(another long one!)
Recap: We climbed through the icefall and arrived at camp 1 (6100m) feeling good! We had some food and drink and decided to push onto camp 2!
Last year the toilet situation in camp 1 was just a snow wall about hip height, but this time I spotted a toilet tent! At least the toilet tents I’m used to, they have a barrel with some rocks around to stand on. I went inside, but had to go out immediately because it was just the snowy floor with poop EVERYWHERE. I could barely stand in the tent without stepping on poop. I’m sure you can imagine how it smelt. 😃
Anyways I decided I wasn’t that desperate.
We have A LOT of toilet talk here so excuse me if I’m being too TMI – I’m trying to share all of Everest :))
Dad and I geared up again, and at about 8am we set off to camp 2. My body felt great, but I was just pretty sleepy since I had woken up at 12am and had maybe 2 hours of sleep. I don’t like having coffee at altitude, but I had a lot of black tea in attempt to wake myself up.
We started walking from camp 1 – this section is in the western cwm (pronounced coom) which is a large valley, that is notorious for getting very hot in the day. Luckily for us, it was cold enough for us to wear our down jackets. Camp 1-2 is not too steep, and has only about 400m of vertical elevation gain between the two.
I find this walk a bit annoying because the terrain looks pretty flat, but at altitude you can feel any incline so you feel unnecessarily slow. Another thing I don’t like about this part is that you can see camp 2 from a long way away, and it looks close. But when we are walking it seems like we are never getting closer, so it’s very frustrating.
It is definitely the easiest section with the least interesting terrain of the mountain, but there are BEAUTIFUL views of Everest, Lhotse and Nuptse though. On the Everest base camp trek there are of course some views of Everest, but it looks small because it’s so far away. Here however, it looks HUGE.
We walked with some friends from base camp who were coming from camp 1 and it was nice to have a distraction.
Dad and I had a rest, and I had some more gel and water, and even a couple caffeine lollies because I was so sleepy hahahaha. Those woke me up!
By then it was starting to warm up. There is not much middle ground between very cold and very hot here. So dad and I, as well as our friends who we were walking with, pretty quickly took our down jackets and gloves off. We have to be very careful with sunscreen too, as the sun reflects off the snow, and every angle of the valley. Hence the nickname “western barbecue”.
We continued on slowly, and we finally reached camp 2! Hold your applause, because our agency’s camp is right at the top of the camp, which is on a big hill. So we had still a longggg way to go, and in the heat, it slows us down a lot. We had to pass literally every company’s camp before ours. The sun made it soooo hot – I was in just my thermal top and sun hat and I was roasting.
Finally, probably 40 minutes after passing the first tent at camp 2, we reached our camp. We were greeted by the lovely Kristen, who had come straight from base camp the day before. We saw lots of other friends from base camp too!! It’s so nice to be with a group of 20 or so people that we know from base camp (and most of us knew each other before) and even though we aren’t always on the same climbing schedule, when we do cross each other it’s so relieving to see familiar faces in some extreme environments.
All of us sat in the dining tent, and had some tea, then some soup and fried rice for lunch.
Dad and I were pretty tired! When I slept on Lobuche with Kristen, I had already stayed 2 nights at the equivalent of camp 1. My body had already made more red blood cells, so it works more efficiently at these higher altitudes. The highest dad had stayed this trip was only a little higher than base camp, and only touched the height of camp 1 (on Island Peak). So coming straight to camp 2 is impressive. We crawled into our very warm tent, and passed out for a few hours. Between naps, I ate some chocolate from base camp that was meant to be eaten as a snack in the icefall.
I went to go to the toilet, but it was even worse than camp 1!! An even bigger pile of poop on the snow, with an awful smell. Luckily, they were in the midst of building a new toilet tent with a barrel and poles to step on!
At 5pm, one of the Sherpas yelled out that “soup ready!!” so everyone emerged into the dining tent. It was starting to get cold so I wore the top part of my down suit (I use a 2 piece down suit), and many people were wearing their 8000m suits. We had noodles, rice and potatoes – carbonanza as Kris calls it.
We filled our Nalgenes with hot water and went to bed at about 7:30pm. Even though I napped for most of the afternoon, I still had a whole night’s sleep to catch up on, so I had my vitamins and other medicine, and fell asleep immediately.
