Dingboche Rest Day

My back was killing me yesterday, as were my two big toes, my little toe, and my left shoulder was hurting from carrying the rucksack. I woke up feeling very dry mouthed. I had blood in my nose and it was congested, so I had been mouth breathing,

We had a late breakfast around 9:15am and then we did some admin, battery charging, transferring videos, and flying the drone to test the altitude limit. The big drone managed 2000m so the update from DJI had worked. The mini went to 500m elevation.

I reflected a lot about yesterday. I looked up Island Peak on Google and there was lots of articles and videos showing up on the first page about it being beginner friendly. This is a complete myth. It’s brutal! It’s a very hard climb. For us it was an 18-hour day. To go from base camp to summit and back to base camp is a brutal 1100m altitude gain. I found Island Peak harder than Mont Blanc. It was a very tough climb, harder than Lobouche East, and much harder than I had imagined.

During the morning I had a video call with Geljen and he told Dhanu (who was translating) that his blood pressure was 190. They said he would probably go back to KTM to get some check-ups.

We had lunch at 4410m and met Gelbu the replacement sherpa, 33 years old, and he had come down from EBC (in about 4 hours!) so he must have been honking as Google says its 6-8 hours. Gelbu seems nice like most Nepali’s but barely speaks any English. But that’s ok.

After a long lunch, and a documentary played on the TV in Café 4410, we headed back to the lodge. There are some nice small shops that stock quite a lot of mountaineering gear (shoes, poles, boots, mitts, etc) and we picked up a couple of small bits we needed like water, toilet paper, electrolytes, etc.

Bed time after chicken steak and rice. I found it hard to get off to sleep again. Throat was dry and nose was congested. Before going to bed, I got a message from the leader Dan Mazur who told me the icefall remained shut and the team were going to head to summit Lobouche East peak. With the icefall closed, it meant that rotations were not possible. Everest summiteers need height, so people were shifting over to nearby Lobouche East to get some altitude.

Stats

Weight: 68.70kg

Fat: 13.0%

Muscle: 82.6%

Visceral fat: 2.3

Resting heart rate: 62

Nerve health: 88

SpO2: 84%

Altitude: 4352m

Sleep last night: 7 hours 43