I knew it was a very expensive piece of equipment, and I set it down on some snow, getting ready to get the computer to hook up to it, which it turns out was in Nima Tashi's pack, well behind me all the time anyway, but we had not yet figured that out. I retrieved it. We'll see how rugged these things are when we hook it up here soon. The Southwest Face of Everest with the South Summit and Hillary Step in profile on the right ridge. Above the Southwest Face of Everest, you would not want to slip.
More rock is exposed up high.
So it wasn't a particularly dicey situation in terms of climbing, but the wind was blowing very hard. M y motivation was still very much to go get that damn antenna, hook it up, and run the thing for Roger Bilham and Fred Blume for ten minutes, or whatever I could do to say that some work had gone on at the summit that day. They had managed to pull some things out of their packs and not lose them, and I realized that we were not going to be able, with the summit team that had come up together, to power up the GPS antenna and record any data. They're bundled very differently than they used to be. The Italian tripod no longer really exists as a tripod.