2nd – More up

We left the camp at around 0800 as we were having a long day ahead of us. Today’s goal was simple; we were to walk to BC (Plaza de Mulas) 17-18km away at 4230m, giving us a total ascent of 800m from Confluencia.

Apart from the fact that we had a long distance to travel the walk was rather uneventful. Right after leaving Confluencia we had quite a dip down when crossing a river, but after coming back up again the following distance, probably half of today’s walk, was completely flat. Reaching the end we came to the part of the day’s walk that had most of the altitude difference; the beginning had a lot of ups and downs but slowly the downs vanished and we were only going up and at times quite steeply, too. It was a long pull but when coming up an edge we suddenly had the entire camp in front of us.

Flat.

Completely flat.

Before the ascent with the Base Camp at the end. You can just barely see some tent structures where the BC is.

We are a group of 7 tourists and 3 guides, but yet we have access to a dining tent that is an at least 40m² dome tent, just for us. We were welcomed with 6 freshly baked pizzas that were all gone in less than half an hour, after which we went out to pitch the tents, followed by the usual relaxation. It is quite a bit windier here than at the other camps we have stayed at, but considering how many rocks we used to secure our tents we should be fine. Hopefully.

  

Left half of our tent.

Right half of our tent. Plenty of room.

Dinner was served together with 3 bottles of wine and a glorious chocolate cake for dessert. Tomorrow is a rest day so people seem a bit more relaxed than usual, despite now being much closer to our final goa than ever before.

On the way to BC we met another group, a quite large one of 12-16 people, who were descending from what had been quite a disastrous climb. They had turned around 200m from the summit due to high winds, but coming back to their camp they realized that their tents had disappeared – they hadn’t been secured properly so they had simply blown away. That meant that they had had no other choice than to continue down all the way back to BC – a total descent of almost 2600m in one day. I can’t imagine how tired they must have been when coming back down. Apparently the winds have been kicking it up a notch the last couple of days; weather forecasts indicate wind speeds of app. 80-90km/h at the summit.

The walk today was done in 6:45, compared to the estimated 8:00 it is clear that we are sticking to the high speed tactic. After the long walk today there did seem to be some agreement on that things ought to be slowing down a bit the next couple of days.