Wednesday 17th May 2000 - Kangchenjunga Base Camp
It has now been snowing for almost 24 hours and the conditions on the mountain this morning were not suitable for a summit bid. As a result Ian Venables, Dan Carroll, Dave Pearce and Colin Scott plus James Raitt from the "DHL" team have descended to Base Camp after experiencing horrendous snow conditions when they left Camp 4 this morning. It didn't take long for them to realise that an ascent of the Gangway in these conditions would be impossible.
This left only Larry Foden and Roddy McArthur on the mountain who have moved up to Camp 4 today in the hope that they would be able to "slipstream" a large group of Indians who may attempt to fix rope up the Gangway tomorrow morning. However, Larry has not been feeling well and the pair of them are in the process of descending to Camp 3 where he can get a decent night's sleep before descending to Base Camp tomorrow.
You may be interested to know that the BSKE 2000 website has received in excess of 73,000 hits since 30 March and is now the biggest site on Bluedome.
Today's pictures show Dave Pearce at Camp 4 on the 17th May in weather typical of the recent spell and Colin Scott and Ian Venables on route from camp 3 to camp 4 on the 16th May.
