3rd – Up, up and away

Today being a day off we didn’t do much else than relax and… more relaxing. We had a relatively late breakfast at 0900 and 1030 we went to have our final medical checkup. 115/65, saturation 86 and a pulse in the 90’s, so nothing to worry about. I had expected my saturation to be higher, but it was still within the required limits so I didn’t worry too much. Also, the pulse was checked first and the medics said that just walking the 20m from outside and indoor which included climbing 3 steps to the door would be enough at this altitude to raise the pulse significantly more than one would otherwise expect, so the otherwise high resting pulse was nothing to worry about.

Lunch was had at 1400 and it was on par with the dinner last night. When finished we were briefed on the next couple of days. The summit is these days plagued by high winds but the forecasts indicate that in a couple of days there will be a window of 2 days where the winds will die down and stay at around 30-50km/h. The original plan was to spend the night at 3 different camps before initiating the summit push (Canadian Place, Nido de Condores and Camp Colera), but due to the timing to have the summit push during the weather window and Canadian Place has dried out the plan has been changed to only two camps. These two camps will be Cambio de Pendiente at app. 5300m and Camp Berlin at 5929m. From there we will push towards the summit, spending estimated 8-ish hours going up and half that coming back to Berlin. But the weather can change and all the way up our guides will be in radio contact with BC for updated forecasts.

The afternoon, apart from more relaxing, was spent on packing our bags and sorting our stuff into what to bring with us up and what to leave behind at BC. As the plans are right now we won’t be leaving until 1030 tomorrow so we won’t be suffering under a late departure.

After having been relaxing for more than 24 hours at BC and previously having walked some technically easy days, being told that we will be going for the summit in less than 3 days feels very overwhelming. Even if we’re just trotting around here at BC in our luxurious conditions it suddenly feels very real and it feels like it’s going very fast.

But let’s see how it goes.

Our guides have at least promised us a much slower pace than the last couple of days.

If you needed to go somewhere there's a sign to show you the way.

Yup, a gallery.

Highest in the world!