before it collapses, step over here to let the Sherpas pass, do this and don't do that…QUICK! And Seth watched and pestered her from behind. She was probably wishing we'd just let her plug in her iPod to drown out all the excess coaching. But she passed another test with flying colors. We radioed Linden Mallory at basecamp just after 10AM to let him know our team of five was out of danger and headed for food, friendship, thick sleeping pads and the low, fat air of 17,500 ft.

The first day and night down after an Everest climbing rotation are great for enjoying the novelty of comfort and easy living again. But it isn't really until the second night back down that I normally get full and renewing sleep. And looking at Kent, Seth and Erica over coffee this morning, I'm guessing it was similar for them. We all seemed back to our normal selves again today, ready to make plans and preparations for climbing again..

Toward that end, during breakfast out in the sun, we began sketching a big calendar of the next four weeks. There are plenty of blanks on it still, naturally… and of course a big question mark or two at the end, but I was pleased to at least be building a framework out into the all-important second half of May. I consider it a great luxury to be down merely resting rather than recovering (which can be a much less predictable process). I'm crediting that distinction to my strong, fit and patient partners… but also to my experience and past mistakes in this arena. I'm guessing that we did just enough up high this last time around… not too much, not too little. It is all too easy for me to remember the many trips that formed my learning curve on which I wasn't satisfied to come down the hill until my throat was bleeding, my head was pounding, and my muscles were pulled.

This is better. And I find I can illustrate the elusive "big picture" with the help of a calendar and some colorful marker pens. Pacing is everything in a two-month-long "race." My partners didn't fight me on any of this stuff (making me worry that my own slow learning curve could possibly have been avoided by employing a bigger brain). Erica settled in for a morning of schoolwork. Kent went to fiddle with his cameras and Seth had reading to do. We'd already made good use of yesterday in showering, shaving and leveling our tent platforms, so today was just plain old good rest. That is what they were doing up at C2 today as well. And perhaps it was the plan all over the mountain, as I didn't see very much traffic in the Icefall this morning. Our Sherpa team didn't rest today, but then they were up early enough and moving fast enough that by my morning survey, they were well out of sight and on their way to C2 already.

By afternoon, I was in the mood for struggle and conquest, and so I sought out renowned Scrabble player Justin Merle in the IMG camp. We tussled for a bit (alas, no bingos) before the better man prevailed. And then it was nice to just share afternoon tea with my longtime friends Mark Tucker and Eric Simonson. HimEx leader Russell Brice and Monica, his team doctor, showed as well for an unplanned and relaxing chat. Linden Mallory completed the party when he came to make sure that the "Sirdar" meeting was taking place as scheduled. Far more important than our tea party, this was a meeting of the Sherpa team leaders and dealt with figuring a plan to fix rope -and soon- on the summit terrain. While I may seem smug about taking the longer road and viewing the bigger picture, and all that, in order to get to the summit in the easiest and safest way -three weeks down the road- I'm anxious to have others start pounding away urgently at the door to the top… NOW!

There are plenty of strong and ambitious people here, and I don't want them all going to the top when I want to go to the top. It benefits everybody to have the door to the summit open for a longer period… and it will benefit my team to have that route pounded in and well-tested. Those who desire more challenge and more bragging rights back home can go early when it is colder and meaner. I wish them luck. Kick big footsteps, please.

Now if the first night down low was novel and the second was restful, I wonder what the third will be like… Will I soon be able to brag about having achieved the perfect basecamp rest day? Ambition takes many forms.

I probably shouldn't have accepted the toast from Dave Hahn…after all, red wine with antibiotics to treat a deep-seated chest infection is perhaps not doctor recommended. But, how could I pass it up?

It was nearly 10 years ago that Dave and I and three others - Conrad Anker, Andy Politz, and Tap Richards - stood on a lonely patch of rock at nearly 27,000 feet on Everest's North Face, each in stunned silence, for lying at our feet were the remains of a legend, a hero, a mystery: George Leigh Mallory. He and his climbing companion, Andrew Irvine, had disappeared 75 years before, virtually without a trace, some 800 feet below the summit.

