Mount Everest 2002

Our schedule

For a mountain as high as Mount Everest, one can hardly give a detailed schedule. Everything depends on conditions, weather and acclimatization.

Our orgaization schedule

The ABC at 6500 m is clearly situated too high for a real base camp - it is already as high as camp 1 at Cho Oyu. We will see how well we can handle the altitude there. Based on this, the climbing strategy will evolve.
Of course one can construct a kind of "best case scenario". I don't need to mention that the reality will be different. But it could give ideas about the time scales involved. So, what must be done after arriving at ABC:

• Bring material to camp 1 (7000 m, on the North Col) and go back
• Bring material to camp 1 and go back
• Bring material to camp 1, stay a night there. If the acclimatization is good enough, go up further to camp 2 (7600 m), deposit material there and go back to ABC.
• Go up to camp 1, stay the night there, continue to camp 2, stay a night there, and back to ABC.
• Go up to camp 1, stay the night there, up to camp 2, night there, go to camp 3 (8300 m), install the camp, stay the night, next day to the summit (8850 m), and then back to 3,2,1..

In between, we will need several rest days in ABC. Provided that the weather is perfect (which it for sure will not be), a scenario like sketched in the graph below could make sense from the acclimatization point of view. This would give us two weeks of time for bad weather reserve. We will probably need this reserve because the weather at Mount Everest is known to be not too cooperative in April. Eventual descents from ABC to BC are not taken into account here, too - and that is a long long way.