Nathaniel Merriam Saturday, May 1 Namche Bazaar, Nepal

"Watch that first step, it's a doozie"

I made it in one piece to Namche, but that's not saying much. Bataan Death March, indeed -- we climbed 3000 vertical feet on Thursday from 8300 feet above sea level to 11,400 feet. I slept well that night. We all sleep well every night.

The walk consisted of a decent hike uphill until lunch, after which we entered Sagamarta National park, home of Sagamarta (Mount Everest). After entering, everything became much cleaner. The air isn't choked with diesel exhaust, for one thing.

We proceeded to walk straight up for four hours. Well, it sure felt that way. I ran out of water about two-thirds of the way through, which was not good considering it was probably in the 80s and I was perilously close to heat stroke. I stopped at every shade area to let the breeze evaporate my sweat and cool me down (growing up in Houston, I don't know nuthin' 'bout cold weather, but I shore know heat). At the final approach to the city, you walk up a huge staircase and my legs started cramping so badly that each step was a major ordeal of bending the leg, lifting the leg, straightening the leg. Thirty minutes of that and even my aerobics instructor would have been satisfied.

Today has been a bear, and its only 11:00 am. Our main generator has died, and neither of our transformers seems to be working. I can't find the equipment I need to fix anything and the medical testing is just getting up and running for the day. Thankfully the second generator is running smoothly and we have the ability to run everything critical without the transformers (that's not entirely true but we're using a few "travel" transformers on an item-by-item basis to run things as necessary).

We may as well be set up in the middle of the Sahara for all the sand that goes flying through our tents while we're working, eating, and sleeping. Of course, the sand isn't really sand so much as its a toxic combination of dried human and animal waste with a little sand mixed in for consolation. Everything is covered in it -- the equipment, our food, and our drinks. I'll need to drink some Drano when I get back to clean out my pipes (although astute readers will recall that my pipes are doing some cleaning of their own on occasion). We're running into other trekkers and Everest teams coming down all the time now, and news of our impending arrival has made it to base camp already. One group didn't believe we were really the "brainy Yale|NASA team" because they entered our lunch area while we were telling some pretty raunchy jokes.

Nathaniel