Editor's note: Ed Viesturs and the rest of his team--including the IMAX filming crew--returned to base camp Monday after a long period at the higher camps. Now it's time for a few days of rest, after which they will climb back up and begin their final summit bid that they hope will culminate on May 10. Here is Ed's latest update.

(523K .wav file)
Oh, it was great (at Camp II and III). I mean we're totally ready to go now. We're acclimatized and, rather than run up and down, back and forth, we just stayed up there for 11 or 12 days.

For the most part the weather was good. We'd have a couple of afternoon snow showers and that type of thing and no major storms. And now the weather is very stable. We came down to base camp. It's really warm now. It looks like it is stabilizing up high now, the winds are dying. This is as predicted, the first two weeks in May are when you have the best conditions to go to the summit.

And some people are going to be going in the next couple of days. But we just got down so we are going to wait and rest at base camp for four or five days and then head back up.

Everybody is doing fine.

(690K .wav file)
We went up to Camp III and spent two nights there at 24,000 feet and spent the night there and then the rest of the team came down and then I climbed up to about 25,000 toward the South Col just to go a little higher. And then we all came down, spent one more night at Camp II and then came here yesterday (Tuesday).

Definitely when you first get to an altitude, I mean you are reminded of how lethargic you feel and how unmotivated you are to doing simple tasks. But every day, the longer you stay at an altitude, the more your body adjusts to that altitude, so you feel better and feel more motivated.

So I guess that is the one thing that recurs when you go to a higher altitude again for that first time is just, you go, "Whoa, it is just so hard to motivate myself to do simple tasks." Like digging a tent platform or whatever. The motivation factor is what I think you really lack when you first get to a new altitude.

(429K .wav file)
I think you have to be very, very aware, very cautious of everything you do, every move you make. That's where accidents occur at high altitude. People just kind of let their guard down and you have to keep thinking about that at all times. Be safe, when you are walking around camp, especially when it's a steep place like Camp III. Always carry an ice ax. It's little errors like that that can cause problems.

It's just trying to remember that, thinking "OK, if I'm going to be expending any energy, it's going to be expended toward the safety factor. I'm going to think about what I'm doing before I do anything."

(724K .wav file)
When you first get up there, when you do any sudden movement or any type of extra exertion, yeah, you're going to run out of breath.. That's why we try and stay up there at least two nights so the next time we go up there our bodies will remember that we were there and we won't be quite as out of breath.

But you do have to move a little slower because, like I said, any sudden movements or overexertion and you find yourself sitting down and catching your breath where normally at sea level it wouldn't even affect you.

When you come down to base camp, you're in this sea of oxygen and you sleep like you've never slept before, and your appetite returns. And so it is a really good, restful time now that we're going to spend four or five days here totally recovering and sleeping like crazy and eating a lot of food because our appetites are good and we'll be totally ready to go back up then in five days.

The route's all fixed. It's been fixed to the South Col now for about a week. The first stage is to fix the lower part of the Lhotse face to Camp III and that takes about three or four days of fixing. And the upper part from Camp III to IV usually takes maybe two to three days.

And what we do is our team and another team did the lower section from Camp II to III and then we leave it then to the other groups that are here. We kind of share the burden and the Sherpas join up. There are two Sherpas from one team and two Sherpas from another team. And then they go up and fix the route. It's fairly safe because there is a lot of old rope and they can clip into that rope and as they are just stringing that line they are pretty much just using a lot of the old anchors that are already frozen into the Lhotse face anyway.

There's a lot of political things going on. There's the South Africa team that has been having some problem. I don't really know what the whole gist of it is. But there are so many people here and so many different countries with so many different sponsors and so many different goals. Of course there's going to be problems.

(307K .wav file)
There was one Norwegian climber who had a team of like 18 Sherpas and he was going to climb the southwest face with them. But in the spring that route is very dangerous because it's just, literally, rocks are falling the whole time. And he was quite inexperienced and we tried and let him know that he was going to run into some rockfall. And finally he went up on the face and got hit by some rocks and then he decided to call it quits.

There's always going to be some minor hassles going on throughout the camps, but for the most part everything is going good for everybody.

(465K .wav file)
I've met (Goran Kropp, the solo Swedish climber) a couple of times, and I talked to him actually last night. He's a really nice guy and he went up again last night hoping to reach the summit by the 3rd (of May). So he's hoping to do it in three days. He's doing a lot of his own route-finding, not using the fixed ropes going up, but I understand he will be using the fixed ropes coming down.

But still, it's quite admirable what he's trying to do. He's totally staying away from everybody's route, carrying all his own food. He basically brought everything on his bicycle all the way from Sweden. And he hopes to reach the summit by May 3rd.

(503K .wav file)
Like I said, we'll hang here for three or four or five days. We're in no hurry. I think we have the weather window that we're looking for. And it could be that we're going to shoot for a summit day on May 10th. So we would leave here on the 5th, go to Camp II and rest there for a day, then go to Camp III, Camp IV, and then summit on May 10. Roughly, if everything goes well, we feel that is a good date.

Again we are going to be shooting the movie and we don't want to be up there when there are 30 or 40 other people attempting the summit. So we may either try and go a day before that, or even delay a day or two. We're in no big hurry.

-- Ed Viesturs