Skip this bit if you're not interested or find it icky.
To recap: your body acclimatises by getting rid of bicarbonate from your bloodstream, and it does that via the kidneys. So you have a dilemma. If you want to acclimatise, you will generally need to pee three or four times during the night, but that means getting out of your nice warm sleeping bag and your nice warm tent and staggering about in your pyjamas in the cold and dark. The answer to this is to have a way of having your pee without going outside the tent. Since no-one has yet invented a lightweight, cold-proof plumbing solution [1], the standard answer for mountaineers the world over is to have a receptacle in the tent that saves you having to go outside during the night.
Said receptacle needs to have a number of characteristics:
- A wide opening, to avoid aiming problems [3]
- Easy to open
- Easy and secure to close
- Large enough capacity to last the night
- Sufficiently different from your drinking water receptacles to avoid confusion.
On the way to EBC, I'd used a standard Nalgene bottle in a distinctive colour, which ticked most of the boxes but only held 1L - enough to avoid one trip outside, but not two or more. But a 2L bottle is a big thing to carry, so this time I had a Camelbak-plastic-bag-style reservoir from Source. This folded down small, had a 2L capacity and an opening the full width of the bag that closed by folding over the top and sliding a plastic bar across to clip it shut. It needed a little care to make sure it was properly open before use and hadn't folded back up again, but it meant that I stayed warm in the tent all night.
OK, you can start reading again now.
Anyway, it seems that despite all precautions, my body only wants 6 hours sleep a night, so I woke up early and read for a bit until everyone else started getting up. Breakfast was biscuits and tea, but I wasn't that hungry.
The porters came at 10 to take the tents, so we scurried around for 40 minutes before then packing our bags and dismantling the tents. Once they'd gone, we set of for Nido de Condores. Nido isn't quite visible from Canada, but the route to it is. You go up the zigzags, aiming for a prominent saddle between two large outcrops of rock, and then up and over a little way.
About an hour and 150 vertical metres in, we stopped for a drink at some rocks and drama ensued. My camera slipped off its belt loop and lodged behind Tomi's pack. When he next picked up the pack, the camera began bouncing down the slope. All we could do was watch: there was no way to catch up to it while it was moving, certainly not safely. We shouted down the slope to other climbers we could see, and one eventually stopped it - well over 100m below us. Tomi made an heroic trip up and down the slope to bring it back, while I stood around and felt embarrassed and everyone else got cold. He made it back up to us in about half an hour, and we inspected the damage. The polarising filter on the front of the lens had cracked, there was some damage to the LCD, but if I took the filter off I was still able to take pictures. Considering what it had been through, not too bad. Unfortunately, I later realised that there was something up with the autofocus. I suspect one of the lens elements has been knocked out of alignment and every photo from here on in is a bit blurry.
Still, I hope you will agree that the photos I'd already taken were well worth saving, and join me in thanking Tomi for rescuing them.
We pressed on without further incident, making our way up the slope and crossing a number of meltwater streams until we reached the breakpoint where the steep slope becomes a gentler saddle. This was something of a crossroads for parties on the mountain; we were one of only a number going up, looking enviously at various groups who'd reached the summit in the good weather of the last couple of days and were now coming down. Every so often we would see a group where one of the members was being nursed down the slope by the others - a reminder [4] of just hard the next couple of days
The trek into Nido ended with a long traverse across a wide slope up to the campsite. Unlike Yacob, who was sprinting ahead of us to shoot video of our arrival, I was very tired by the end of it and really glad to get my boots off and into the tent. The group had slowed right down by the time we hit the traverse, and paradoxically I felt I could have gone a fair bit faster and might have felt better if I had. I'm not sure if that makes physiological, logical or indeed English sense, but that's how it felt.
Nido itself is a spectacular campsite, a broad plateau that drops away sharply. For the first time, you can see the whole of Cuerno, including its east ridge and the glacial bowl to its north, followed by the chain of the Andes stretching away to the horizon. Cuerno looms above Mulas and Canada and the rest of the range is hidden behind it. Nido, at 5,570m comfortably into the "extreme" altitude category, looks down on Cuerno in much the same way that John Cleese looked down on Ronnie Barker in the Frost Report. This was the first time we had seen the Andes in all their glory.
Because a lot of people had come down from the mountain that day, Nido was fairly empty, the remaining tents dotted in between the rings of stones that mark pitches [6]. Grajales, as you have probably guessed, have a separate campsite, on a smaller plateau a few metres higher than Nido proper [7]. Dinner was frankfurters and mash, and several of us had seconds, adding further evidence to my theory that processed food is what you need at altitude. Sunset was, predictably, spectacular (and also the only thing my camera got in focus).
[1] Now there's an idea... actually, we did discuss this several times on the trip. Modern rucksacks assume that you will have a Camelbak or suchlike and have a little "H20" slit that allows the tube to get from inside to out. Why shouldn't tents have the same, only for liquid to get out of you rather than in? I suppose it all depends on what you regard as a suitable distance from the tent for your fluids to end up [2] and therefore how much pipe you need to carry.
[2] Note: this distance gets smaller as you get higher. Which may be important, because the distance before it starts freezing in the pipe also goes down.
[3] As Jeremy discovered in a nearly-disastrous experiment, a mineral water bottle just won't cut it late at night. Not without a funnel.
[4] Well, I suppose strictly speaking "harbinger" would be a better word [5], but it really sounded odd and archaic, especially in the context of a blog. I wonder what @DrSamuelJohnson would make of it?
[5] Unless you have deja vu or have travelled back in time from a point after you'd done the climb. Or have done it before, but why would anyone do that?
[6] I think I've explained before that at this altitude tents are anchored with stones rather than tent pegs. Guylines, and the edges of the flysheet will be weighted with decent sized-rocks, and sometimes they will even be put in the inners to provide extra protection against the wind. Getting back from the summit to find that your tent has blown away would be a Very Bad Thing - potentially fatal - so, in the words of They Might Be Giants, everybody wants a rock to wind a piece of string around. Of course, when you strike camp, you just unwind the string and roll the rocks off the flysheet, so good pitches become defined by rings of stones around them like the remains of miniature dry stone walls.
[7] And yes, it has its own toilet arrangements. But this one faces the mountain, so Canada wins the prize for loo with a view.
No comments:
Post a Comment