Yup, this is definitely an anniversary worth toasting, antibiotics or not. That day was, and is now, the most poignant day in my climbing career, far surpassing the fleeting moments I've spent on top of the world, or on top of other peaks around the world. Far removed from personal achievement, our discovery of Mallory was a collision with history, a step back in time, and a humbling, welcome reminder that our goals and accomplishments, successes and failures in the mountains - and in life - are predicated on the efforts of remarkable people who came before. We are, as I wrote in Issue 1000 of Trail & Timberline Magazine, standing on the shoulders of giants.

Indeed, as I sit in my basecamp tent reflecting on May 1, 1999, I can't help but think about my predecessors on this side of the mountain…May 1, 1963, when Jim Whittaker and Nawang Gombu (clad in Eddie Bauer down) struggled through deep snow and blasting winds to stand on the summit of Everest, Jim becoming the first American to reach the top. (Two years later, Gombu would reach the summit again on an Indian expedition, becoming the first person to reach the summit twice.)

Whittaker and Gombu's ascent was made no less impressive by the tracks that came before: Hillary and Tenzin in 1953, the Swiss in 1956 and the oft-forgotten Swiss expedition of 1952, which put Raymond Lambert and Tenzin Norgay within 800 feet of the summit. And, of course, their tracks were only made possible by the reconnaissance expeditions of '50 and '51. And, those, in turn, were enabled by the efforts of the pioneering Everesters of the pre-World War II expeditions of 1938, '36, '35, '33, '24, '22, and 1921. None of those would have happened without Sir Martin Conway, the Duke of Abruzzi, Fanny Bullock Workman, General Bruce, Sir Francis Younghusband, John Noel, and countless others who pushed the limits years before. And…the tracks go back through the ages, each generation standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before.

To some, that may be demoralizing…to them, the idea that someone had climbed the route before takes something essential away from the enterprise today. For me, however, it is far from demoralizing, and rather is invigorating. To look around me high in the Western Cwm, and see hidden in the layers of snow the footsteps of Hillary and Tenzin, the toil of Whittaker and Gombu, the inspiration of those who came before…well, it inspires me to push on against the demon of the day, against the gnawing forces of inertia, lethargy, and the want of comfort, rest, food, and air. Seeing the giants in these hills, the things they accomplished and all they endured, pushes me onward, upward, and forward.

May 1, 1999, was an amazing day, a direct interaction with one of the many giants on whose shoulders we all stand. Tonight, perhaps another toast…

Sure enough, the rumors turned out to be true. Several climbers made the summit yesterday. By modern standards, this would be quite early for success on the Nepal side of Mount Everest. It is a good thing, without question.

I've overheard gossip and squabbling as to whether the proper emphasis was placed on doing a thorough job of fixing rope as opposed to just tagging the top first, but for my purposes it doesn't matter so much either way. The door is open to the top and others will move that way with greater confidence and determination now. The route will improve with the passage of each set of boots. My hope is that a few weeks of relatively stable weather will allow a steady trickle of climbers to get up, get down and get moving on to whatever they've scheduled next. Traffic jams up high on Mount Everest are a bad thing. That is as obvious as can be, but jams are an especially bad thing for those of us who are trying to guide the mountain. Safely guiding big mountains often boils down to keeping one's team moving at a business-like pace (for various reasons including conservation of body heat, conservation of bottled oxygen, conservation of daylight and conservation of good weather and luck). Few things mess with that business-like pace more than hanging out on a 28,000 ft. rope in the dark behind a line of climbers you don't know while they learn things about themselves and each other that they should have learned at sea level.

Good, strong, skilled climbers may bob and weave through such traffic jams… forging detour routes and forgoing use of the rope in some sketchy places in order to get by. And those same climbers can usually endure lengthy delays without losing fingers, toes and noses because their fitness and abundant experience in really cold places will protect them. But those who try to guide normal folks through such jams had just better hope they get lucky. Not it. We'll wait, thank you, until the crowds have had their shot at the big top. Sadly we'll miss out on some of the hype… the fame… the fortune. The world may be completely over the yearly Everest summit mania (and justifiably so) by the time Seth, Erica, Kent and I get around to heading that way in earnest.

