Feb 6, 2018- Last night as the storm was raging around us I was in my sleeping bag listening to the thunder and watching the tent walls bow inward with each gust of wind. I loved it!! My tent mate Mike unfortunately wasn’t feeling well due to the altitude and had a much rougher night than I. After a very stormy night we awoke to a winter wonderland. Everything that had been dirt and rocks the prior day was now dusted in snow.
Today we would be hiking up to the ridge in the picture above and traversing a few hours around the mountain to Camp #2. It was a carry day meaning we would be bringing future supplies up to the camp leaving them there and then returning to Camp #1 for the night. After breakfast Mike came to me saying he was suffering pretty bad from the altitude and he needed to go down to base camp. I was extremely sad to have my tent buddy and fellow San Franciscan leaving the expedition. One of the guides would take him back down to base camp where he would arrange a helicopter ride to get Mike off the mountain and back into Mendoza. Hopefully with the decent and lower elevation Mike would start feeling better. The rest of the team got ready for another carry day and this time I was a bit more careful with loading my bag trying to make sure today I’d be carrying the bulk of my weight so that tomorrow would be easier.
We set off to Camp #2 and while the climb up the ridge didn’t look so terrible from Camp #1 it ended up being a steep climb. After a few hours of making our way to the ridge we got to the top and the views were incredible. The day was partly cloudy but it felt very warm during our ascent.
We eventually made our way into Camp #2. After a brief rest along with water and a snack we unloaded our supplies and piled them up for the night with some rocks on top of them to make sure they didn’t blow away. Camp #2 is around 18,000ft and we were more concerned with the wind distributing our supplies all over the mountain than we were with animals getting into them. Aside from a few birds and the occasional fox there isn’t too much wild life up that high.
The view from the Camp #2 “bathroom” above was ridiculous. I’ve already said the views were incredible on this mountain and I’ll probably say it a million more times before I’m finished writing about the trip. There’s just something incredible about how wild and untouched it is up there. After stashing supplies and a “bathroom” break the team started down back to Camp #1. Since the day had been pretty sunny and warm when we got back to the ridge we had climbed earlier we were very surprised to find that almost all the snow had melted off. What had been a winter wonderland of snow this morning was now an alpine desert of rock and snow. We made our way down a hill of scree avoiding the switchbacks we had climbed earlier opting for a direct route straight down to camp. The team had dinner and then we all settled in early to our tents. Tomorrow we would be moving to Camp #2 and sleeping up there for the first time so everyone was eager to get some rest. Since Mike had left I had the tent to myself for the evening. I was in in there reading when I heard a commotion from a neighboring camp and out of curiosity I peaked me head out to see what was up. It turns out that all the melted snow needed a place to go and it decided to run right through camp. The team next to us had tents which were in the way of the new stream. I popped out and began helping them move their tents away from the water and using whatever tools we could find to try and cut a channel to direct the runoff away from the rest of camp. After everyone had been relocated I looked at the stream which was 4-5’ away from my tent and decided that while it was still light out I would also move. I didn’t want to get woken up by water coming into my tent in the middle of the night so I grabbed two of my teammates, Tom and Annabel to help me move. Once I was out of dodge I got back into my tent thinking about all the days events. We were only 7 days into the trip and already we had lost one teammate to the altitude, had a river pop up and dislodge camp, I had a raging toothache, and we had hiked through a snow/ thunderstorm. I guessed that by the rough schedule we had that there were still 7-8 days left in the trip making today our halfway point. This left a lot of opportunity for more potential “excitement” on the mountain which I was sure we would get soon enough.
Climbing the 7 