Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 45

Tempo Monsoons stall Everest climbers Chicago Tribune, Monday, September 7, 1987 Section 4 7 'If 7 The 1987 "MP 1" 'ii US 'ir. Mffca fti ni Sirdar (head Sherpa) Lhakpa Dorje, who wanted to go to a Buddhist monastery outside town to be blessed by a Lama before the expedition. Sherpas will not climb until they are blessed, but it usually is done in the higher monasteries. Fellerhoff and Athans, however, having spent considerable time in Nepal, know that, without Sherpas, most expeditions couldn't take place. At the ceremony, we walked in a clockwise direction around the large stupa (temple), spun prayer, wheels on temple walls in a clockwise direction while saying silent prayers, and then entered the monastery where the Lama resided.

Before entering his room, we were given white clothes to hold in our cupped hands. We gave these clothes to the Lama, an ancient man who rocked back and forth on his bed, chanting the entire time we were there, he then gave each of us a red string to wear around our necks and wove us each a multicolored string ornament symbolizing many prayers. Afterward, the group ate lunch together at a Nepalese restaurant, where Whittaker, 28 the nephew of Jim Whittaker, first American to climb Everest and Link, 29, questioned expedition doctor Charlie Tufts about how to cope in potentially unsanitary tea houses they would stay in. The answer Make sure water is boiled and food well cooked. On Aug.

19, Whittaker and Link left (the women would leave two days later), and the trekkers finally got on a helicopter. But there weren't enough flights to get all the climbers out only one, photographer Chris Noble, made the flight. In Nepal there is a phrase, "Bholi parsi." It means "Tomorrow or maybe the day after." Another day passed without a helicopter flight. Remaining team members Athans, Fellerhoff, Rhoads had no way of knowing when they'd get out. Rhoads asked if she could walk in with Brewster and McCoy.

Rhoads suggested I go with the women as well. After six days and nights in Kathmandu, I opted to get out. The four of us left for the nine-day trip on Aug. 21. Two days later we saw a helicopter above and could only hope Fellerhoff and Athans were aboard with the team's oxygen tanks.

By this time, we already were a week behind schedule. Next report: Setting up at Base Camp The 1987 Snowbird Mt. Everest expedition, of which The Tribune is official media sponsor, hopes to place the first American woman atop the world's tallest mountain. Regular reports will be filed on the expedition's progress. By Elizabeth Kaufmann fl rt athmandu, Nepal Like I most Westerners who come I i to n31 to cumD and trek VXthe Snowbird group planned to use Kathmandu as a steppingstone to the Himalayas, the highest mountains in the world.

But Kathmandu had other plans, and our orderly timetable for spending two days there and flying out soon went awry. After 30 hours of air travel and a two-day layover in Bangkok, our group of two climbers, a physician, a journalist and 16 trekkers was happy to have finally arrived. It was mid-August, and all but three of the team's 10 climbers, Marjie Lester, Steve Fossett and Renny Jackson, were now here, along with four of the 20 trekkers who had supported the team and who would go only as far as the Everest base camp. Planes can't land in the mountains during monsoon season, so our group had reserved one of the King of Nepal's two Puma helicopters to take us to the small village of Lukla on Aug. 17.

From this vantage (Kathmandu is 4,300 feet), the trekkers and most of the climbers would make the eight-day hike through the spectacular views of the Khumbu region to the Everest base camp, where the real climb up the mountain would begin. Team leaders Karen Fellerhoff and Pete Athans had assigned two climbers, Pete Whittaker and Robert Link, friends and professional mountain guides at Washington's Mt, Rainier, the task of accompanying 125 porter-loads of team supplies on the 100-mile trek from. a town called Jiri, a day's drive east of Kathmandu, to Namche Bazar, a picturesque mountain trading post near Lukla. At Namche, porters would transfer their loads to yaks, which would carry them the rest of the way to base camp. Though the Jiri-to-Namche trek would take nine days, it would cost about half as much to hire porters (about $3.50 a day each) as to send the loads by helicopter.

