The Sun Returns

We woke this morning to a beautiful sunny day with sunshine streaming into my tent just after seven am.

I must have moved my sleeping mat yesterday as there was a rapid drip drip drip of melting condensation on to my left cheek this morning from a tent seam. More effective than any alarm clock and I suspect not far off 'waterboarding' ! It certainly woke me up with a start.

Yesterday I mentioned the creaking ice around my tent. Well yesterday afternoon I found out what it was a prelude to.

Just behind my tent over a small ridge of morraine (it really is only a metre or so) is a large depression (that's the land form not me!) which up until yesterday had a frozen lake in it. Well yesterday afternoon after what sounded like a large 'thud,' a bit like a tree trunk splitting, the frozen lake has gone! It's as though somebody has pulled the plug out of the bottom of the lake. The water has just vanished deep within the glacier.

I only wish I had a photo of it before to show you the comparison.

After this had happened you can imagine my concern when in the middle of the night (around 2.00am) I not only heard but also more alarmingly felt the ice cracking beneath my tent. You begin to imagine the worst - can a crevasse big enough to swallow up a whole tent really appear just like that? Then I thought about which belongings to save (sat phone first, not to keep going with the blogs you understand but because it's so expensive to replace and it's got a lot of credit on it!). Wait a minute what if my high altitude boots disappear from the front of the tent, I'll never get a chance to summit. It's amazing what rushes through your mind when it's dark. A quick scan with my head torch revealed I was still infact horizontal and everything was intact!

Thankfully after what must have been an hour I dropped back off to sleep. On surveying the tent this morning thankfully only the subsidence on one side has got worse. The cracks only a couple of inches wide!!

We had a very simple breakfast this morning but it was a great to have some variety. Slices of fresh, yes fresh, water melon followed by some freshly baked brioche and jam together with a couple of hard boiled eggs. Adam had worked wonders again.

After breakfast Phil and I sat outside the mess tent drinking coffee and 'chewing the fat'. Once again I can only marvel at the scenery. Yes you can take photographs but they never really capture say: the scale of the seracs, the jumble of ice, much like an upturned box of Lego, that is the ice fall, or the majesty of the peaks. Today really is a stunning day to be in the mountains.

It now looks as though we will be at BC for another week until the winds begin to drop.

David's keen for us not to go 'stir crazy' here at BC and has again suggested we drop down to a lower village for a change of scenery.

Trouble is Adam's food is good, we could pick up a bug from someone else down there, and it's going to cost us some money. All in all most seem happy to stay here and do a day walk every two or three days to hopefully stay in condition.

So not much in the way of humour today but please consider this. I think I've worked out why most of the West is stagnating or in recession and why China isn't.

Apparently, according to the stats, there are around 500 of you very kindly reading my blog daily. Now I suspect a good proportion are doing this in work time. This got me thinking. If everybody in work is just reading somebody's blog for five minutes a day, how many man hours or indeed days are lost every single day! Interestingly not a single person from China is reading my blog!!

Remember though recessions are always caused by somebody else so please continue to read my blog whenever you wish!