A second rest day before we go up the mountain for our summit push, mainly spent reading. By the end of the day I've completed another Mark Horrell, reacquainted myself with Rum Doodle [1] and read most of Thunderball. We also fell into a long group discussion about Everest, the fates of Mallory and Irvine, and the 1996 and 2006 disasters on the mountain.
We left that happy subject to get our kit together and undergo a final kit check. Tomi gives mine the OK and expresses his approval of my down mittens: no brand, $10 from a shop in Kathmandu, but wonderfully warm. Possibly the best value bit of kit I've ever bought. He also likes my inner boots; Scarpa Vegas have been a staple of high altitude mountaineering for about a decade, but recently Scarpa has started making extra warm inners designed specifically for extreme altitude. My second hand pair came with both the standard inners and pair of unused high altitude ones. I was having a little trouble on the descent yesterday because the lacing on the boots makes it hard to lock your feet in tightly enough that your toes don't smash into the front of the boot. Tomi offers a strip of old sleeping mat as a possible answer and it seems to be working.
Gear duly checked, we turn to packing our rucksacks. There is much discussion and comparison of how much weight we will each be carrying. Carlos is travelling heavy, in part because he is videoing the trip and needs to carry his video paraphernalia and a laptop onto which to download it. At the other end of the scale, Jeremy is travelling as light as he can, in part because there's only so much he can cram into his rucksack. I'm somewhere in the middle, but my crude confidence check is that if I am sat at our dining table, I can reach behind me and lift the rucksack one handed.
We go to the medical hut for a final check-up before we go. My O2 Sat has risen to 90%, my pulse rate has fallen to 86 and blood pressure is also down a little at 145/90. This is deemed good enough for me to press on upwards. The rest of the team is also declared good to go. The doctors advise me to take off my wedding ring in case my fingers swell [2]. It's only later that I realise it's my wedding anniversary. Taking one's wedding ring off is an odd way to celebrate it.
My choice of aspirin over ibuprofen as a high-altitude analgesic and prophylactic becomes the subject of another long discussion with April. Just before Christmas I completed two pilot projects with my employer's Life Sciences team in which we educated actuaries about developments in heart attack treatments. April's boyfriend is a doctor of the kind that Americans call "Internists" - that is, a specialist in internal medicine - and so we are able to talk in the medical jargon and understand each other. She's also into statistics and evidence-based medicine, so I recommend Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science" and "Bad Pharma".
As the sun creeps towards the skyline, Vicky translates for us a description of the summit day route. It has three phases: a series of zigzags; La Traversa, which takes us across the face of the mountain; and La Canaleta and the summit ridge - a steep, rocky climb up to the summit pyramid. No great surprises, I suppose, but it starts to bring the challenge of summit day to life in our minds.
One last night at base camp, and we're off.
[1] I'd forgotten just how funny it is - the opening planning meeting, which features an argument about whether a 3-ton steam hammer constitutes essential equipment and repeated telegrams from the group's navigation and linguistic expert, who gets progressively more lost as the meeting goes on, had me snorting with laughter.
[2] This happened to my brother-in-law on honeymoon in Bhutan. They ended up taking his wedding ring off with a drill, because the alternative was taking his finger off.
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