Waiting time was taxing. You are not sure how long the waiting time will be and how to plan your schedule; You worry if the summit window will come before Monsoon arrives;  You worry  if the ice fall will still be safe to pass when we finish the climb; You are worried about getting weaker while waiting (don’t forget our base camp here is as high as high camp on most high mountains on other continents, if not higher than its summit), you worried about getting sick from any random factors, you worry about getting injured …

Now it finally is time to go up, and you can stop worry about a lot of things that kept you awake. Yet, you know how reliable the weather forecast is for days more than a week away in the city, not to say on a mountain like Everest! One day, the forecast was “confident” about summit window in mid May 20s; the next day, it said the “forecast model is jumping around”. Everest is a big mountain, the summit push takes 5-7 days. You just can’t wait until you see a clear forecast to start going up or you would risk missing that precious window. It’s hard gambling game here!

Thinking of Ed Viester’s “No Shortcut to Summit”. It’s so true on Everest! Every step is so hard! No shortcut!
I’m little nervous, so many things to finish, and I need to pack and rest!

Like a soldier training for war having got bored waiting for the big time. Now all of a sudden, we are moving and I am scrambling around and barely have time to finish off the list of to-dos.  While waiting, we worried about getting weaker by sitting around, so we tried to do some exercise every day. 


Now time to move, we worry about not resting enough, and realize that we have been so spoiled for so many days – sleeping till day break every day, no torture moving in mid night frigid temperature or baked under brutal sunshine in mid of day. Time to get used to not sleeping well in the night; time to get used to plan every visit to toilet, day or night; time to get used to going to sleep in the clothes that you would wake and walk in; time to nervously calculate when sun will cast its brutal heat on the glacier slope… More this time, need to learn to calculate how many hours do I have left on that bottle of oxygen …