Today was a rest day, not through choice but due to the severe weather conditions. The thunder that started rolling last night brought with it an incessant snow fall. Base Camp received a minimum of 6 inches of snow during the night and more during the day. The situation at Camp 1 was no better with at least 8 inches accumulating. The morning was spent clearing snow off sleeping tents, mess tent and forging paths to vital points of the camp. For those who were forced onto the mountain, only the Koreans having to descend, they faced the increased fall of avalanches. The snow is still falling with the threat of continuing showers for the next 2 to 3 days. A large amount of fresh snow will take time to settle. This settling process is important to stabilise the snow pack from avalanches and to prevent us having to wade waist deep through powder snow.

Our Liaison Officer arrived during the snowfall last night. He too had underestimated the final day's trek in and took 10 hours instead of the misquoted 5. As a result he was overjoyed to bump into our mail runner and some of our porters bringing a light load in from Ghunsa to guide him the last few kilometres. His role will be covered in more detail in a future report. On the subject of mail, we do occassionally use a mail runner who goes all the way to Suketar (where we started our trek in from) to drop off and pick up any mail. As you can guess this is a long process and will take several weeks for the turn-a-round of one's letter. The advent of email allows us to transmit and receive not just this diary, but personal mail, weather reports and answer any queries you may have. For those schools who are monitoring our progress, or conducting projects on mountaineering, please send in your queries and we will do our best to answer.

On a sadder note, our sympathies go out to the family of the Korean Expedition's Sirdar (their head Sherpa) who died yesterday after being hit by a serac fall. Dawa Thaman was a very experienced climber who had summitted Mount Everest three times, and his presence amongst the Sherpas will be missed.