Bit of a Bliz'

5th June
We had blizzard conditions all through the night and they continue all through the next day as well. We have to take it in turns to get up, put on our GoreTex gear and go outside to dig out the tents which are being constantly buried in snow. It takes an hour of effort each time, and we did it at least three times during the day.
This is the other main reason (other than the effort to make them) that I Don’t like the deep tent platform placements that Marcus likes! The wind and snow just love to fill in holes and it seems that the only place that the snow is accumulating is in the holes where the tents are!!!! – but do you think I can convince Marcus of this! – Oh well, again, It is what it is.

We spend all day laying around and digging out the tents. No one even considers heading up the ridge today. Marcus and I barely see Russell and Ian all day. On the flat ground, at least 30cm of snow has accumulated and many times this in the tent hollows.

In the evening, the wind abated and we got out of the tents and had a look around…
Id have to say that our camp site was a VERY bad choice!
Apart from the snow accumulation problem, we are positioned right at the base of a very steep, convex slope that has just been “storm-loaded” with a lot of fresh new snow and is in all of our opinions a significant avalanche risk!
We all agree that its not very clever of us but then we also decide to just leave the camp where it is and go back to bed for another night!!!!
Now, in hindsight, I’m not sure what we were thinking but I guess the altitude and lack of oxygen may have contributed to these choices J

6th June
Well, we survived the night despite our foolish choice not to move camp. The gods smiled on us and the weather was getting better as we slept. We woke to glorious sunshine, mostly blue skies and magnificent views.

The snow was very deep though and after Marcus spent an hour trying to break a trail up out of camp and dint manage to get more than a single rope length away, we decided to wait around for a while and dry out our gear while the sunshine lasted.
At about 3pm in the afternoon, there was movement above us. We all came out of the tents to see what was going on. It was another pair of climbers coming down from above us. We had also met these guys on a previous day and they were doing much the same as us with a load day and then a camp-move day. They were very cautiously coming down to get their stash and move up to their camp.
Our team all got out of our tents and backed away from the foot of the steep slope so we would maybe be a bit safer if they triggered an avalanche – which looked like a very real possibility!

Again the gods smiled and they got down without triggering an avalanche.
Now this changed things! We had dried out our stuff but the steep ground and deep snow meant that we were not going to head up the slope till the next afternoon. However the guys coming down the slope had broken quite a nice trail and they told us how far the next camp site was.

We rapidly decided that we could get there so we very quickly broke camp and packed all our stuff up – We had managed to relocate all our buried gear over the course of the morning in camp. It was still hard work breaking trail since up-tracks and down-tracks are rather different in their step sizes. But we were well rested and we pushed on up the ridge to a height of 4400m. At this point the ridge was still quite steep but very broad and there were some crevasses/’schrunds around to provide a measure of protection from avalanches.This was to be our Camp 5.

The sky was clear and we had magnificent views in the cold evening air. We dug shallower platforms (at last) along side the two other climbers that had made the down-hill trail and had magnificent views of Mt Vancouver as we had dinner and finally made it to bed at about midnight with the definite prospect of making it up onto the plateau at the top of the ridge the next day :)