Trek Day 7

2 Canadian lads have been trekking about the same pace as us so we got to know them a bit. They pushed on to ABC yesterday with what I’m told is a pretty ancient tent. When I started the trek it was 30°C. Just 2 days ago it was well above 20°C but up at ABC it often drops to -15°C or lower at night. Around 7 in the eve one of the porters realized his people hadn’t arrived and headed down the valley in the dark to find his wards, 3 Canadian girls trying to get up and back in 5 days. Dangerous with altitude sickness (which some of them already had the symptoms of), not to mention the risks of being lost on a dark mountain.
This morning was incredibly windy. The german weather meteorological station behind the guest house lost its roof, and it was a solid looking building.

Anyways we got up to find these Canadians had headed up the hill in this blizzard. Even there porter was staying put this time. So we have 5 people lost on the mountain in a storm all Canadian. I’m beginning to understand why its such a sparsely populated country.
Eventually one came back, them all having been separated. A second followed an hour or so later having fallen. For some reason the satellite phone was out so we had no way of knowing if the third had made it.
Eventually the storm eased and we headed up the mountain ourselves. We passed the third Canadian, she’d actually made it and was on her way back, and heard tell the campers had found a guest house in the middle of the night.
There were still gusts of wind that pelted us with snow blown off the mountain, but we slowly made it through.

When we arrived we hid in a guest house for a bit as the weather worsened once more and I celebrated with a beer at 4130 meters above sea level.

It’s really stunning up there but we had to make the decent to MBC again when we had a break in the weather.
Tomorrow I descend to warmer climbs in my very wet shoes.