December 26, 2010

December 26, 2010

Today I woke up at 6:15am with barely any sleep. At these altitudes, it's honestly too cold to sleep. I probably got 3 hours or so last night. We packed up everything and went to breakfast. More fried eggs, sausage and porridge. We left Karanga Camp around 8:45am. Today's hike was steep, but not staircase steep like the first two days. It was more gradual. Around 14,200 feet, I started having a headache, but it went away after I did my pressure breathing and drank some more water. The terrain on todays hike reminds me of what I would think Mars would look like. Very dirty and rocky and just black and brown as far as the eye can see. Not very good views at all. It was a short hike though, only about 3 1/2 hours. Thomas set the pace and his pace is always nice and slow, so I love it when he leads the hike. We nicknamed our trekking team the "Tiger Team" for 2 reasons: 1) We have numerous inside jokes about "Eye of the Tiger" being our song and 2) because this year is the year of the tiger, according to China. (Also fitting because the Auburn Tigers won the National Championship this year).

We made it to Barafu Camp at 15,092 feet and we begin our summit push at 11pm tonight. I plan on sleeping in all the clothing I'm wearing to hike to the summit. It's estimated to be 0-10 degrees at the summit. Oh what I wouldn't give for a shower right now. There is so much dirt under my fingernails. It's seriously insane! We brush our teeth everyday and we used some fresh bath towels for the first time yesterday, but I haven't bathed normally in 5 days now. It's so gonna be worth it at 19,340 feet though. We have lunch at 1:30 today and then we're all taking naps since we have to wake up for the hike at 10pm. The diamox is making me tingle like crazy! Thankfully the side effect of making you pee all the time hasn't really happened to me. It's happened to Justin, but not me. Of course he hasn't had the tingling that I've had, so we've gotten totally different symptoms. The tingling is happening in my fingers, toes and my heels. The best way to describe the tingling is that it's the same feeling you get when your feet fall asleep, except it never goes away. Quite annoying.

Dinner is at 5pm then we "rest" (because none of us will actually fall asleep) until 10:30pm when we have breakfast (crazy I know, but yes, we had breakfast at 10:30pm this day) and leave camp at 11pm. YIPEE!!!

Beginning Elevation: 13,300 feet
Ending Elevation: 15,092 feet
Elevation Gain: 1,792 feet
Calories Burned: 1,542
Miles Hiked: Just over 3 miles
Time Hiking: 3 1/2 hours
Marcie Oxygen: 83
Justin Oxygen: 85

Here are pictures we took on this day:



This is the view of the summit at Karanga Camp when we woke up just before we started the hike for the day. Awesome views!



This is what the hike looked like the entire time. Also, you can see two little white buildings up on that cliff, one to the right and one to the left. Those are the toilets at camp. By "toilets", I do still mean a hole in the ground. It's just that the sign on the stalls say "Tourist Toilets" (see picture below). Interestingly enough, these are on the very edge of that cliff. As we hiked closer, we noticed that older outhouses were on the ground that had busted...we eventually learned that they were at the top of the cliff but fell off due to high winds and busted at the bottom of the cliffs. This made us all slightly scared to go to the bathroom at this camp.



You can see the cleared path behind us that we hiked.



Welcome to base camp...Barafu!



See, they say "tourist toilets" but there's no toilet, I promise!



Campsite



A couple of the hikers watching the sunset over the cliffs.

Here's the video of Barafu Camp:



Stay tuned...tomorrow's post is SUMMIT DAY!!!