I slept better last night.  Little if any Cheyne-Stokes although I did have some of the craziest dreams imaginable.  Hypoxia does that to most people.  Never did any psychedelic drugs (other than Pepto Bismo) but I have heard that it’s similar.  I don’t get why anyone would do that to themselves.  Of course my kids don’t think I get a lot of things like buying a pair of jeans with some one else’s name on the butt.   If I paid for them they ought to have my name on them and don’t get me started on car dealers wanting to advertise on my car. 

We started for Camp II in pretty nice weather.  We had been told that it had been windy but the winds were dying and that sure appeared to be the case.  However about 1 hour into our hike and just after we crossed the last crevasse the wind began to freshen and within a few minutes we were breaking out our wind gear.  In a few minutes it was roaring.  I would estimate 40 to 60 MPH.  The snow stings at those wind speeds and you try to avoid exposing any flesh.  Fortunately it was probably in the 20’s so it wasn’t that cold.  The worst part is trying to breathe with a buff or balaclava over your face with wind head on.  It also occasionally will make you stagger like a drunk man.

The route did eventually bring us into the lee of some small hills that cut out a lot of the wind force.  We pulled into C2 about 3 hours after leaving C1.  There is a small communal tent at C2 where you can eat and hang out.  We had missed the radio calls looking for us because of the wind noise and BC had assumed we had turned and abandoned C1 for BC instead of going higher.  We would have but it really never was that bad.  There is a cook and mess boy who stay at C2 for the entire expedition which at 21,000 it pretty amazing in itself.  Apparently they like it because they have a lot of down time.  They quickly had us some hot tea and soup.

I never drink hot tea at home but at altitude I love it.  On the other hand I love chocolate at home and would weigh 400lbs if I ate all I wanted but at altitude won’t touch it.  Food is the challenge for me.  My pants are already bagging.  Unfortunately you loose muscle before fat – at least that is what I am told.  I’ll try most anything but I have a hard time eating things I don’t particularly care for especially at altitude.  I wish I could figure out how to bottle the appetite suppressing effect of altitude.  I could make a mint.

It was very windy during the night.  A couple of times the top of the tent pushed down on me laying flat in the tent.  Even though we had our tents secured to big rocks I tried to figure out a way to tie some cordage to the tent ceiling so that I could lie on it and help prevent “lift off”.  One of my team mates told me the next morning that he packed everything that was loose in his backpack in case the tent blew away.  Actually that was a pretty good idea.  I’ll consider that too but my emphasis was on trying to prevent that happening in the first place.  Our cook tent did depart the realm of the vertical during the night but we were able to retrieve it without too much loss.  Needless to say I didn’t rest too well.