I am writing this at 8000m so bear with me.
Today we started at 4:30am, well that was the plan but it was more like 5. There were some queues but they weren’t moving too slowly.
I had oxygen on the whole way and omg thank god for that.
It was pretty cold in the morning and I wore my down suit, with a thermal and fleece underneath. I had liner gloves, chemical hand warmer and my biggest gloves apart from my summit mittens.
We climbed up the lhotse face and it was so so steep and never ending. Finally (after probably 4 hours) we got to the yellow band, a famous section of sandstone. It wasn’t too tricky to climb up, but still, easy rock climbing at almost 8000m is always tough! Then we traversed up and across a couple of hours to (at least what i think is) the Geneva spur. The geneva spur looked really daunting and tricky but it wasn’t horrible.
The whole time i needed to pee so badly like so badly. So just before arriving at camp, my wonderful guide pemba helped me take off my harness and i could then pee (thanks to the butt zip on my down suit) on the trail. I always felt left out before because i would see pee everywhere from men, on the trail, but i never had the audacity to do that. Such a girl boss moment. 💪
(also i mean with high altitude climbing, peeing on the trail is very common. Nobody really cares about anything, just walking up that big rock, and staying alive. With normal hiking lets not pee on the trail ✨)
I also saw another dead climber today. This was much much much worse because you could fully see his face, and you could tell it was recent. He still had his backpack on, crampons on, sponsorship patches on his down suit. We had to walk right past him, and i just couldn’t. He looked so raw and fresh and it felt very wrong of me to just helplessly walk past him. My guide saw that i wasn’t dealing well with it, so he short-roped me and pulled me faster along that section. I wonder if his family will pay for some Sherpas to drag him down, or if he will just be left up there.
We got to camp 4 and tried to eat random stuff and drink as well. Now we are resting before we head up in a few hours.
