Good evening out there to everyone following Mountain Zone. This is, of course, good morning for us here at Everest Base Camp, this is Willi Prittie reporting again for the Alpine Ascents South Col Expedition.

For us, yesterday was a pretty inactive day, nothing much happening. We're kind of waiting a little bit here. But for other folks on the mountain there's been a tremendous amount of activity. On the 15th there were actually three teams in place ready to go on the South Col, they did not climb due to high winds overnight and by early morning on the 16th, perhaps you could say late night on the 15th, there were somewhere between six and nine teams in place ready to go at the South Col and yesterday brought very good weather on the high mountain and they pretty much all went. So we had a record number of people, there were, to the best of our information here at Base Camp, there were 63 people that summitted Mount Everest yesterday overnight.

All who summitted as well as those who turned back got safely back down to the South Col. So our team would really like to extend a big congratulations to all those that have actually seen a fruition of their labors here on the mountain this season. For our part we're kind of looking at weather reports and weather is forecasted sometime between tonight and tomorrow night to get bad again for a short period, with jet stream high winds hitting the upper mountain and also with what is called persistent snow coming in on the south side of the mountain.

So we're actually looking out to the, somewhere between the 23rd and 24th to be in position for actually our summit bid up higher on the mountain which means that tomorrow or the next day we will actually be leaving Base Camp and starting the final climb up through to get ourselves in position for the correct time. Of course, this is always a big guessing game, you try to have as much information as possible on hand and that includes as many weather reports from as many different sources as we can. You're trying to look at trends, trying to look at a lot of information to predict when the next good weather cycle is actually going to come by. So that's what we're all occupied with here in Base Camp at this point. Like I said we're looking at in one to two days for us to start advancing up.

There's actually very few teams that didn't summit yesterday. It was kind of an unusual summit day with everybody going all at once. The National Geographic Team, for our information, is still waiting and also the Women's Team, for our information, is still waiting and there's also a small Italian team down here at Base Camp that's probably going to be on the same schedule that we are.

So that's what's happening here on Mount Everest, lots of movement on the upper mountain and for us it's still a little bit of a patience and waiting game until we can get the right window for, to actually begin our final advancement up the mountain.

Right now it's still good weather holding on the upper mountain. There are some low-level clouds coming and going, but it looks like for their descent, everybody is also going to be having reasonably good conditions to get back down all in one piece. Of course getting to the summit is only half of the trip, the other half of the trip is, in fact, getting back down safely. So we're all going to be keeping our fingers crossed that that all happens okay and everybody gets back to Base Camp safely.

So that's what's happening right now on the mountain and we'll keep you posted as always with cybercasts and we're planning on having more frequent cybercasts during our summit bid when we're in position and starting out from the South Col as well. So that's all for now from Everest Base Camp.

— Willi Prittie, Alpine Ascents International Guide and MountainZone.com Correspondent

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