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Last night was certainly interesting. Wind gusts of 45 mph(70 km) caused our tent walls to flex considerably, hitting our faces while we were asleep. I more than once wondered what wind speed these tents were rated for. If this is how bad 45 mph is, I can’t imagine what the 100 mph(160 km) winds on Denali are like. Thankfully our tent stayed up through the night and we awoke to snow. I’m beginning to wonder what the weather will be like on the rest of the climb if this is any indication.
Being our rest day, I took the opportunity to hole up in a communal heated! geodesic dome and read Seven Years in Tibet. It’s the perfect book for mountain climbing, reading about the superhuman author surviving in the Himalayas for months without tents or warm clothing. It makes what we’re doing seem trivial in comparison! People from many teams were in that tent so I had the opportunity to meet people from all over.
There was a Polish team that was climbing the mountain, but after awhile one of them admitted to being very sick & was waiting for his flu to clear. I really can’t believe his stupidity in intentionally sitting in an area with a lot of people, spreading his germs. At high altitude your body has a very limited ability to fight infections – if you get sick it is Game Over. For someone to not consider that is not only rude, but dangerous in this kind of environment. I left immediately after hearing him say that, as did others from my team. We were very lucky that none of us got sick from that experience, but it could have been a disaster.
The only task required of us today was to get checked out by the mountain doctor. If he says we can’t climb, we(individually) have to turn back. Luckily all of us passed without issue. He recorded things like pulse, blood pressure & Blood oxygen content.
Internet is advertised in this camp but it’s fraud! The internet worked well enough for the system to allow me to enter my credit card info and take my money, but I was never able to log in afterward. Some of the others had intermittent success, but my experience was nothing short of fraud.We are far from civilization and internet out here is a crazy idea in itself, but if you advertise a service you should make sure it works…
Visibility was pretty terrible with it snowing and windy so we just hung out in our tents getting ready for the big day tomorrow, having retrieved our big packs at base camp. Tomorrow we carry heavy loads to Camp One at 16,500 ft(5,000 m) and return to Base Camp afterwards.
Planetary Muffin Expeditions 