The confirmation of the early success hit us after a first luxurious night back down in basecamp. And like I said… it was all good news. But as you can see from the previous paragraph, I rationalize and blow my own horn and justify my own slow methods in order to remember that. I've gone on and on about the importance of resting in basecamp, but it should also come as no surprise that it is hugely anticlimactic after days spent up in the tricky and interesting zone. Maintaining focus can be difficult when life gets soft again (basecamp "soft" being used as a relative term now… not to be confused with someplace actually warm, clean and well endowed with furniture). The other half of my team is composed of good, strong, skilled climbers and they are gearing up for the summit and getting set to head out the door. Our paths are diverging after six weeks and I'm prone to summit-bid-envy. We are still weeks away from our own guided bid and in need of a last difficult acclimatization round before the summit. Patience is a pain in the neck sometimes… but I keep in mind that screwing up an Everest summit bid is a bigger pain in the neck. I keep in mind that the goal is not simply to get myself to the top or to chase Apa Sherpa's numbers (18 summits and counting… not exactly low-hanging fruit, ripe for the picking). My goal is to guide a climber (Erica) who has earned a decent shot… to introduce a deserving guide (Seth) to the holy grail of mountain guiding… and to stun the world with the imagery a consummate cameraman (Kent) can capture up that way when given half a chance. We'll take our rest and take our time and be as absolutely ready as possible when our own summit window opens in two weeks.

I believed I'd imagined Kent Harvey's call to me at ten minutes to four in the morning. I didn't have any alarm set; it was a rest day coming on and I was sound asleep in my tent. So fully unconscious that Kent called me several times and when I finally responded, I had no idea where I was or what was going on. It was dark, and as he suggested that something had happened that I might want to be concerned with, I finished rubbing my eyes and zipped open my door. The beauty of the scene seemed unreal and impossible. The moon had set, and the sun wasn't close to being up, but there was starlight on the Khumbu Icefall, Nuptse and the great bulk of Everest's West Shoulder. Kent was saying that he'd just seen a fairly large avalanche come down the Shoulder-sending a cloud of debris across the Icefall-and he was concerned that climbers may have been caught. I listened to him, but I was having trouble taking my eyes from the bright planet perfectly framed above the Icefall and bracketed by the mountains. I did manage to look down and left enough finally to see several small strings of headlamps, just where I knew the avalanche had to have come down. I turned on my radio, taking a guess that my friends at IMG had people in the area. I listened to Mark Tucker calmly and carefully check in with his Sherpa team to find out that they were ok… another near miss; and his Sherpa team was able to tell him that the only other team in the area was also ok and that everybody was going on with their climb.

I related this to Kent… stared at the planet again for some time and then went back to sleep in my warm down bag. In the morning, we all looked up at the troublesome serac on the West Shoulder to gauge its stability. The same huge fin of ice had been threatening all week. It had sent down the major avalanche we'd earlier reported which caught some of our team on their way to basecamp while I was pushing up to Camp II. In the morning light, it appeared hideously undercut and I don't believe any of us expected it to last through another day. I went so far as to take "before" photos of it. But to my knowledge, no Everest climbers did anything different yesterday morning because of the serac. It wasn't like the Icefall route would be closed by any proclamation; there wasn't some safer way to go instead. This isn't the only mountain we frequent that has chunks of glacier ready to fall, and I for one have mistakenly pronounced dozens of crazily tilted hotel-sized ice-blocks in danger of imminent collapse only to watch them hang on for months.

But this serac sent down a handful of lesser slides as the morning progressed… enough to keep our attention focused… and our cameras ready. I wanted the thing to come down. I certainly didn't want to walk under it again in its decaying state. At 10:35 AM it did come down. I was sitting in my tent doorway, and I didn't need to fully look at Everest's West Shoulder to know that this was the big one. In this valley of avalanches, the quality of noise was easily different and distinct for this particular slide. I fumbled with my camera and began shooting. I didn't see the tiny dots representing climbers in the avalanche path. Partly because they may not have been visible down in the rough terrain of the Khumbu Icefall, and partly because I was totally mesmerized by the power and majesty of the white explosion I was witnessing. I kept taking pictures as the cloud engulfed basecamp. I knew it was only a cloud… we were nowhere near close enough to be hit with actual debris, but it was ominous and disturbing even so. It rolled over us like a volcanic ash-cloud, blotting out the sun and rocking the tents back and forth in its wind while pelting us with a "snow" of overly large ice crystals. And then, quite quickly, it was gone and what remained of any mist in the air was quickly burning off in the bright sun. I assumed that it had been a lucky day… that what needed to happen had happened and that nobody had been affected.

