So much stillness....just last weekend on Hidden Peak the same thing happened. All the Powder Keg was as if a conch shell held to my ear...the salty surf in my vessels the only sound. I suppose really it was my balaclava acting as the conch shell, but the absence of wind made it seem super loud! Impossibly still...wind has always been my nemesis. A poor choice of nemesises, wind will always have its way. That day, however, not only was the wind absent, but an inversion bathed the highlands in the mid thirties.
That was last weekend. This weekend there was no inversion, but the stillness and full solar lured me on. At one point I looked back to see my last three breaths suspended, frozen, above the skin track. Seconds later they sublimated away...the only visual indication of passing time in this frozen windless vastness. Pine boughs hung heavy but did not sway, cornices perched but shed no spindrift. So cold...with even time frozen, I was free to do whatever I wanted, save for the avalanche, a grain in the hourglass that would crush me!
At 10,000 feet I set up my new Beta Mid. A 1.5 lb floorless tent for winter camping. You dig out the floor as deep as you want so in the middle of the night you can just stand up and pee! Awesome! I then scrambled up about 700 feet on 45 degree mixed ice/scree/snow (using full body contact and frozen moss/mud climbing techniques honed in Montana). I buckled down just in time to catch a steep scratchy descent in the alpenglow before heading back to the space station.
In the desert in January, when the sun sets the temps drop about twenty Farenheits in minutes. This left me at a brisk negative fifteen as a starting point for the gradual cool down that would keep me company over night. It went like this: do crunches until failure. fall asleep mesmerized by the heat. dream pleasant dreams. dreams get darker and cold. dream of sun rising. wake up shivering. do crunches until failure.
My best strategery ever was placing my space station so the first solar rays would strike its flank. My station immediately gained 50 or so Farenheights, as water began to drip. I bailed having accomplished nothing toward my objective save setting up base camp and making it through a really cold night.
