Dingboche Acclimatisation

In keeping with the standard practice weather, the skies cleared yesterday as evening turned into night, and I had another go at capturing the starlit mountains. This time it worked rather better - the first photo shows Lhotse and Island Peak under the stars.

The skies were still clear this morning and the views were stunning, but the cloud gradually rolled in as we spent the morning practising the rope techniques we’re going to need later in the trip. We focussed on using the Jumar to ascend a fixed-rope, but also covered abseiling back down and roping up for a glacier-crossing. Most of the stuff was do-able, but Andy seems to expect previous experience of it - I’m quite glad we’re going to have another go tomorrow as I’ve never used a Jumar before. Tomorrow they’re going to be making sure we’ve all go the message, which is reassuring.

The difference between night and daytime temperature here is amazing. As soon as the sun comes up the change is instant and hats, gloves and down jackets are no-longer required. Although the air temperature is still very low, the amount of radiation at this latitude and altitude is enormous, so it suddenly feels much warmer. It’s fairly straight-forward to manage the layering at sunrise and sunset, but it’s hard to know what to wear sometimes, if the sun is going behind clouds every few minutes.

One thing which never warms up is the water in the streams. I did some washing in a bowl this morning then rinsed it out in a stream, and it was freezing! Nice to have some clean clothes though.

While I took some early morning photos today I got talking to a Californian guy who was as amazed as I was by the amount of traffic over the last few days. He’s heading up to a few high passes over the next few days, so is looking forward to some quieter trails.

For some reason Andy didn’t take the group on an acclimatisation walk today, which surprised Mark and me. The usual advice is “climb high, sleep low”, so we were expecting to spend a few hours climbing up one of the valley sides to get used to the lack of oxygen, but Andy’s success-rate on the big climbs is pretty impressive, so we decided to listen to his advice and rest. Later on he said a short climb wouldn’t be the end of the world, so we climbed for about half an hour up the west side of the valley, and took several hundred photos of Ama Dablam as the view through the clouds came and went.

Since then I’ve bought a pen, written some diary and read. Martin has lent me The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which is excellent.