K2's unclimbed North Ridge Expedition report from the K2 base camp -- Tuesday, July 2 The team has established base camp on the Baltoro Glacier and a preliminary Camp I higher on K2. R.D. Caughron filed the following update on the team's progress: Severe storms force downtime at base camp R.D. Caughron For the last five days we've had some problems with storms and there was a pretty severe storm two days ago. Yesterday, the mountain sloughed off and today we were able to get back on the mountain. We're kind of frustrated. Our current Camp I is not a very comfortable, protected spot. We've been trying to locate a Camp I that's satisfactory. We've got one team on the mountain today and they were unable to establish a platform, so tomorrow there are six of us who are going up to establish the platform and hopefully start fixing toward Camp II. Camp I is at 5,800 meters. Everybody's in great health. In terms of acclimatization we've had no problem. Base camp is about 16,000 feet. No one's gotten sick. No one even has a headache. We're looking forward to spending a night at Camp I tomorrow night, in order to acclimatize, and we'll know more then. This group has climbed several 8,000-meter peaks. We need to do things in sequence, and we need to go high and sleep low. But we've had no problems with acclimatization so far. Because of the storm we had to, after we established Camp I, leave a cache and go back down to base camp and stay there during the storm, but the weather is beautiful now. It's cold. It's sunny during the day--it's too sunny actually--and so we're looking forward to two or three days of good weather and good climbing. We're the only team here. It's possible there may be a Russian team lower, but we haven't seen them or heard from them and we don't know if anything's going to materialize here. We're the only ones on this side of the mountain. The route is a very steep route--terrifyingly steep, from my point of view--but we just won't know (about the route conditions) until we get up high. The trek in involved about 30 camels or so and the Chinese camel drivers really know their stuff. We had no trouble with the river crossings. We anticipated some problems with the river crossings but they went really smoothly.