{"id":18601,"date":"2014-03-27T10:23:31","date_gmt":"2014-03-27T16:23:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/?p=18601"},"modified":"2014-03-27T12:53:00","modified_gmt":"2014-03-27T18:53:00","slug":"everest-2014-moving-small-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/2014\/03\/27\/everest-2014-moving-small-city\/","title":{"rendered":"Everest 2014: Moving a Small City"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many people focus on the climbers when thinking about Everest, and rightfully so. However supporting those climbers is a massive exercise in logistics.<\/p>\n

The team from International Mountain Guides starts around the first of every year gathering gear and sending it to Kathmandu for further transport to Everest Base Camp. They use a variety of methods from trucks to airplanes to helicopters to porters, and of course, yaks.<\/p>\n

\"IMG<\/a>Eric Simonson and Ang Jang Bu of IMG<\/a> sums it up this way through a series of posts:<\/p>\n

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The Sherpas finished packing up another batch of supplies, and today they loaded up the truck to drive it all to Jiri. All total we have 143 porter\/yak loads (3,626kg) of food and gear all packed and ready. The plan is that it will get flown by helicopter from Jiri to Shyangboche in the next few\u00a0days.<\/p>\n

Up in the Khumbu, Jangbu reports that we had 143 loads flown by helicopter to Shyangboche yesterday, with more cargo still in Jiri waiting to fly.<\/p>\n

the weather has been marginal the last four days, so a lot of the Lukla flights have been canceled. The result is a massive backlog of cargo in Kathmandu waiting to fly to Lukla (this is why we started flying team supplies in to Khumbu many weeks\u00a0ago). To mitigate the current situation, Jangbu reports that today they sent Kaji Sherpa with a smaller truck filled with base camp duffels to Manthali (a small airstrip south of Jiri). There is a better chance to get cargo flights tomorrow into Lukla from Manthali than from\u00a0Kathmandu.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"Arnold<\/a>In addition to the member climbers, there are the Sherpas and support staff at Base camp that all have to be fed and provided tents for sleeping eating, cooking, toilet and shower – a lot of tents!!<\/p>\n

For example this is the Jagged Globe team:<\/p>\n

\n

Our team of 33 comprises; 3 expedition leaders, 1 Sirdar, 12 climbing Sherpas, 9 climbers, 2 chefs (Gavin Melgaard is also on our climbing permit), 4 cook staff in base camp and 2 Camp 2 cooks.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Altitude Junkies has 30 Sherpas supporting their team. Arnold Coster has 11 tons of gear – 22,000 pounds or 9979kg!<\/p>\n

\"Willie<\/a>And sometimes the life of a guide is not all that glamorous as shown by Willie Benegas waiting for bags at 3:45Am in the Salt Lake City airport!<\/p>\n

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Filling the Duffel<\/h3>\n

\"Manaslu<\/a>Of course individual climbers have the same challenge but in a significantly smaller way. They must cram all their gear into two large duffel bags suitable for transport on porters’ back or the side of a yak.<\/p>\n

But just getting their gear to Kathmandu can also be a serious challenge with excess baggage fees, lost bags. Some climbers will send their gear weeks in advance using freight companies in order to lessen the mental burden.<\/p>\n

Usually climbers spread out all their gear on the floor much to the chagrin of their spouse but to the delight of their pets! This was my gear recently for Mansalu which shrunk down to the two duffel bags.<\/p>\n

Trekking to Base Camp<\/h3>\n

Teams continue to stream into the Khumbu. Dave Han leading an RMI<\/a> team posted this:<\/p>\n

\n

Yesterday was a whirlwind marathon of packing and prepping in the chaos of Kathmandu.\u00a0 This morning was the staccato hurry up and wait of getting up and out to the airport and hanging to see if the weather would permit flying.\u00a0 Flying conditions weren\u2019t perfect when we got through security at the domestic terminal in Kathmandu.\u00a0 We ended up waiting several hours -swilling coffee, listening to music and people watching- until the pilots felt good about taking off for Lukla.\u00a0 Once up and out of the smog layers of the Kathmandu Valley, we were ed to stupendous views of the Himalaya<\/a>.\u00a0 Those with port-side window seats could pick out Mt. Everest<\/a> as the flight progressed.\u00a0 But we were only up about 45 minutes before the pilots put the Twin Otter into a dive.\u00a0 They had Lukla\u2019s crazy-angled airstrip in their sites and it was clear from the steep mountain walls all around that this was our one shot at parking the plane.\u00a0 Heart rates shot up, cameras were clicked on and the wheels touched down perfectly.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

OK, Everest 2014 is well on its way.<\/p>\n

Climb On!
Alan
Memories are Everything<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many people focus on the climbers when thinking about Everest, and rightfully so. However supporting those climbers is a massive exercise in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"dois","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[403],"tags":[404],"class_list":["post-18601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2014-coverage","tag-everest-2014-coverage"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18601\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}