Me and Jo getting our warm stuff ready to move up to 17,000 feet. I’m on the left. Jo is getting rather excited. We have laughed a lot this trip.
Day Fourteen – 17 th June
Two weeks on the mountain now and we all stink. Even my little bottle of Georgio Armani doesn’t cover it anymore. I have hairy armpits, hairy legs, the skin around my nose is hard and flaky, my hair sticks to my head and has dandruff. We are most certainly a motley crew now and the worst is yet to come. We still have another week.
We woke up and had breakfast of scrambled eggs and little bacon. Well Andy said there was bacon in it. Somewhere maybe. But I couldn’t see any. Anyway it’s gas to put in the tank. We then went on another acclimatisation hike back up the bloody great hill. We can see the summit now, it looks so close but it’s still a really big day to move up to high camp tomorrow and then rest day and then hopefully summit day will be 12 to 18 hours slog. We have to traverse a serious ridge with steep slopes. But one day at a time. We have to get ourselves in position yet. Bo has decided to descend with team 4. Their man appears to alright now. A helicopter wouldn’t have been able to get up here in that weather anyway. They will go down this evening. I think Bo got scared when he saw the state of the other team when they came down from high camp. And he’s been going on about the dangerous ridge as well but there are fixed lines there. You just need to not look down.
I didn’t bring my camera on our acclimatisation hike this morning because we’ve been up this bloody hill so many times now. When we got to the top I really regretted it because it was the clearest views and so spectacular. You know when you look out of the aeroplane window and you see blue sky and just down below you are rolls and rolls of what looks like cotton wool clouds that you could bounce on, well imagine sitting on the side of a great big majestic white mountain just looking down on that same view only with other white mountains poking out the top of them. Man it was so cool.
Later at dinner we discussed the weather and the situation. Realistically there’s only one weather window and that’s Tuesday. So the plan is to move up tomorrow, rest day Monday and summit push Tuesday weather permitting.