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Guess what! Today is in fact our hard-earned rest day. A good day for it as well, as a low pressure front rolled in last night dumping snow on Camp Two. It seems like the bad weather days are eerily coinciding with our rest days. That works for me as long as things clear up tomorrow.
Last night was especially rough for me. As you climb, your body’s resting breathing rhythm is always less than it needs to be due to not being fully acclimatized. When you sleep, you start breathing less and less, until your body panics and wakes you up gulping for air. It’s called Chain Stokes, and it really really sucks. You wake gasping for air, feeling like you’re suffocating – which in fact you are. This happened to me about 20 times that night. I’d wake up every 30 minutes gasping for air before falling back asleep. I believe it was the low pressure front that caused this as I didn’t have any problems the night before, and I should have been better acclimatized today.
Given the dreary weather and lack of agenda, we basically just hung around in our sleeping bags all day. I read more Seven Years In Tibet, and snuck out of the tent to take some photos of a crazy horizontal rainbow. We were told lunch was up to us, but we were treated to awesome hot quesadillas and a dessert of – Cheesecake with Raspberry spread on top! We couldn’t believe the guides had been lugging this up the mountain(or maybe they secretly put it in our carry loads and were laughing their asses off…knowing Luke I highly suspect this was the case). At any rate, it was incredibly delicious.
Nothing like good food on a mountain, where luxuries are few and far between. We were seriously missing the outhouses at Base Camp at this point, despite complaining about them while we were at Base Camp! Trying to do #2 in cold, windy weather into a wag bag is not a very pleasant experience…
Planetary Muffin Expeditions 