Denali Day Two – 5th June

  Mine and Jo’s tent on the left. The other two tents had 3 guys in each.  What a view to wake up and unzip the tent to look out at this. Nature at its wildest.  It was a wee bit chilly   Our ice kitchen, sitting on benches made from the snow and ice  Good banter over hot drinksWe slept on and off until breakfast (hot meat pasties and cinnamon buns) was ready at 5.30pm. We went to the dining tent which was a few benches dug into the ice for us to sit on with some tent fabric over the top. It was quite cosy when we’re all inside it. The guides cook for us and serve it from behind a counter made of ice. Like a little ice kitchen. The ice bar in London has nothing on this. It’s absolutely real here lol.

It’s nice to get out of the tents though. Although it’s great to rest as much as we can, inside them we fry in the heat during the day, they act like a cooker (maybe this is the microwave I carried lol, the tent microwaves us) and then at night when we walk we freeze. But it’s safer to walk at night as the snow and glacier is frozen and nothing moves. During the heat of the day when things melt, cracks appear and everything is weaker.

At 6pm we had breakfast of cereal with skimmed milk and an oatmeal breakfast bar (they’re American and the flavour was called Morning Glory- the guys couldn’t figure out why us Brit girls were giggling. We said we’d tell them higher up lol)

Then we packed up our stuff, prepared our sleds, back packs and set off at 9pm.

The sleds weren’t too heavy and we made it to the cache point in about 5 hours. Our stuff for higher up the mountain was hidden in a deep hole on the snow and we popped our empty sleds inside our backback and walked back to camp like a row of penguins with the orange sleds sticking out way above our heads. It was quite peculiar looking. We made it back to camp in 2 hours and went to our ice kitchen for hot drinks and dinner of burgers. These aren’t normal beef burgers, they were squashed up garden vegetables made into patties and spice added for flavour in a bap or as English folk say in a bun. Im sure I would never eat these at home but here after a hard effort they were bloody marvellous.