The Plateau

7th June
We got up early and packed again. We depot ed some gear here at this camp having decided that we would push on in lighter weight fashion from this point – The altitude was making it very hard work, we were now getting close enough for a summit push, and single carries instead of double carries would make us much faster.

Again, Marcus broke trail out of camp and had a very hard time of it. He was up to his groin in fresh snow for a good way. Things did get better though and we all took our turn wading in the new snow at the front of the trail. There were also six of us now that we were with the other two climbers for the day and that helped with the trail breaking too. The slopes stayed very steep at 50 – 55 degrees and it was hard work for many hours.
Then the terrain got a bit more complex again and we had to wind around a bit to find our way past the massive bergschrund formation at the top of the ridge.

A bergschrund is a type of crevasse. It forms at the top of ridges and snow slopes and it marks the point where the snow and ice above it are fixed to the mountain and not moving. The slow below the ‘schrund though is not fixed to the mountain and is essentially working its way ever so slowly down to the base. Bergschrunds are often the crux in climbing routes and are often simply huge impassable crevasses.
On a mountain of the scale of Mt Logan, the ‘schrund is not just a single crevasse but is a huge structure of several large crevasses and it is difficult to find a way through without the benefit of a view from further away – much like crevasse fields on glaciers.

In this case though, there was no insurmountable obstacle and though we wove around a bit, we got through OK. It was not without a bit of very steep and exposed climbing which fell to Ian to lead which he did in good style and again without fuss (I was very happy with the skills of our team I must say).

After that the slope got far less steep and the soft snow almost disappeared. We were up on the top of the mountain now which in this case (is a plateau of quite several kilometers in every direction (Mt Loan is a very big object!).
We kept moving up till we were well and truly on the flat. It was overcast and very cold and the wind was whipping by at 40 –50 Kmh.

There was no shelter anywhere that we could find so we just stopped on the flat and set about pitching the tents in the random spot that became Camp 6. We got them set up with full effort from the whole team and then we set about trying to create some shelter from the wind – This is why Marcus likes the deep tent platforms!

The snow was very firm, so we set about cutting out blocks of snow to make walls around the tents. This took several hours and we did OK. In the end we retired to our tents with the gale blowing outside and felt we had done very well for the day.
However, tonight was my turn to cook and that wind was just getting stronger. I set about cooking the evening meal, huddled down in the little vestibule of the tent, but the wind just blew straight through under the edge of the tent and every time there was a gust, I would get absolutely covered in -20degC spindrift (snow dust). This would leave me cursing very loudly as I was getting very cold and very wet… Marcus on the other hand found it all quite amusing from his warm dry position inside the zipped closed tent – I cant blame him :)

The night passed with the constant howl of the very strong winds. It even managed to blow aver a section of the wall we had built outside and had not let up when morning came. I didn’t manage to get any sleep at all that night – Due mostly to the high altitude of about 5900m.