Mt. McKinley (2008) - Day 17
Stuck at Camp 4
It takes twelve hours to get eight hours of sleep at night. At least I think I'm sleeping. I'm not overly tired in the morning, so I must be sleeping. It sucks having to rationalize whether you're in fact sleeping or not.
Every time I hear boots come tromping by the tent, I always tense up thinking that it is Mike, come to tell us that breakfast is ready. After multiple false-alarms, the boots finally were Mike. We wera awakened for breakfast more than an hour before sunrise and it is *unbelievably* cold. I refuse to give in and break out my parka. After breakfast I'm going to crawl back into my sleeping bag until the sun starts to warm up the tent - if I can make it back to the tent.
Breakfast this morning was five strips of bacon, each, and freeze dried scrambled eggs. During breakfast Mike told us about a weather system (excuse me; a "wind event") that'll bring seventy to eighty mph winds to the summit by Friday. The decision he is faced with is either to haul up to high camp today and hope that it isn't so windy that we can't summit the next day and then quickly scramble back down the mountain, or weather the storm out here - where the weather will probably be nicer, all the while acclimating, and then summit after the storm.
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I awoke over-heated! Finally. While I was sleeping I heard the llama (the helicopter) come and pick up the frostbit Spanish lady from yesterday. She had to spend the night in the medic tent because the pilot had exceeded some FAA set limit on flight hours or something (the rule is, "don't get injured on a Tuesday"). Last I heard she was only going to lose three toes on each foot. I'm pretty sure that we crossed paths with her group some days prior. I'm glad we have good guides.
It might get a little windy here at 14k camp during the next several days, so we're looking at digging blocks out of the cook tent to lower both the floor and the seating area so that we don't have to sit hunched over because of the cook tent canopy thing. Might as well make the place more hospitable as long as we're going to be stuck here for a while. Time to work.
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I'm going a little stir-crazy, but as long as I have seventeen days and a lot of money invested in this trip, I'd prefer to wait a few more days and summit on a nice day.
"Grow red blood cells, faster, faster. Carry more oxygen to where it matters." (Sung to the tune Grow Mrs. Goldfarb.)
This being the fourteenth day on the mountain, we should have at least eight more days of food left - which should be plenty to wait out the storm and still summit.
Time for some more rubik's cube action and then maybe another nap. One thing is for sure: on my next such trip, I'm brining an iPod full of movies and a solar charger. I'll be back when there's something more to report.
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I took my nap and then decided to capture the festivities on video. Mainly, ice sculpting. It's all captured on video so there's really no point in recording the juvenile nature of it all here in my journal.
The weather upstairs looks pretty gnarly and it has started to snow lightly here. If this all plays out as predicted, we'll be sitting here for at least a couple more days. I wonder if we could then summit directly from 14k.... Time for one last nap while it is still warm out.
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Now that was a fine, fine nap. I've sort of become a connoisseur of napping. We're at a high enough altitude that our bodies have to work fairly hard just to keep us breathing that we can lie around doing nothing and still lose weight. Anyway, the folks in the other tent claim that it's snowing. And Mike just woke us all up to tell us that dinner is on in twenty-five minutes. And unrelated to all of that: I keep thinking of this one scene in Men In Black 2 where Tommy Lee Jones explains [paraphrased], "you're not sad because its raining, baby. It's raining because you're sad." I've got about a billion movies that I want to watch upon my return, but I'll probably not want to when I actually have the opportunity.
Dinner was chicken and rice and was pretty good and sufficiently plentiful. After-dinner conversation included riddles and talk of conspiracy theories. John was the most avid. His included remotely activating cell phone mics (plausible), the cell battery being the surveillance device (dumb), remotely activating web cams (sure), etc. Billy went on about the Yahoo/China journalist thing, claiming that Yahoo gave China the technology to find this rogue journalist - when I'm sure that all Yahoo did was hand over info that Yahoo had readily available: ie, name, ip, etc. Not exactly technology.
And the weather report remains the same, so it looks like this might end up being a twenty-plus day mountain trek. Another six days. Doof. And only twenty-four more blank pages in the journal. I wish I had thought to write small the first week. Good night.
