Erickson

Hello, on Sunday afternoon. A great day of skiing followed by a day of rest in Base Camp has gotten everyone jazzed to make the move up to our Advanced Base Camp. The snow is falling outside and I am sitting in my tent thinking about the skiing and views of yesterday's adventure.

When we left camp yesterday morning, with Hans, Andrew, Mark, myself, and David filming, it was 2:30am. I was thinking to myself that big days only happen when you have big projects on the plate — and this could be a long day. It ended up being 9am that morning before we started booting up the face we were planning on skiing. Mark didn't seem to be feeling well — several stops for repeated conversations with a horse trader along the trail had taken its toll on him. Hans started the process up the slope — that would get us acclimatizing further that day — a 6,800m couloir we had hoped to ski. Each breath of air seemed harder to grasp in the thinly pressurized air. One hundred steps, 20 breaths — I was starting to see patterns developing in my performance and also in the weather.

Around 11am the clouds began to descend on the mountains. We stopped in the middle of the face, made radio contact with the film crew and deferred to the conclusion that the visibility wouldn't improve. I kept thinking that the weather would improve, but day-after-day the same patterns appear, and we find ourselves sitting in a cloud waiting for the clouds to clear, just enough, to make our descent. (Or even worse — today it's been snowing all day.)

The sun broke enough to link some great turns down the face which were followed by the lower glacier's amazing corn snow. We made the decision to hike all of our gear over to ABC at the bottom of the slope. It was to be an easy carry: drop our gear and hike the three hours back to camp. Andrew, David, and Mark easily skinned across the rest of the glacier towards ABC, while Hans and I made the fatal error of post-holing through the glacial snow with water running under the surface. Within the first 10 steps, Hans had managed to plant both feet into a two-foot deep slushy and soaked his feet.

With the glacier behind us, our plan of carrying to ABC was seeming a little more difficult. The 1,000ft moraine of loose rubble that stood before us only seemed to complicate the plan. Mark and Hans were both expressing interest in the option of staying the night in ABC. The hike back to camp was long and in the way of a great view of Shish they knew they would get, if they waited long enough.

By the time we had unloaded our gear everyone was feeling worked. David and I had decided we didn't want to miss dinner, so we sped back to camp. Andrew found a different rhythm and ended up taking a wrong turn only to roll into camp shortly after the flashlight crew of cooks was sent out to make sure an ankle hadn't been broken. It was just another day of preparing to get up this big mountain and hopefully make a go at sliding down.

— Kristoffer Erickson, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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