Reaching altitude

I'm all about experiences, good or bad,although I prefer the former.  So here are some more elements of my trip that have had an impact on me...

We climbed in an area in the north Argentinian Andes called Tuzgle. To quote a friend (please excuse my language), "It's in the middle of buttfuck nowhere". The climbing was incredible, we were camped down in a gorge and on both sides of the gorge were miles of superb rock. Climber's paradise - almost. When the sun was shining it was hot, but when the sun wasn't shining it was very very cold. The temperature inside our tents at night was measured at -9 degrees C. Our condensation quickly froze on our sleeping bags and our water bottles froze as well. Now I'd had a suspicion that my sleeping bag wasn't really all that good, but only here did I appreciate how inadequate it really was.

The wind would invariably pick up in the early afternoon. The wind was bitterly cold and very strong which made climbing difficult if not impossible. Most days a dust storm would kick up as well, covering every thing in a layer of dust. Including the inside of our tents.

These conditions meant that most people would take refuge in the truck throughout most of the afternoon and evening. The truck's a bit too small to cope with that many people couped up for that time. I think that this is about the time when some of our group began to tire of this lifestyle and long for creature comforts and space. More on that in a later blog.

It was my turn to cook in these conditions, and this was probably my first truly miserable experience of this journey. Cooking outside where everything that you aren't holding on to is blowing all over, trying to keep dust out of the food, and trying to wash up in water where you have to break the ice on the surface first. The pain in my fingers made me want to cry.

This was the first time we'd been up to high altitude - about 4000m. And the altitude was definitely affecting us. We were feeling so tired every day. Short climbs were very hard, even short walks were difficult. We set off to walk up a volcano. Each step was a plod. A short hard plod. We managed to make about a 400m height gain before we hit our limit and had to return.