Our first night in Kathmandu, we had a group dinner at an Indian restaurant. When 29-year-old Mount Everest Snowbird Expedition TMfflilliiliTfTa climber Mary Kay Brewster of Boulder, walked into the dining room and sat down alone at a table, no fewer than five men gravitated to her side. Brewster, tall with long platinum hair, deftly moved to another table and talked to fellow climber Kellie Rhoads, 30, a professional outdoor guide from Inkom, Idaho. The next night, which was supposed to be our last in Kathmandu, we were honored with a cocktail party at Flo's Place, a private watering hole for Americans. There we heard that we Sherpas will not climb until they are blessed, but it usually is done in the higher Without Sherpas, most expeditions couldn't take place.

wouldn't be flying out the next day because of severe flooding in the Terai Lowlands south of here; the King's helicopter's would be needed the next day to aid victims delaying our departure. The trekkers took this in stride and hit the streets for another day of shopping and temple-exploring. There are five levels of passenger vehicles in this Hindu city, in which Buddhism peacefully coexists: one-speed bicycles, rickshaws with pedals (three-wheelers with room for two passengers in back), motorized rickshaws, taxicabs and buses. Despite almost daily rains during monsoon season, streets always are dusty and the air dirty and foul-smelling. A day after their first departure was canceled, trekkers rushed to the airport at dawn, waited five hours, then were told the helicopter wouldn't be flying that day, either.

Later, climbers met with some of the team's 10 Sherpas, including are at the controls of the spunky little can teach mail, include the stylish foreign-language instructional programs produced by the BBC, which are particularly popular in the spring when viewers are about to leave on vacation and want to know how to order beer andor ask for the nearest bathroom; "Signing with Cindy," which combines music and dance routines to help teach sign language; the cooking programs, especially "Dining in the redoubtable "Cats and yoga and exercise shows, particularly "Body Electric," which features an array of Florida women with trim bodies and trimmer outfits. "A friend of mine says he watches the show every chance he gets," Chaplik noted. said, 'I'm amazed. I didn't know you He answered, 'Who said anything about "People of different demographics enjoy different kinds of programs," said Milberg, who may be the only extant onetime rock and roll disc jockey with a law degree. "Those who live in Lincoln Park and the north and northwest suburbs liked our series on sailing, we get a lot of mail on the language instruction from Hyde Park, and senior citizens like 'Modern Maturity.

About 10,000 people 10 percent of Channel 20's viewing audience take TV courses for college credit, possibly toward a two-year associate-of-arts degree. At $26 per credit hour, it is "the cheapest deal in town, Chaplik said. Couch potatoes need not apply, as the procedure includes buying a study guide, conferring with the teacher during specified phone hours, writing papers and going into one of the City Colleges to take exams. "Most take the courses concurrently in the classroom as well the telecourses," Chaplik said. "The typical student is someone in his or her late 20s or early 30s who has a family and one to two jobs, so that this is the only way the can go to school.

The majority are female, and it's about S0-S0 for -minorities and whites." a A3 4-4 j3 I i 1 -i Elynne Chaplik and David Milberg Channel 20 Continued from first Tempo page mile signal in all directions. Unlike the top-dog PBS station in town, WTTW-Ch. 11, WYCC does little original programming. "Initially," Chaplik said, "I made the decision that we wouldn't be a production house because-we -couldn't afford to be a good one." The exceptions are the weekly "Conversations with the Chancellor" (Salvatore G. Rotella talking about the City Colleges), an occasional special (such as one on missing children, hosted by the ubiquitous Chaplik), in-house program promotions and news updates.

know, people tend to stay with us through the day," Chaplik said, "and if the world ends, I'd like them to know about Instead, programming is picked up from such sources as the BBC, PBS and individual college telecourse producers at community college systems in California, Texas and Florida. The result is an array of offerings ranging from "Principles of Accounting" and "Introducing Biology" to those series that also aired on Channel 1 1 Africans," "Planet to hands-on programs Brush Painting," "The Wonderful World of to foreign-language children shows "The Unlike the old blackboard days, the shows make use of various kinds of visuals to pep things up. "Economics in discussing federal deficits, hauls out vintage footage from the Franklin Roosevelt years. "The Mechanical Universe" brings on lively 1 animation and graphics to help explain principles of physics. Sometimes, like the old days, the result is clumsy, as demonstrated in a recent segment on "The Write Course" that tried to teach English composition through a heavy-handed sketch awkwardly performed by a group of actors.

