day 3

Today was going to be strange because we were travelling from Shira Camp (3,840m) to the foot of the Baranco Wall (3,950m) via the Lava Tower at 4,600m. 700m up and then 70m down again. We set off fairly early in the morning and once again the landscape varied considerably from anything we’d seen over the previous two days. At this altitude there was almost no plant life and it was almost like walking along a deserted beach covered with small round stones.

The going was good and we’d planned to stop off just before the Lava Tower for a lunch break. Around 11am Martin tapped me on the shoulder and pointed out our lunch tent in the distance. “Great,” I thought, “we’re making good progress – perhaps today won’t be quite as hard as yesterday.” I asked Martin how long it would take to reach the tent but he just shrugged his shoulders; “Pole pole – slowly, slowly,” he said. Now I know why. Just when I thought we’d reached our lunch site we turned a corner to be faced with a giant ravine 200m deep. To get to lunch we had to climb down the ravine and then up the other side. It took us four hours to reach the lunch tent and all that time, I was thinking that I might use Martin’s entrails to build a bridge. He just smiled.

As had become the norm, it started raining in the afternoon – then it turned to snow, then some sleet, a bit of hail and then back to rain – and when we eventually arrived at our camp at the foot of the Baranco Wall we were cold, wet, tired and utterly miserable. Tim and I both looked up at the peak towering above us and knew we were beaten. “One day at a time,” said Rayson over dinner. He’d been there before and knew we’d be ready in the morning.

Again, we slept like the dead and when we woke in the morning, the mountain towering above us didn’t seem quite as high as it had the night before.