High winds aloft have stymied Chinese attempts to bring the Olympic torch to Everest’s summit. Photograph © Allen Kearney, Getty Images

The reports from Mount Everest just keep getting stranger, now being total innuendo, rumor, and guesswork. Who knows, except the Chinese authorities, what is really going on? One post on PeakFreaks claims that the Olympic torch did reach the summit, perhaps yesterday, and a TV crew in a military jet, circling the peak, attempted to film the event. High winds, however, conspired to snuff the torch out so no filming was possible. The official Olympic flame thus remained somewhere lower on the mountain. Is it cynical to think that this whole Everest Olympic snafu is now reduced to just a photo-op?

The next good weather opportunity, according to Chinese meteorologist Yang Xingguo, is tomorrow May 3 when winds are expected to slacken. Yang told Xinhua, “The weather around the Mt. Qomolangma is complicated as it is located in the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, dubbed the Third Pole in the world…. There are also distinctive diversity of weather mode between the south and north slopes of the Mt. Qomolangma, so it is really hard to predict precisely. I think at least it is impossible to scale the mount in the next three days.”

Xenhua reports today that Chinese Mountaineering Team spokesman Zhang Zhigian said, “The Chinese climbers are beefing up for the ascent of the Olympic flame over Qomolangma,” but refused to disclose where the climbers or torch were now. Zhang also said, “The torch relay to Mount Qomolangma is a highlight of the whole relay, and it also represents the idea of Green Olympics, High-Tech Olympics and People's Olympics. It will be the Olympic flame's first trip to the peak, so I think the torch relay on the summit will push the Olympic spirit to a new high.”

Hopefully it will be sooner than later so all those Westerners in tents below Base Camp on the south Nepalese side can also get their chance to trek to Qomolangma’s sacred summit in whatever weather windows remain…and all their hard-earned cash spent getting there won’t be in vain.