Very easy day today. Just a three hour hike up the rubble-strewn lower glacier following an obvious path up to the next expedition basecamp that’s used by most climbing parties on the standard summit climbing route. The terrain was ridiculously scenic as we climbed the glacier, wrapping around Dhaulagiri, but we were a little dismayed by the amount of trash littering the basecamp. Seriously…what the hell is a car tire doing lying on a glacier at 15,000ft?
Ongchhu mentioned today that we could skip the acclimatization day and continue over French Col tomorrow if we were feeling good. I had been looking forward to spending a rest day here to take in the scenery and make sure AMS wasn’t a problem, but it sounded like we were also running low on fuel so we should probably keep moving if folks are able. We were told not to worry about the fuel - that we could switch to a wood fire for cooking once below treeline on the other side, but we still mentioned that we could switch to purifying our drinking water with iodine instead of having it boiled and we certainly didn’t need luxuries like warmed washing water in the morning if fuel was low. Becky and I felt fine, so at dinnertime we all decide to skip our rest day and push on over French Col and into Hidden Valley.
...the next day
link to all the photos
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