Clearing the snow from the tent walls so it doesn’t collapse on us
Building walls of ice blocks 
Jo just loves to carry these 😉
Our wee tent needed rescuing
What do you mean shovel the snow???
Sawing ice blocks, Linda Scissorhands lol
Day Thirteen – 16 th June
Oh. My. God. We woke up with 50 mph winds and a foot of fresh snow dumped on us. We were defo not going anywhere this morning. We have to wait to see if the winds die down. Our team four is up at 17,000 foot high camp. I can’t imagine the winds up there. Much stronger. We are quite protected here. They are up on the ridge. Now they have run out of days and may not be able to make the summit. I had applied to be on team four but it was already full so I went on the waiting list whilst being pencilled in for team five. After a few months I booked my flights and then a spot became available on it but I said as I’d booked my flights I would just stick with being on team five. I’m so glad now.
So we had breakfast of little bacon and potato bits in a burrito, hot drinks and then we set about digging the tents out of 2 feet of snow caused by spindrift with the wind. Everything was under snow. We sawed snow blocks and made walls around the bathroom and the ice kitchen to protect them from more snow drift.
After a couple hours of rebuilding and fortifying our camp we had lunch of fried bagel with peanut butter and honey.
Then it was just resting in our tents and drinking enough water and keeping warm and dry.
Team four are on their way down now. Miss Denali denied them a weather window for their summit push.
Later in the afternoon the weather cleared up and the sun came out. The view was just superb. We went for a 10 min walk roped up to the edge of this view called ‘Edge of the World’ where we would be belayed and dangled over the edge for the most amazing pic lol. So when we got there the clouds came over again and it was like pea soup. Oh well. We got a little exercise trudging through 3 feet of fresh snow.
We heard that one climber has died on the Casein Ridge here.
We returned to our little camp and were about to have dinner when team four arrived down. One of their guys was in bad shape so we had to evacuate the cook tent for him to get medical attention. Me and Jo ate our tuna pasta in our tent. Apparently he had a cardiac arrest but he seems to be alright. We don’t know if the helicopter will come for him. The rest of team 4 are digging snow platforms now to erect their tents and spend the night here now.
We will still be stuck here tomorrow. Hopefully we can get to Edge of the World though and we’ll also do an acclimatisation hike to keep the legs going and keep the exercise up. This is important at altitude especially when you can spend quite a bit of time lying down.