This day will be the first big acclimatization climb and a test of our fitness by Oxana.  We get up for a 7am breakfast, dump our extra bags in storage, check out of our rooms, grab our packs and go to the lifts for 8am.  We want to get the first lifts up to avoid all the day hikers, skiers, snowboarders and tourists who wish their picture taken in bikini on the glacier.  After some argument between Oxana and the lift operator over wanting to charge us double for our packs, we go up 2 gondolas and one single person chairlift with pack in our lap to reach the Barrel Huts which will be home for us for the rest of the time on the mountain.  The Barrel Huts each house 6 people.  Our Barrel (#8) houses myself, Marek Cibor (Poland), Bjoern Christian Alsaker (Norway), Marius Teigen (Norway) and Hendrik Vivier (South Africa) who is on his own schedule since he is coming directly from Mont Blanc.  The others in our group are Juarez Gustavo (Brazil), Marc Bullock (UK/France), Patrick Loftus (Ireland), Stipkovits Istvan (Hungary), Jorge Perez Ramos (Spain) and Nacho Berenoguer (Spain).  

 

We dump our gear in our huts, grab an early lunch, put on sunscreen, grab our daypacks and we are off on a hike to Pastukhov Rocks at 4600m (15,092ft) for acclimatization, planned to be 5 hours up and down.  The heat on the glacier has got to be reaching around 90F and the sun is constantly pounding us and reflecting off the glacier.  Oxana is setting a fierce pace but everyone is keeping up.  After an hour the sweat is pouring down my face and I take off my black, unvented baseball cap.  This is mistake #1.  The profuse sweating has removed all sunscreen and now I have no protection from the sun.  Note to self, buy a white vented baseball cap for mountaineering/glacier travel.  After just over 3 hours (with two 5 minute breaks) we reach Pastukhov Rocks, but continue almost to the top with only a few stragglers.  We sit around for a while, eat a power bar and generally acclimatize.  Done properly, we probably should have sat there for a few hours.  After 20-30 minutes we go down and complete the hike in around 4 hours, a full hour under the planned time.  We are a strong team, we should all make the summit.  Oxana had pushed us just to see how strong we were.  

 

Dinner is at 6 and thus begins our new daily regimen of meals, breakfast 9am, lunch 1pm, dinner 6pm.  Three meals in only 9 hours!!!!  Breakfast is usually some type of oatmeal or porridge, yogurt, eggs, fruits, meats, cheese, tea and coffee; I don’t eat much of anything for breakfast at home, so I try my best to eat the yogurt, some oatmeal, cheese and tea.  Lunch and dinners always start with a big bowl of soup, and by big bowl I mean about a liter of soup.  This is huge, so I always try to eat all the soup and have some cheese, vegetables and tea.  I typically skip the main course which is some meat and lentils or rice.  There are cookies and sweets for dessert.  On this trip I may have lost a pound or two in weight, but no more than that.  Longer trips I will not be able to afford even this much weight loss per week, so this will be a challenge for me.

 

At dinner we meet up with our very boisterous bunkmate Hendrik.  Hendrik is on his own compressed schedule since he is coming directly from Mont Blanc and is acclimatized, thus he did not hike with us today.  This guy speaks his mind and has a natural ability to piss everyone off; and he knows it and tells us directly that people don’t like him.  On the positive side to all of this is that he is wildly entertaining and a lot of fun to be around, you just have to take what he says with a grain of salt.  I really enjoyed meeting Hendrick as a truly unique individual.  One night after a particularly ranting dinner someone told him outside that he is over the top.  His response (in South African accent), “I’m a foocking breath of fresh air”.  Love him or hate him, he was quite a character who we will all remember.

 

We discuss at dinner the prospect of taking the snow cats on summit night to Pashukhov Rocks.  At the beginning none of us wanted to use them.  After today’s hike people were beginning to wonder if adding 3-6 hours to summit day was wise.  Oxana tells us that everyone uses them and we should not think it shameful as we already climbed to there.