It is possible that I went on in this belief for a full twenty minutes before word began to filter around that people had been caught in the avalanche. I began putting on my climbing boots and quickly loading my pack… by then, word had it that it was an acquaintance of mine of several years and many mountains. My friend had been caught along with his client and the Sherpa working with them. I saw Willie and Damian Benegas going past our camp, both speaking into their radios. There were a number of Sherpas moving toward the start of the Icefall route, including Tendi and LamaBabu from our own team. Seth Waterfall was ready before me and stood patiently as I finished up my climbing harness, then we started walking fast and I joined the ongoing radio scramble to get men and equipment to the accident scene. Since IMG's Sherpas and clients were descending the route at the time and were very lucky to come through unscathed, they were among the first to report the situation via radio, and so all other teams migrated to the IMG frequency. This seemed right since Mark Tucker and Ang Jangbu Sherpa at the IMG basecamp had shifted into their familiar role in bilingual crisis management. Seth and I checked in and learned that HimEx was offering up a full rescue pack cached near the start of the route. Russell Brice came on the radio, directing us to the gear. We loaded up heavy packs full of oxygen, sleeping bags, medical equipment, and rescue hardware and began climbing. We listened as various expedition leaders, guides and Sherpas reported in and offered up a mountain of resources. This from supposedly competing companies-none of whom had any reason to think that their own staff or customers were involved or injured. We began to feel the sense of community that is so often overlooked or ignored in modern media coverage of the Everest "scene." And we began to feel the intense sun that we normally avoid working under at midday. The glacier surface was brilliant in its new coat of "snow" from the avalanche and seemed to be reflecting 100% of the sun's radiation onto the skin I hadn't had time to protect in my dash out of BC. Within minutes under the big packs, we were covered in sweat.

It turned out that a descending Indian team was instrumental, along with IMG's Sherpas, in getting my friend and his client out of a crevasse that the avalanche had pushed them into, but now the radio chatter was focusing on the Sherpa that had been with them. He was missing. Willie and Damian Benegas (Argentinian-American brothers leading two different Everest teams) were among the first Western professionals on the scene, and we relied on their reports of the situation as we continued to climb. My friend, badly hypothermic and shaken, was being placed on a stretcher as Seth and I arrived in the blast zone. We dove into the medical supplies we carried in an effort to help stabilize him. Seth concentrated his efforts then on escorting the remarkably unscathed client down. Willie Benegas and a strong team of Sherpas worked to get the stretcher down, as I then went up to join Damian and perhaps 20 Sherpas who were searching for the missing man. After 15 minutes or so, I was encouraged to hear Willie describing my friend as "combative" enough that they could no longer carry him on the litter. He preferred to walk, as it turned out, and of course that was a fine outcome.

At the "point-last-seen" I was amazed at the bravery and high energy of the searching climbers. Damian and a British guide were roped up and jumping crevasses in an effort to reach islands of glacier that might offer better views. The Sherpas had fixed ropes down a series of steep, debris-strewn ice gullies and were exploring every crevasse and alcove along their path. I kept looking up at the origin of the avalanche, where it appeared that a tooth had been broken from some massive jaw. Unfortunately, there were still other teeth, and the searchers were clearly in a terrible position should a second slide follow the path of the first. I checked my watch and my radio to confirm that two-and-a-half hours had passed since the avalanche. I began asking the team to suspend the search. The missing man's boot, with crampon still attached, had been found close enough to his last known whereabouts that we were each haunted to imagine the power of the wind that had hit him. His pack was eventually retrieved some 100 meters distant. The clues only made it more difficult to quit. The Sherpas all agreed that there was now no chance of finding a buried man alive. They agreed that it was time to quit and move to safety. But they wouldn't. Nobody wanted to be the first to leave. Tendi and LamaBabu continued to twist in ice screws and rappel into crevasses… "Just this last one." But they couldn't find the 31-year-old father of two. Knowing how many of them were also fathers, I insisted that they quit-eventually they listened to me, to their own leaders and their own valid concerns.

We walked down through the ice rolls and ridges of the lower glacier without much talking. Dozens of good folk had come out from basecamp and stood on the ice ridges with water and tea for the search teams. Upon reaching basecamp, the teams melted back into a tent village composed of twenty different expeditions, but not without a number of quiet handshakes and a hundred expressions of thanks. To each other… to a missing man's sacrifice… to the good luck of survivors.