Waiting for the weather window feels a lot like Groundhog Day. The weather is generally the same every day (blue sky, sunny), we eat meals daily and regularly at 8:30, 12:30 and 6:30 every day, and conversations generally revolve around the summit window, or summit day generally or the ever popular weather forecast. Somehow these conversations always degenerate into one or another toilet joke or a ‘silent but deadly‘ fart by a member of the team where the next 20-minutes are spent arguing over ‘who-dunnit’.
On a daily basis we wake up at 7:20-ish to the intense heat of the morning sun on our tents and go to bed wrapped in our down jackets with our headlamps on, diving into the warm comfort of our sleeping bags armed with hot water bottles. Such is life at Base Camp…… It will be good to get moving again although I think that it will be quite a shock to the system.
The Weather Window
You will have seen from Facebook and Twitter updates and in any literature on Everest, mention of ‘weather windows’. Because of ‘weather windows’ Everest can only be climbed in the spring (April / May) and in the temperamental post monsoon season (September / October), when the normally 200kph summit winds drop to about 40 - 50 kph. This drop in wind speed ultimately only takes place for about 7 - 10 days in late May, just before the arrival of the snow-bearing monsoon. The exact dates vary from year to year. This means that Everest climbers spend April - mid-May acclimatising / stocking up on red blood cells to prepare for the challenges ahead so that when the weather window ‘arrives’, they are ready to make the summit push and take advantage of the low wind speeds and warmer temperatures.
Because the ‘window’ dates vary from year to year, much time can be spent back at Base Camp which is used as the ‘launch pad’ for the summit. Ideally, a 7-10 day ‘rest’ at Base Camp ensures that aches and pains and coughs are tended to and that the body is repaired (as much a possible!) through a healthy combination of sleep and food. The key is to spend as little time at altitude as possible.
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