Sept 24th - Back down to Base Camp

Seeing as we had no headlamps, we had to wait for the sun to come up. Another stunner, with the sea of clouds in the valley. Tchouky has pointed out to me that we're going to bed around 7:30 pm and waking up around 6 am and perhaps this is part of my perception that I'm not sleeping at altitude. I can't say that I wake up exhausted, it's just the long periods of tossing and turning that get to me. My head starts to tap a bit, not a full pound but just enough so I know it's there. Then my mind starts to wander so I come back to some deep breathing exercises which then leads to long periods of wondering if I'm actually sleeping or not. I think its the hypoxic environment that is leading to some crazy dreams as well, if I wasn't so concentrated on getting up and going, I would do better on writing them down.




This was really my first test of the skis and boots together. Between C2 and C1 are all the steep sections. Aside from one moment of fear, it was pretty good. Definitely not the edge control that I 'm used to. It was good to get up early because the slopes are all fairly protected from the wind and at that hour, were all still cold. Toward the bottom, a reality check as we had to cross a serac avalanche that had fallen in the night. From C1 to BC was amazing skiing, the glacier is almost solid out in the middle, compared to the foot track on the side. Reports from yesterday are that two people on foot fell into holes along the way. No suprise I guess, it goes through some nasty areas. We rolled in at about 8:30 am, not bad from our 7 am start. We start dreaming of the ski down from the summit...



So our acclimitisation is finished, we now have about three weeks to wait and hopefully hit a good weather windown. We saw the first teams heading up today, making summit day 28 Sept. There seem to be conflicting weather reports, from all clear to big dump of snow for that day.