Besides "Lap Quilting the most popular shows, according to the Ultrasound can By Dr. Allan Bruckheim How do they use sound waves to check babies before they are born? A Ultrasound, the use of high-pitched sound waves, works like sonar, which uses sound waves to look for submarines. Emitted sound waves pass through water but are reflected from bone and tissue. An unborn baby is surrounded by a sac of water, so the waves that bounce back show the baby. Using sound waves to "see" the baby is extremely safe, far safer than taking an X-ray.

But ultrasound is not done routinely on pregnant women because it is an added cost and many obstetricians do not believe that it is needed for all pregnancies. Ultrasound is widely used to check on the size of a fetus and can detect certain circumstances in which normal progress is not occurring. Obstetricians frequently use this technique to check on a baby's size or to look for twins. Using specialized ultrasound equipment, obstetricians can measure blood flow in the umbilical cord and detect serious problems in the fetus and placenta. Q-r-Is it possible to have a normal blood pressure even though it is high every time my doctor takes It? A Yes, some people's blood pressure goes up only in their doctors' offices.

Doctors make them nervous enough to boost their pressure to the point at which, on the basis of the high readings, their health is in danger. This may result in a doctor's prescribing unneeded amounts of blood pressure medication. But a high reading in the doctor's office should not be ignored. The trick is Bay aeoi Oe arance Tribune photo by Quanttn Dodt Channel 20. lesson Other vjewers may take other courses in preparation for the GED test toward a high school diploma or for instruction in English as a second language.

"Chicagoans are starting to talk about the station," Chaplik added. "They're relating to it as a very strong alternative to their regular TV viewing. It serves them intellectually and practically. They watch either through word of i mouth or by accident. People happen to switch the dial, and i there we are.

"So the word is spreading, but 1 it's not totally there. It's not a given. We still have to convince others that we're not 'TV College The other thing we've had to fight is that a large percentage of our demographic audience lives along the lakefront, and we're finding that a lot of the high-rise buildings aren't putting our UHF component on their master antennas. They didn't even have it on my building for a while." "We've started to show up in the local Arbitron ratings," Milberg noted. "For the last six months 1 we've soundly beaten channels 44, 38, 26 and 60." "I can tell 20 is becoming much more recognizable because I'm stopped more often on the Chaplik said.

"A while ago some lady recognized me and grabbed me in the middle of State Street I swear, she almost got both -of us killed and told me the Russian language series was good but that there should be more. People believe this is a very personal issue. You know, it's their station and this is what they'd like to see." Meanwhile, the, uh, Little Station That Could will continue to chug uphill in trying to satisfy all those devotees of Chinese brush-painting, electric bodies and, it goes without saying, lap-quilting. (For information on Channel 20 courses for credit, call 855-8213 or write the Center for Open Learning, Chicago City-Wide College, 226 W. Jackson Chicago, 111.

60606-6997.) A better way to measure blood pressure is a 24-hour ambulatory reading. A blood pressure cuff under your clothes is attached to a small device that takes your pressure periodically during the day, when you are away from the anxiety a visit to the doctor may provoke. LABOR DAY PERF. TONITE AT 8:00 "BEST IAY OF THE YEAR!" Chicago Tribunt Hmtort' rofl "ROLLICKS WITH IAUOHS!" Kup, CMcoeo Swi Tim SHEAR MADNESS 01 Sal. JO.

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