My day started at about 4am as Dad was leaving to go back to base camp. He needs to leave early to hit the icefall when it’s still cold and safest. He woke me up asking if I wanted to keep his little bottle of hand sanitiser. He left at 4:30 with another guy from our team, Steve from the UK.
I said goodbye, half asleep from my sleeping bag, and went straight back to sleep. At about 8am I woke up, and listened to some music whilst I packed my bag for a walk today. It wasn’t as windy as yesterday but still very cold and snowing a lot. I went to breakfast and even though I arrived at 8:30 on the dot, the time we were told to come, everyone seemed to already be there. I guess people were ready to hike, and don’t like their beauty sleep as much as I do!
We do a hike on our acclimatisation rotation to gain a bit of altitude, then go back down to camp 2. This “climb high, sleep low” method is helpful for our bodies to make more red blood cells and thus work more efficiently at altitude. Even though camp 2 isn’t low, going lower than where we climbed to, is helpful. In a way, the whole rotation is us “climbing high”, and the rest we get at base camp afterwards allows us to sleep “low” and somewhat recover.
Even just getting your heart rate up at high altitudes is helpful as well for acclimatisation.
I was planning on hiking with Kristen – she had to move to camp 3 as she is climbing 3 big mountains without oxygen and needs more acclimatisation than me. She also currently has no Sherpa (not planned) and had to carry all of her stuff to move to camp 3. But I was told to hike with some other climbers, and Kristen had to wait for the fixing team anyways.
We all put our crampons and harnesses on and set off! Honestly I felt not the best today, as I had a bit of a stomach ache. That’s okay, so I just slowed my pace down and drank some water. There is no need to push through the pain, and work unnecessarily hard, when just on a rotation.
I went slowly, still staying with the group, and keeping my heart rate “low”. For me, zone 1-2 is good for these walks. For me, that is at about 110-120bpm – as I am younger than most here, my heart rate is higher. Obviously, at sea level with a heart rate of 120, I would be able to walk or run much faster. So we walk A LOT slower up here.
I’m quite happy with my acclimatisation overall, because I can compare my stats with last year. At camp 2 (6500m) last year, my low resting heart rate was around 80-90bpm and now it’s getting to about 58bpm when I sleep. There is less than half of the oxygen at sea level here, so we can definitely feel the altitude, the second we start moving.
We continued our walk up, and it was very cold and windy. Occasionally the sun would come through which was nice, but it was still freezing! I only stopped for some water and to put another jacket on and some chemical hand warmers on. We stopped just under 6800m, which is close to the Lhotse face – a very steep ice, snow and rock wall that is over 1000 vertical metres long. It goes from halfway between camp 2-3 and all the way from camp 3-4. We tried to take some photos with our freezing hands! Whilst we were resting, Kristen caught up and we said goodbye for a couple of days – before we can be at base camp and eat good food, have a bit of a shower and not feel disgusting hahaha!
I also thought I should mention how no one is making 6 7 jokes up here! Well actually Kristen does find it funny too. The amount of times today people said we’re at 6 7 (6700m) and I swear nobody laughed. Or even talking about waking up at 6 or 7am! People are too serious up here! I need to get these gen X and Y people onto it!
I walked down with the group, and soon enough we were back in camp 2. I went straight into the dining tent and made myself a cup of tea. With all of the dry, cold air, it’s easy to get a cough. I wear my buff (neck warmer) over my mouth but sometimes on the uphill I need max airflow! I also find it useful to keep hard lollies in my mouth whilst I climb.
We all had lunch, and yes whilst the food is very good for the altitude we are at, it’s not the best flavour wise. Plus with our diminished appetites from the altitude, it’s harder to eat, especially food we don’t love. We were praying that it wasn’t going to be noodles or fried rice because we have had that for the past few days. We had pasta with egg, and a slice of spam. I was still feeling a bit sick in my stomach so I only had a little bit.
We discussed the plan for tomorrow, which is to have breakfast at 2am, then leave at 3 to go to base camp. As inconvenient as it is, it’s the safest time to go through the icefall. I don’t want the fact that I wanted to sleep more, to be the reason that something happens in the icefall.
Toilet update: We now have 1 toilet back!!! If you don’t know, we lost BOTH of our toilets yesterday as they got destroyed by the wind. It was a bit of a worry for some. At least we can all let loose now!
I went back to my tent – I can spread out my gear now that dad is gone. The tent was soooo hot, so I opened every door and lay in just my thermals (if I had a t shirt I would’ve worn it). I had SUCH a nice rest! I put some cooling eye patches on, listened to some chill music and ate chocolate in.my hot tent. 😌😌😌 doesn’t get much better in my opinion!
I did the long trek to the toilet – the poor poop barrel is working overtime, now that it’s the only one one the job for A LOT of people who have been holding it in for a day.
I headed off to dinner at 5:30 and then packed everything except my sleeping bag and mat to make life easy for me at 1:30am. I put my boot liners in my sleeping bag so that my feet don’t freeze when I put my boots on, then went straight to sleep!
