Hello from Kathmandu

Keith here...

I haven't had the time or the inclination to read all of the posts so far on the Blog, just the last one that details some of the reasons we are done.
Here is the skinny:
We set out with the Swiss group to make a last summit attempt. There were 10 Swiss which included a guide, two climbing sherpas and one sherpa "trainee". Our entire group was with them except for Dave. We did make camp one with no trouble, in fact the initial glacier crossing had become quite a bit easier with all the snow. Our camp one included Toby's tent and Neil's tent. Both were under about 1.5 meters of dense packed snow. We dug them out, repaired many rips and busted poles and spent the night in C1. The Swiss were in a similair predicament in their own C1, except they had a couple of spare tents with them.
Next day we made it to camp 1B2. By this time we have stayed all over the mountain and we just started naming all the subsiduary camps. We had C1A through C1C and this camp was between B and C...long story short it was around 6200m. Once again it was the Canadians up and breaking trail for everyone else. While we were discussing the late hour with the Swiss guide and what to do, Norboo Sherpa screamed AVALANCHE!!! We all looked down to him expecting to see the avalanche BELOW him. It was above us. We were looking straight up a serac we were under and the entire sky was filling with snow on top of the serac. We ran around like ants at a picnic looking for some kind of shelter. Fortunatly the avalanche was on it's last legs and the cursed wind helped to blow the snow back up the mountain away from us. Very exciting stuff.
The five of us borrowed a couple tents and some down suits from the Swiss group and stayed at 6200m for the night. Next day we went up the slope toward our C2 at 6800m. The wind was very strong this day...60-80km maybe and of course blowing in our faces. We found the Swiss C2 by a peice of nylon and a busted pole sticking out of the ground. Our C2 was a hundred meteres higher and when we got there an avalanche had changed the whole area. We spent two hours digging and probing for our camp. By 3pm we new we were done and would have to get down to C1 or freeze.
Our C2 had a tent from Gonzalo and my Mountain hardware tent along with most all our high altitude gear...like down suits and mitts. On our decsent we found both tents 400m lower and a couple of kms from where we hd left them. Both Gonzalo's tent and mine had been carried down the slope with a very big avalache, probably the same avalanche that sent the blast down that wrecked everyones base camp.
We were able to recover most all of our gear. The tents are both destroyed and we did lose some gear. Happily we have the stuff if we ever want to try this again.

We are all now in Kathmandu except for Mike who has stayed on Manaslu with the Swiss and two members of the Dynafit(German) team. They will try for the top one more time.
Thanks to all for the text messages on our sort of reliable sat phone...they were a big part of our base camp "therapy". We fly out on the 11th and will be checking personal emails till then...if we can stay sober long enough.

Out
Keith Sanford