Blogging Everest
The Olympic torch is headed to mainland China this week. You can track its progress around the world on any number of , and . Less certain is the location of its lesser-known sister, a parallel torch that's been stalled on the north face of Mount Everest, waiting for clement weather to make the ascent to the summit. One Chinese newspaper described the lack of news as a "mysterious veil that has surrounded base camp."
Information has been limited on the north face of Everest, but on the south side - where all the climbers are this year - a total communication ban has been in force for almost two weeks. The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s reporter was on April 28th, and told by the Nepalese authorities that they were 'doing this for our friend China'.
What information there is comes from the climbers who are blogging - often surreptitiously - about their time on the mountain and their worries over the time it is taking for the Chinese Olympic climbers to summit. There are only two brief windows every year when an ascent of Everest is possible, and the regular mountaineers aren't able to climb until the torch has reached the top. The delays are raising fears that this could be a particularly dangerous season, should the climbers race at once to climb the same route in a reduced window of time.
We looked at the situation today through the reports posted on blogs such as , , , , , and .
We also spoke (very briefly in the end, due to time pressures elsewhere in the programme) to Luis Benitez, who's been up and down Everest eight times but refused to go this year for 'moral, ethical and safety' reasons. He's involved in Climbers without Borders and , which has been aggregating the blog news from Everest this last fortnight and offering an anonymous call-in service for climbers on the south face to communicate news without jeopardising their stay on the mountain.
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