Denali Day Ten – 13 th June

Day Ten – 13 th June

We had a really cold night. Woke up to everything frozen, ice inside the tent even though we vented it well. We had breakfast of potato bits with couple bits bacon and cheese. My appetite wasn’t great and this is one of the first signs of AMS but I didn’t drink enough water before going to bed last night. I was aware of it but it really challenging to drink freezing cold water when you’re already cold. Lesson learn’t though. I will drink plenty today even though having a wee is another challenge. Your body goes into diuresis at altitude and does some extraordinary things to try and help out. It gets rid of water to try and help more blood flow get in to carry more oxygen but it can make your blood sticky and also your lungs dry out because you’re breathing out condensation and breathing much harder. So drinking plenty of water helps. It also combats the altitude headaches.

There is a rangers office here and I walked over to it to try and get some phone reception but it seems to only be something called ‘Horizon’ that gets reception. Arghhh. I was so looking forward to making some calls.

The ranger is here to help out with rescues and emergencies. He said he had some stuff to deal with now and was going up to 17,000 (camp 5- high camp) where we are headed up in couple days. I think we have to cache emergency food up there tomorrow just in case when we move up we get stuck there with bad weather.

Now we are going to retrieve our cache. It means coming back up that last slot of a hill but this time on fresh legs. I just hope my back has recovered.

Well the hill was much better today and my back was alright. When we got back we had lunch of this really heavy brown bread loaf thing with egg and bacon sandwich. It was actually really delicious so I had seconds of it. I think I was hungry after not eating much this morning.

After lunch we practised our fixed lines rope skills and how to pass the anchors on the ascent and the descent. Tomorrow is a big day. We will do an acclimatisation hike up to cache a couple of emergency freeze dried food meals just before high camp at 17,000 feet. And the way out of this camp is almost straight up a snow/ ice wall. The top is so steep that we will travel on fixed lines to remain attached to the mountain. There’s about 800 feet of fixed lines to climb. I’m a bit apprehensive. It will be a big effort.

We had dinner of macaroni cheese, some more good laughs and I’m in bed now 9.30pm. Tomorrow we get up at 5.30 am, breakfast at 6am and leave at 7am.