After arriving at base camp we spend a day with “moving in”, meaning to make our personal tents as comfortable as possible… under the circumstance, of course. Our base camp is quite comfortable; we have our individual tents, a dining tent, and two other tents for communications, equipment and possibility to recharge our personal electronic equipment. The latter depends a lot on the weather because the back-up batteries are solar powered, and priority is on keeping emergency equipment and satellite phones charged. The weather has been sketchy at best, 2-3 hrs of sun in the morning, then cloudy and light snow in the afternoon. All this then finally clears up at night, to assure the nights are pretty cold…
After two days at base camp we packed our duffels again for one more excursion. We descended back down to Loboche, and spent the next two days on Lobuche East, 20,070 ft, with climbing to a higher camp, and testing our personal equipment on some fixed rope climbing.
As I mentioned previously, staying healthy is a foremost challenge on this trip. Small ailments do not go away as easily as at lower elevation, and can get much worse as time and altitude progresses. I picked up some stomach infection on the last day before arriving to base camp. Luckily, I got on it right away, and was able to get over it within less than 48 hrs (and with help of some Cipro). Nevertheless, it does take a few more days before everything else returns to normal. So, on the practice climb on Lobuche East I proceeded very cautiously, and tried to avoid unnecessary exhaustion that would make full recovery more difficult.
On March 16 we arrived back at base camp, and now several days of rest are scheduled before we will start preparing for our two climbing rotations through the ice fall, and up to camps 2 and 3.
No comments:
Post a Comment