Still, if it was cold out (and we hadn't yet reached the pee bottle [6] stage), it was snug in the tent (a big semi-permanent Nissen hut affair with bunk beds in it) inside our sleeping bags. This was encouraging, because Lito had looked rather dimly on them when they were first unvieled. One of my neighbours had given me them when they traded up to better ones: Nepali-made Alpine Designs down sleeping bags. Not a brand you'll know (unless you've shopped for trekking gear in Kathmandu and resisted the temptation to go for the North Face rip-offs), but I have down mittens and hats from the same company and reckoned these would be up to the job. I'm pleased to report that they were.
However, a hut of 8 people is very noisy, and dropping off was tricky, so I started some reading. I'd brought two eReaders (figuring that the battery on at least one of them would go before we'd finished the trek) and started on the set of free out of copyright classics on my Sony Reader. I chose The Count of Monte Cristo which, it turns out, is both more complicated than the version you'll know from the films, and longer. Much longer. The Sony clocked it at 2,700 pages. I made a start, and wondered if the book would run out first, or the battery.
Breakfast was at 9.30 and was superb. One of the big problems on the Everest Base Camp trip was food. Your taste buds are dulled at altitude and it can be hard to maintain an appetite when food is reduced to little more than a texture - but you need to eat to keep your strength up. On the way to EBC, our morning omelettes became a daily challenge - could you grab one and eat it before it cooled to a piece of unpalatable rubber? Grajales pride themselves on their food, and rightly so. Hot scrambled eggs with a varying collection of cheese, herbs, bacon and sausage to add flavour, porridge, toast, pancakes and a choice of honey, jam and dulce de leche to spread on them. Plus fresh ground coffee and an endless choice of teas. Much more like it.
We then set off - at a punishing pace - on an acclimatisation walk to view the South Face of Aconcagua. It's a climb of 650m vertical from Confluencia to the viewpoint at Plaza Francia (4,000m). We reached it in around three and a half hours, slightly less than the par of 4. I have a suspicion that throughout the trek Lito was pushing us to see how fast we could go, trying to gauge how we'd cope with the summit day. The view was worth it, though. Our route eventual route up Aconcagua would be non-technical - basicallly a very long and demanding walk over scree, but little actual climbing - but the South Face is another prospect altogether. It's a vast wall of ice and rock, at 3,000m tall one of the highest and most demanding anywhere in the world, with 11 main routes, including one pioneered by Reinhold Messner and one known as Russian Roulette.
In front of it lies a huge glacier, covered with moraine and scarred with crevasses, many of which were filled with muddy, liquid meltwater.
While we were sightseeing and eating lunch we also go to watch a rockfall a few hundred metres across the valley:
The descent was almost as demanding - steep and over loose scree. On return to camp, tired but elated, we trooped off to the medical hut for the first of our acclimatisation checks. The main camps on Aconcagua are staffed with doctors who will check you over and advise you as to whether it's safe to go on. It's part of what your permit pays for - they're not cheap at $700, but there's a lot included, such as emergency helicopter evacuation. The doctors check three things - O2 Saturation and pulse (using a little clippy thing they put on your finger) and blood pressure (the traditional way, with a sphygmomanometer [8] and stethoscope). I'd been warned in advance that big guys have trouble acclimatising, so was pleasantly surprised to find that my O2 Sat was 92% and pulse was 90 - both pretty good. Blood pressure, though, was 140/80 and I was told "that's OK, but we wouldn't want it to go any higher." One to watch out for, but not a bad start to the trip. Everyone else was also OK, so we're in good shape.
[1] It's long been known that there are several key aspects to successful acclimatisation to altitude of which one of the most important is drinking a lot of water and its inevitable corollary, going for a pee on an embarrassingly regular basis [2] [3]. It's taken longer to understand why this is so. For instance, it didn't seem to be widely understood 5 years ago when Jeremy and I trekked to Everest Base Camp. Of course, it's all now on Wikipedia. Basically it seems to be to do with stopping the blood from becoming too alkaline. The body's normal and immediate reaction to low air pressure (and therefore low oxygen) is to breathe harder and so get more oxygen into the bloodstream, but that expels more carbon dioxide from the lungs, and leads to respiratory alkalosis (which is doctor-speak for "your blood becoming less acidic" [4]). I don't fully understand why, but this is A Bad Thing. Acclimatisation is essentially the process of your body excreting bicarbonate via the urine, to keep the blood acidic. Which it can only do if you give your body lots of water to work with and it, erm, expels it.
[2] As Dr "Dr Death" Ramesh, our expedition medic when I went to Everest Base Camp, used to say, it's all in the 3Cs: Clear, Copious and regular as Clockwork.
[3] The other acclimatisation rules, if you're interested, are (as best I can remember):
- Try to limit the height differences between where you camp from one night to the next (on Everest Base Camp this was 300m, on Aconcagua it was 500m)
- Have a rest day after each 1,000m gained
- Climb high, sleep low (i.e. where possible, go on acclimatisation walks to higher points, but return to a lower place to camp)
[4] Interestingly, people from ethnic groups we think of as high-altitude people (the Sherpas, say) have genetic mutations that predispose them towards more acidic blood.
[5] Fernando Grajales was an Argentinian farmer and mountaineer who pioneered a route up the western face of Aconcagua. In 1976, he began guiding people up Aconcagua. He was one of the first to do so, and the first to set up the logistics for carrying their gear to the various base camps. Today, the organisation is run by Fernando Grajales Jr ("Fernandito") and is one of the largest guiding organisations. They also organise logistics for independent guides, which led to us sharing our tents with an interesting mix of other guides over the course of the trip.
[6] More on this later. Much more. Probably more than you ever wanted to know [7]
[7] Which I suspect is not very much.
[8] That's an inflatable cuff to you, squire.
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