Sept 18th - Up to Camp 1 (5700m)

18 Sept - a fairly relaxed morning with the plan to move to C1 late in the day and spend the night. I was originally going with nothing but then Tchouky pointed out that this was the time to start moving all the summit gear up the mountain. In the end, my pack was about 17 kg. Even with this, we were about 3 1/2 hours to get to C1. On the way, we passed one of the guys from the Altitude Junkies team who was clearly having trouble. On arrival, Tchouky and looked at each other with surprise on the time it had taken us to get up there, perhaps we went too fast?




When I first brought home my summit suit, we played games to see who could wear it the longest. I would start to sweat after about ten seconds and couldn't go any longer than a minute. I once told my nephew Zach I would give him 1 Euro for every minute past 10 mins that he could keep it on. He never made any money out of it. So I found my self in a t-shirt with this North Face parka on and quite happy. This was after sundown at 5700 m. We sat in the tent, eating soup, ramen noodles, and drinking tea planning for the night. The thing with being at this altitude is that everything will freeze over night. So you have to take anything you want to wear or anything with batteries and stuff it in the bottom of your sleeping bag. I stuffed in two bottles of hot water, socks, sat phone, video camera and some fresh underwear. As I warmed up, I peeled off the layers and slowly settled in for the night. I managed to watch about 15 mins of a movie on my iPod before I fell fast asleep.



Bad news from BC was that Laurence was sick and she's headed down to Samagaon.