The big advantage of heading to Canada instead of Cerro Bonete is that the climb starts - steeply - literally metres outside base camp. You cross a small string of penitentes, and then you're on the mountain and going up. Tomi sets a well-judged pace that's easy to keep up with until the last half hour, when we're picking our way through what from below feel like a set of rocky outcrops but from above look like much steeper cliffs. We get up to the camp in two-and-a-half hours versus the regulation three. Not bad.
Grajales - and we'll discover that this is a recurring theme - don't like to camp with other parties, so they have set up their own Canada a few hundred metres' traverse along the mountains face from the main one. They have their own cache of food and equipment, their own tent pitches - levelled and each equipped with a "deadman" [1], and - perhaps most importantly - their own toilet arrangements. There is a little three sided screen perched in a notch between some rocks on the edge of the cliff. Inside it is an aluminium frame with a loo seat to which a bin bag is clipped. It's basic, but it works and it's ours. It also has the best view of any loo I've ever used.
We have a lunch of cheese, salami and crackers, and lounge around while the sun is still high. I lose heat quickly and realise I need to rethink my layering strategy. I need to have my down jacket to wear and stop me cooling down too much, and be more careful to wear an outer layer that will breathe well.
On the way down. Tomi is worried by my technique and advises me to use a much shorter walking pole on the mountain-facing side. However, once we're past the initial, rocky bit, I feel much more secure and, since we're on scree, we can go back to the "skiing down an escalator" technique that I used yesterday. In fact, I find that the plastic boots, which I've barely noticed on the up, come into their own on the way down. The rigid ankle support gives you much more confidence because it's so much harder to injure yourself.
We're back at camp mid-afternoon, and the eReader has finally given up the ghost. Not even an afternoon in the sun with a heat pack has revived its battery. Damn, I was over 90% of the way through Monte Cristo. Now it will have to wait for when I'm back in the UK. I whizz through my first Mark Horrell (The Wrath of the Turquoise Goddess - he's good at titles, though the drama of the books never quite lives up to them) instead, and onto Will Greenwood's autobiography, which is intermittently hilarious because he's used parts of it as a means to get back at Austin Healey for various practical joked committed over the years.
Tonight we are sharing our sleeping tent with April, an Alaskan who now lives in California, works as an independent guide and has just climbed Aconcagua from the other side. Her clients got as far as Plaza Argentina (essentially base camp on that side) and decided to fly out again, so she went up on her own. She's declared the conditions to be the warmest and calmest she's seen in three or four trips; we hope the weather holds for us. A strangely rambling conversation begins that various people fade in and out of, and which covers mountaineering, music and podcasts. April hasn't had a tv since 2001, so she relies a lot on podcasts for information. I can't stand podcasts, mainly because I can read faster than people narrate things, but it turns out we are interested in many of the same things despite very different modes of consumption. She's also very into new music, so I offer to connect her with some of my friends in the music community.
[1] A heavy rock or weight buried in the ground with a loop of rope around it. It provides a point to fix the tent to that won't blow away in high winds. Even so, the other tent guys are looped around rocks of various sizes to keep them secure.
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