Inka’s proposed itinerary had us doing a carry to Camp 2 on Day 10. However, weather watchers were seeing a better window on Tuesday — one day ahead of schedule. That prompted a decision to move to Camp 2 instead, which meant all gear up in a single push. Doing so would place us in a position of greater flexibility if weather suddenly changed for the worse. Everyone agreed with this new plan while our blue skies had already turned to grey.
So off we went with violent winds in our face, fully loaded and heavy for those not using a porter.
We had such great weather for the first 9 days, this was almost on the brink of being miserable.
The wind just whipped around as if in persistent anger about us trespassing. There also wasn’t much to take picture of around 17,000 feet.
A stretch of penitentes at 18,000′ was pretty cool to pass through.
Our tents were already set up for us as we walked into Camp 2. This is something my tentmate and I chose to pay for ahead of time — and both of us were very glad we did. The winds would have made things pretty tough with neither of us knowing this configuration. Setting up ourselves also meant being responsible for any missing pieces, even if something accidentally blew away. Nah. For $20 each, it was done and ready for us to just slide in.
It was so nice to be out of the wind for a while.
Stats for the day: 1.96 miles and 1,585 feet in 3 hours and 37 minutes (ignore the Avg Moving Speed)
Everyone looked forward to resting at Camp 2 after the past two days.
