원정 개요

Rice arrived at BC on 5 April and two days later went to C1, then returned to BC on the 8th. On the 9th he developed stomach trouble and stayed in BC while he recovered.

He went back up to C1 on the 14th and on to C2 the next day. On the 6th he gave his light tent to Joao Garcia, the Portuguese climber on the expedition led by Piotr Pustelnik, for Garcia's summit push. Rice descended to BC.

On the 20th, Rice climbed from BC to C2, and on 21 April he headed up to C3. He reached 6250m, where he was hit on the head by a block of ice, a part of a serac that had fallen, struck a rock and broken into pieces. His head was not visibly injured, but left him vomiting and dizzy, and his balance was not normal. He managed to go down alone to C1 at 4:00 pm in near white-out conditions. On the 22nd he was back in BC.

He left BC on the 25th and went up to C2 with the intention of climbing the next to C4. However on the 26th, when he had not gone very far above C2, to only 5750m, he became dizzy again and abandoned his attempt on Annapurna I. He returned to BC that day and stayed there until 1 May, when a helicopter arranged by Pustelnik's expedition picked them (and him) up at BC and flew them to Kathmandu.