Starting to head back

The camp cook wakes us up...breakfast is ready. When we glance out our tent the view is breathtaking. We have a clear visual of the ice fall from our tent door.

Tim greats us and fills us in on what the climbers have been up to over night.The radio starts crackling again with reports coming in from all over. Apparently there are 200 climbers on Everest at this time, all waiting to make their summit attempt/ There is only one clear weather window on the horizon (somewhere between the 18-21) so there needs to be a lot of cooperation between the teams to make sure that huge traffic jams don't occur.

Tim mentions that there were 3 avalanches during the night. We didn't sleep very well all night (maybe a few hours each) so we had heard the rumblings but weren't sure what it was. We definitely did hear the glacier cracking a couple of times during the night underneath our tent. One of the avalanches was "quite huge" and the snow from it fell just short of base camp, another one took out camp 3 on the mountain. Luckily there were no teams at camp 3 however a couple Sherpas were caught by the avalanche and a rescue mission was being executed as we sat down to breakfast.

As you can imagine, Tim had a lot on his mind that morning, however he still took moments here and there to explain what was happening and then to suggest some last minute photo ops before we left base camp.

I must say even though we had a cold, restless night we were sad to leave so soon.

Karma seemed unusually restless about leaving on time this morning (we ended up leaving about 1 hour late) and we weren't really sure what was up. We found out soon enough... today's schedule had us trekking back over 4 1/2 days worth of previous trekking in one day. Needless to say the rest of the day was a blur. It felt like we were never going to stop walking. Most days we ended anywhere between 2-5 pm.  Today we didn't stop until around 7:00pm (it starts to get dark around 6:00pm)  With only a few hours sleep the night before and all the walking during the day, we were exhausted.