My blind, limbless, naked snowman
Day Five – 8th June
We woke up and had breakfast of pancakes with maple syrup and pork sausage patty at midday. There has been a whole dump of snow overnight on us so we have to dig around the tents again and restake them. The forecast now is for another seven feet of snow over the next two days so we are stuck here for a while. It’s dangerous to move on the new snow before it settles. It will have covered over all the crevasses so we can’t see them and possibly fall in. We will have to wait it out and maybe another day extra for the fresh snow to settle down and freeze a bit.
Spirits are high, we have escaped the school for today lol. We were supposed to do some crampon technique stuff and move to cache tonight but now schools out with the bad weather. Yay!!!
So we build a cave for a new bathroom. There’s a pee hole in the snow that we all go in the same place and our toilet is a small green bin that has a plastic bag inside. We all use it and we cache the full ones at camp sites to collect on the way down. This means we will carry all our waste off the mountain and keep it nice and clean. We make jokes and while everyone else shovels sensible stuff I build a snow man. There are no stones here that I can use for eyes, no twigs I can give him arms with or nothing I can use for a scarf. It’s all barren snow so my poor wee snowman is featureless, limb less and naked.
About 6.30 pm the weather clears a bit and we are able to have our crampon and ice axe class. Then we have dinner at 7.30 pm of rice and chicken curry. Dessert was Oreos. Wow we’re really eating great food up here. You always have to eat your way up the mountain cos when you’re up really high your appetite goes and you can’t eat anything. Then you get weak. So you have to eat while you can.
The plan now is to stay on day time. No more travelling at night in the freezing cold. It will be cold enough now during the day up here to travel as safely as we can. We just have to see what it’s like in the morning wether we can take our cache up to the next camp. Camp four on the map. Our camp three. The journey will be really really steep and hard going and we will pass ‘squirrel corner’ where there is a sheer drop just to the left of us. I think that will be scary. We hope to leave the sleds and just take back packs but that will mean heavy packs on our backs and that’s what kills me. I like to put the weight on the sled as you’re using more of your legs to pull and it’s more efficient. It’s 8.30pm and I’m off to sleep now. It’s very difficult to sleep. We have eye masks because it’s light all the time around the clock. It’s never dark. Only we get white out in bad weather but it’s still bright white. You just can’t see anything but white all around. It’s very odd. There’s no horizon. Just like being incarcerated inside a giant tip-ex bottle I would imagine. 
Our new luxury bathroom in a little cave for protection. the green CMC on the left is the toilet. You remove the lid, go inside and then put lid back on and carry it off the mountain at the end. We collected quite a few of these. Pee hole on the right. That just filters through the glacoer bt at least people don;t just pee all over the pkace but we try to keep the pee holes collective as we melt the snow for drinking.