Day 22 - Acclimatisation Day 2 (6,000 mtrs)

Today we are heading up one of the nearby slopes to get to about 6,000m as our final preparation before starting our rotations up the mountain.

I feel pretty poor in the morning and have very little energy - this really doesn't bode well. We have done virtually nothing for about a week now and so my appetite and metabolism seem to have greatly reduced. This is something I have been monitoring as I am concerned as to how I will fare on the long rests between our rotations up the mountain. A couple of days will be great for recovery but then I need to start exercising lightly to avoid this lapse into a state of inactivity. Although I think that I am a bit ill which is obviously going to exacerbate matters.

We head up a fairly steep scree slope that turns into a boulder field which is tough going. The few people that we meet have turned round at 5,700 and are surprised that we are heading higher up. We carry on plodding on and then come across a body - a middle aged Chinese lady who is wholly inappropriately dressed for the conditions and seems to have curled up with a blanket and then frozen to death on the mountain side. We build a small cairn for her and take a GPS reading so that we can alert the authorities when we get down. This creates a rather sombre mood and reinforces the point that our expedition is now getting serious and that mistakes up here can have fatal consequences.

We stay at 6,000m for about half an hour and then head down as some pretty nasty looking weather is coming down the valley. I am now feeling very drained and quite unwell and my ankle starts to react to the poor terrain so descend very slowly indeed - it really isn't very enjoyable.

Enjoying our acclimatisation break

Bad weather coming down the valley so time to leave!

Heading down in quite dramatic conditions

View back to BC from the top

View of BC from above - our camp site is the bottom of the middle cluster

We have a quick hot drink when we get back and then I head to bed for a couple of hours before supper to try and recover a bit. Supper is pretty good - roast chicken - but I then head back to bed soon after.

I have got a bit of a fever and feel very shivery and just plain exhausted. My stats (oxygen saturation and heart beats per minute) are quite a lot off from the norm so some rest should do me good - tomorrow is a rest day which should really help as you really don't want to head up the mountain in such a state.

We have been having ongoing problems with the mess tent heaters which means that we are all cold every evening and end up donning our down gear. This is pretty disappointing for what is meant to be a well provisioned camp and adds to the general frustration - there is a decent solar panel which provides a direct current and so needs to run through a battery to be converted into an alternating current - this battery however is faulty and so there is very little power that comes through it. There is also not much fuel for the generator so we can only have it running for short periods each day. This is really quite a contrast to the well lit, heated and powered camps all round us!