Day 4 - Base Camp Rest Day (4,000M)

Rest, Anxiety and Anticipation

Primary on everyone’s mind this morning was the requisite doctor’s visit. It is little more than a pulse/ox reading and blood pressure test, unless the doc senses there may be something else in the works. You want to have a pulse/ox in the high 80% to low 90’s at this altitude. Blood pressure is naturally elevated, which of course is of concern to me given my kidney history. Ultimately, I ended up with an 94 pulse and 89 ox, with 140/85 BP (elevated but not bad), a passing grade for tomorrow's climb. Everyone was a little nervous and joked around the entryway to the office. No one really “let on” that there were any concerns.



Rest days are good for just that, rest. We milled around the camp.



Compared our location to other expeditions…



… and ultimately spent most of the afternoon napping in the tents. Despite the cool temperatures outside, the sun slowly raised the temperatures in our nylon ovens to over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, which momentarily felt soothing then instinctively way too hot.



Looking uphill, tomorrow morning's lumpy slide rock climb should really test the stiffness of our double-lined plastic boots.



The camp sits literally at the end of a glacier field, so any winds coming down the mountain have the aid of millions of pounds of chilling ice.



The gathered afternoon moisture in the air was stripped with a downhill wind flow that turned any remaining atmospheric vapor into a high velocity puff of snow.



As soon as the sun hid behind the mountains, the barometric “push-me pull-you” of the heated valleys and chilled slopes balanced out…



… providing a few hours of stillness for a colorful sunset.



Base camp was pretty quiet in the still early evening, but we were all thinking about the next day’s climb.