Hi everyone!

So much has happened since the last update! Things are really moving fast this season on Everest! It's been such an exciting, but also very very very very exhausting time.

I've been up to Camp 3 (7400m) and my word, going from Camp 2 to Camp 3 was probably one of the most painful days I will ever experience in my life. The climbing was really really really (I can't emphasize this enough) steep and for every pathetic little step I took, I spent the next ten counts catching my breath, so it was truly arduous.

Camp 3 is pitched on the very very steep, and very very icy and slippery Lhotse face, which is a huge ice face that mostly tilts at a 50 to 70 degree angle and in some places, the climbing is vertical. Last year being a very dry winter on Everest, there's no snow now on the Lhotse face to kinda' "sink in" for a bit of purchase, so it's all ice and this is where good footwork is really really important. Most of the time, something like, 0.002cm of my crampon teeth are actually in the ice, so it's kinda like I'm always walking a fine balancing dance of the sloping ice face. Talk about difficult climbing and for the entire day, despite being utterly exhausted, I had to pay lots of attention to my safety lines and my footwork.

I really wouldn't want to know how fast a human can travel down the Lhotse face on a butt slide. Apparently it breaks some speed records.

And then of course, the Lhotse face being so steep, there's no good place to eke out a campsite, so most people make do with a kind of slanting, precarious, sloping temporary existence on the mountain:

 

Those tents are our campsite and there's safety line all around the perimeter of the campsite and everyone clips onto this line when walking around. No one is really interesred in an accidental speed descent down the Lhotse face. So once you get into the tent, movement is at a minimum since there's really no space to walk around or do a dance or anything. One of the trickiest things about Camp 3, is that it's so precarious, a huge gust of wind will easily rip out the entire campsite (and everyone and everything in it), so this is really the worst campsite on the mountain.

 The next morning, we got up bright and early for a short practice climb with our oxygen bottles up towards the Yellow Band.

Alright, general info moment here:

From Camp 3, there are a couple of famous "landmarks" on Everest before the summit.

After Camp 3, there's the "Yellow Band", which is a section of rock. Imagine rock climbing with crampons at over 7000m with an 8kg oxygen tank strapped behind you. It's not very pleasant. So past the yellow band, there's the Geneva Spur (a huge rock outcrop that has to be climbed over), then the South Col (where Camp 4, the final campsite is) and above that, the South Summit (it's not the real summit, it's just a prominent point).

So now you know how Everest roughly looks like. Kinda.

Back to the photo. Note how steep and sloping the terrain is. I kept looking towards my left and then getting really nervous.

 And you get really nervous as well, because there's lots of people on Everest. It's a tough climb, but such a famous one that lots of climbers attempt it every year. With climbers, comes support Sherpas and then you get a really crowded route on a really steep face.

 Usually, it's not so bad when there's lots of people. All of us are clipped onto the fixed safety line (anchored to the ice at intervals) and if a guy behind is really fast and wants to overtake you, he simply moves past you at the next anchored interval. However, it gets really tricky, like in this photo, when you have people coming up and people going down in two different directions, on the same line. That's when some manoeuvring has to be done, where some people unclip off the line, do a kind of scary shuffling dance to the next clear section of rope and then everyone else caterpillars on. It's rather hard to describe in words, but such moments are really tricky.

I think my fear tolerance has seriously gone up many many many notches.

 After an hour and a half from Camp 3, we reached the bottom of the Yellow Band (you can see that slab of ochre-coloured rock in the background) and that's where we stopped to descend back to Camp 2. In the photo from left to right, that's Esther, me, Lihui and Kami, one of our Sherpas. Note our safety lines and also the rather alien-looking oxygen masks we're wearing.

The summit in the background, with the wind blowing off the top, is the South Summit and the black slab to the right is the Geneva Spur that has to be climbed and descended en route to Camp 4.

So we descended back to Camp 2 and from there, the following day we made it back to Base Camp, tired out and majorly sunburnt (me).

Having reached Camp 3, that's the end of our acclimatization cycles and the next time we get up the mountain again, it'd be all the way to the summit!