Mt. Everest 2005: Valencia: Summit push in on!

Update: Jorge, David and Haya are in Camp II They plan to climb to Camp III tomorrow morning, Tuesday, May 31, on Wednesday, June 1 climb to CIV and on Tuesday, June 2 reach the summit. 

It was very hard for us to get to CII yesterday, it took us 9 hours.  The 20 days or more without climbing beyond BC, are evident.  We have lost some acclimatization and the fitness has also fallen because of the lack of activity.  David was a little better than Jorge and Haya on the way up.

We will stay all day in CII as we planned, trying to recover that acclimatization partly lost to get our bodies gradually used to the physical effort required to climb and eight-thousand.

We slept 5 in the same tent in CII (3 of us and the 2 Brazilians) and we tried to mount a kind of advanced BC where we play our dice games and we try to drink and eat everything possible.  The truth is that at this altitude we don't accept food as in BC and it is a real effort to get something solid in our mouths, but we force ourselves because we know it is necessary.  At least hydration is being done very good and we have drunk more than 2 litters of water each one in afternoon of dice.

We got really good news from CIV, our friend Jesús Calleja, from Leon, has reached the summit this early morning and he is resting in CIV to try to go down to BC tomorrow in one try.  We have spoken to him through the satellite phone.  He told us that he was feeling very good during the whole ascent since he left BC.  With him was Willie Benegas, an Argentinean mountain guide of whom we told you days ago.  He was the one in charge to open the Hillary step.

The trail is stupendous for us, because there is an open trail up to the summit and it is rigged with fixed lines up to the south summit and the Hillary step.

The meteo, we better not mention it because it is all so contradictory that we don't know if we should trust it.  It looks like the day we chose (June 2) in which winds looked under 30 Km/h have changed to 60 Km/h.  we hope that as we get closer to the date they will recede. 

From tomorrow we will only carry the voice phone and the data phone will be left at CII.  So from tomorrow we will tell the chronicle to Endika and he will transcribe it.  The pictures will be taken from other publications and web sites, but when we are back to CII, we will send all the audiovisual material we can in take in these days of altitude.

Tomorrow we will try to climb to CIII and we have set our alarm clock to 5 in the morning. 

We want to close today's chronicle with a phrase by Irivan, one of the Brazilians, we like it because it lifts our spirits in the moments of exhaustion: "If you give one more step, you are not in the same place anymore". We hope to write tomorrow from CIII.  Don't fail us, Expeadicts.

Translated from Spanish by Jorge Rivera

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