Mt. Everest 2005: Gavin Bate: Gavin back at Namche!

File photo Everest on a better day ©EverestNews.com

Update: Gavin back at Namche! Gavin has just called in! I must say we were biting our nails for a bit there! Believe it or not he is now in Namche Bazaar - 3440m!

Following his last update from Camp 2 he spent a night there and decided to get off the mountain and down as fast as possible. He cleared his one and only camp and carried 35kg down in bad weather. He reports the Ice fall was as bad as he has ever seen it.

The ice fall is the bottom section of the mountain which is a frozen, moving, seemingly alive river. It continually moves and creaks and cracks. There are huge crevasses and voids which are crossed on aluminum ladders lashed together - sometimes 4 or 5 ladders long. One of these crossings Gavin reports was massive at 45m with only six inches of ladder each side holding it in place. He admits it took a few attempts before making it all the way over!

Gavin then got into base camp and kept heading straight down to Gorak Shep, his own base camp and the original base camp in 1953. He then stayed for one night and today sped down the valley through Lobuche, Pheriche, Dubouche, Tengboche arriving half an hour ago in Namche!

Considering where he has been until now it is quite unbelievable that he has already made it that far down. He has been trying to leave messages on the audio blogger but seemingly it is under maintenance at the minute. So as soon as it's up and running we'll here from Gav.

There is a lot of chat amongst the Sherpa's that he has met over his tactics on the mountain. He really has flipped the 'normal' method on it's head by having one base camp at Gorak Shep and one camp on the mountain at camp 2. To their knowledge this approach has not been done before and has obviously proved successful. Saying that a large team could not handle this but with Gavin's light weight approach and flexibility and the fact that he was not using oxygen and not having to load camps with bottles it worked very well.

Gavin hopes to meet up with Andy and Helena and all the Adventure Alternative team in the village tomorrow to see the projects which Moving Mountains has been building.

As soon as I get some more news we'll get it posted!

Best Regards, Chris

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