Lobuche East

Just trying to knock these out in a few separate posts. Here are a few more pictures and stories from our acclimatization ascent...One interesting twist in my climb was that I've continued to work with Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation to do some climate science projects on these trips. As long as I'm a scientist and heading to these wild places, the least I can do is help some of my peers who need data. Just below the summit of Lobuche East yesterday, I rappelled off the lip of a crevasse to get some snow and ice samples for Natalie Kehrwald, who's work focuses on the thinning of Himalayan glaciers due to climate change and the role of dust and other particles in accelerating the melting. A huge thanks to Chris Klinke, our expedition leader, who helped me set up our anchor system, and Markus Hallgren, the head of our TripleED research project on how teams are organized. Markus let me take the time off from my main research duties to pull this off. I'll continue doing some science projects on Everest. I hope to collect the highest plant life ever and also create an altitude transect of smaller snow samples as high as I can. I'll just say that carrying 15 1L Nalgene bottles up to 20,000ft was plenty hard!Take care,Hari