Mt. McKinley (2008) - Day 07
Stuck at Camp 2
Whoa. So, a bit of a shock. Every morning the weather has been so beautiful - you almost expect to see birds chirping in the trees - if there were trees. This morning it is overcast and snowing. Snow! Such an inconvenience: it just gets on everything. Whatever.
We had nutri-grain bars and toasted bagels with cheese for breakfast. Deeelicious. :-)
Time to get packed up.
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So a bit of a breeze started and the weather continued to get worse. Just before we started to pack up the tents Mike told us to hold off for a bit. We don't have to do any "alpine starts" here, so there's no problem with delaying for a while.
We're going to set up the canopy over the kitchen, and we have a light-weight tarp thing that we're going to anchor over the crapper so that we have a nice roof which'll protect us from the wind.
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It's officially a snow day! I guess if you're not going to be climbing, you may as well be industrious in other ways. We're building up a snow wall around the cook tent, and we're digging out the interior for increased seating capacity. If we're going to be hanging around, we may as well improve our accommodations.
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We unpacked all of our stuff and everyone went back to their tents for the afternoon to read / veg / nap / whatever. I'm still here in the cook tent. I tried taking a nap but my toes started getting cold so I put on my overboots (for the first time), and now my feet are all toasty warm.
Billy said that the secret to dealing with down time is to either "turn off your brain or dream of warm beaches." Time to eat more pringles. Mike said that Camp 3 largely puts us above some of the bad weather. I can't wait to be looking down on the storms.
Earlier today Billy mentioned something about, "taking the browns to the super bowl," which, he explained, was a euphemism for taking a dump. I guess when you do mountain guiding full time, you have a lot of time to come up with these things.
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Dinner was mashed potatoes (re-hydrated) and turkey-and-stuffing meals. Both were amazing and for the first time, adequate. Mike announced that the eight of us consumed thirty-one servings of mashed potatoes. I guess we were hungry.
