Start point: Camp 2 (5,500m)
End point: High Camp / Camp 3 (6,000m)

Today we moved to our final camp. At 6,000m, it is (slightly) higher than the summit of Kilimanjaro – cold, windy, very low on oxygen and a generally unpleasant place to be. The plan was to spend as litte time there as possible, as sleep, rest, and recovery were all going to be difficult. We had to carry our entire gear up to Camp 3 in one go, as leaving any equipment there made little sense.

Two of the girls were conscious of he extra effort of carrying our full packs up to Camp 3 the daybefore our summit attempt,  so asked about hiring a high altitude porter for the day. A porter could carry up to 20kg, but would cost over $400. But nobody needed a porter to carry their entire load, so the plan was to share the porter between a few different people. I offered to throw in few a kilos to nake up the twenty if needed, but nobody seemed too sure what the Clare lads would or wouldn’t be contriuting, least of all the Clare lads themselves. Their numbers from their first pack of the day seemed to differ from numbers at each of their six subsequent packings,.

At first i was told that I’d need t contribute  few kilos (and dollars) for the porter, then none at all, then a few kilos again. One of the lads gave a lot of gear, then the other gave so much gear that one of the girls had to take back 2.5kg and find space for it in her own pack. But once he heard the price tag of $20 per kilo, he took all of his gear back again, resolving that he’d rather the weight on his back than a lightness in his wallet. The girls were able to hand their loads back again.

Up to a few minutes before departure, I had my sleeping bag in  a stuffsack outside my main rucksack waiting to see was it to be handed to the porter or not. In the end I carried all my gear myself – my sleeping bag (quite luckily, as it happened) just squashed into the top of my rucksack on top of everything else.

It was a long slow steep slog up the scree to Camp 3, with some steep traverses. The ground underfoot was quite loose and sandy. We knew at this point that there was realistically only one weather window available, so a lot of teams were making the same journey at the same time as us. There was some banter as we overtook and were in turn overtaken by the other teams. The girls in our team identified a woman from another team who was (in breach of mountain etiquette and the by-laws on Aconcagua) leaving little piles of toilet paper under rocks at each likely peeing spot. The mountain was generally pristine, and we were all making an effort to keep it that way, so it was frustraing to see oter people leaving their own waste to (quite literally) get blown about by the wind.

Towards the end of the trek, Carlos was exchanging a joke with a guide form another team. They were having a short break as we walked passsed. The other guide then came up to Carlos, laughing, and patted him on the back As he did so, he balanced quite a large rock on Carlos’ bag and watched as Carlos carried it off up the hill. I thought this was hilarious at first and marvelled at Carlos’ ability to carry an extra few kilos on top of his already laden bag without even noticing. Then I got to thinking of what was ahead of us that night and the next day and realised that my success in getting to the summit (or not) could depend on how much energy Carlos had left, so I waited until we’d turned a little corner and knocked off the rock. Carlos hadn’t known at all.  I’m a good person, I thought. Karma wll reward me, I thought. I was wrong. Karma’s a sneaky vindictive cow.

A few minutees later, we took our own break. I was towards the back of the line and as I arrived up to the group, the IT Guy was sitting on large squarish rock. The rock was roughly about a metre square across the top, and about as tall. The IT Guy is a big man, but there was more than enough room for me on the rock with him, so I leant my walking poles against the rock, laid my rucksack next to them and sat down beside him. My feet was just just about still touching the sand. After a minute or two the rock moved.

I barely noticed it as first. The IT Guy was moving about a little and I thought his movement was just causing the rock to wobble under us. Then I realised that all the movement, as slow as it was at first, was in one direction – downhill. Stupidly, I initially tried to stabilise it with my legs . I did Physics for the Leaving Cert but had somehow forgotten the lesson where an 85kg man cannot stop a one tonne rock when it decides to move downhill. The rock began to move faster, I began to shout “oh shit! oh shit!” and luckily the IT Guy and me both moved at once – quick enough to save our legs which would have been crushed, but not quick enough to save my walking poles or my bag, which were both trapped underneath it.

The rock just turned over once and stopped moving. The ground was soft and sandy, which probably stopped it moving further. The good side of that was that it didn’t roll on downhill towards any of the other teams coming up behind us. The bad point was that it was very difficult to shift it to get out te remains of my poles or my bag. It took five of us three or four attempts to roll the rock back a few centimetres and pull out the bag and the least trapped of the poles. It was severely bent. It was clear that we wouldn’t be able to save the second pole that way, so we waited until the rest of the teams had passed us and then the five of us pushed it downhill, trying to make it roll again and hoping it would stop again after one turn and not continue on down the hill. Again, it took a few attempts before the rock moved but luckily the plan worked. The boulder shifted and stopped again, but it gave us enough room to pull the second mangled pole out from underneath. It was bent even more then the first. Stuffing the sleeping bag into the top of my rucksack had saved anything fragile in my bag from getting squashed, so for that, at least, I am grateful to the Clare lads and their indecisive packing.

We made it up to Camp 3 without further mishap and weighed our bags there just for fun. Mine was 21kg. The Doc’s was 23kg. I imagine the guides were carrying well above 25kg each even without the joke rocks added on by rival guides.

Rather than each put up our tents in pairs, we were split into groups of six. This meant anyone suffering from the altitude or tiredness could take a rest without meaning their tent didn’t go up. It also meant that someone was always holding on to the tent in case of a strong wind. The Grocer got quite upset about the inefficient emploment of labour with six people working to put up a small tent. I think we did quite well: we had five strong men on our team and one petite girl – so while the guys fastened little clips between the canvas and the poles, we sent the girl off to collect as many big heavy boulders as she could find.

The division of labour meant that for the first time I wasn’t involved in putting up my own tent. Not being great at delegation, I examined it critically and made a few adjustments before oopening up the zips. In the porch area, I found a piece of used toilet paper flapping around the breeze. What a nice welcome. Luckily we caught it in a nappy bag before it got too far.

Tonight it summit night. We were warned to expect the first wake up call at 4.30am and each tent were given a lemon cake and a bag of nuts for breakfast. It was to be very windy so we were told not to expect much sleep and just lie back and relax if you couldn’t sleep. We were too start the final ascent at 5.30am. But nobody should leave the tent until everyone was ready  – otherwise we’d just stand around in the wind getting cold… and once you get cold up here (in the dark and in the wind), it takes an awful lot to warm you up again.

Just before dinner, which we all took in our tents, we got a little bit of good news. We wouldn’t need our ice axes on summit night as there’d been no fresh snow. This was extra weight we could do without and a positive indication of summit conditions. We’d left our climbing harnesses at basecamp for similar reasons, leaving the crampons as the only piece of technical equipment still in our bags.

Dinner was pasta with a creamy mushroom sauce. I don’t know how they did it. I thought it was delicious and ate my tentmate’s leftovers. Then, despite the wind that threatened to lift the tent, I managed to get a few hours of sleep.