24th January, the abandonned tent

So today we were moving to our second high camp, which is at about 5300m. This was to take around 4 hours, fully loaded, so about an hour more than yesterday. With a porter coming for a lot of our gear, though, I felt confident that this time I would be able to keep to that time with no problems.

Last night, on one of his forrays for ice, Lito had been poking around a tent next to ours. He felt disconcerted by the state of it. There were socks hanging on the tent's guy lines to dry, now frozen stiff; the cooking stuff was still outside, exposed to the elements. I could tell he was worried. "It looks like somebody was expecting to be right back", he kept on saying, looking at it. "Nobody leaves a tent in that state and then abandons it". He finally had a quick look inside, scared to find a body. There was no one. But as there was an electrical storm last night, he was unable to use the radio to send information on this seemingly abandonned tent.

So he did this morning, as soon as the lines were clear (there is a lot of communication in the morning as soon as it is possible, between the helicopter etc, so everything that is not an emergency has to wait until all the coordination is done) he radioed in, while the porters, who had just arrived and were busy packing up, made more discoveries that showed that this was not an intended abandonment; a high altitude calmel back, full and now frozen; a head light, meaning the person meant to be back before dark; a sleeping bag, meaning the person meant to come back to sleep. People made these discoveries quietly, uncomfortably. Nobody seemed happy to be looking around. The tracks had been erased by the heavy snowfall, so there was no way to know how long ago the person had left, nor which way they had gone. In the dark, they could have slipped off one of the sharp ledges and fallen to their death. Lito was very protective of where we went when we had to go pee, and he is very likely right to have been.

It was about an hour later that we found out that this tent belonged to the 5th person to have died on the mountain this year, a man who, while walking to base camp below (about an hour at most to walk down), was hit by a small boulder, had his ribs fractured and lung punctured and bled to death. We had heard about this, it had happened right before we arrived at base camp, such a stupid, senseless accident. The guardaparques asked Lito and his team to please place everything in the tent, that somebody would be sent up for it.

I must have looked quite struck as I stood watching the porters grimly assemble everything and place it in the dead man's tent. Enough so that Lito came over and tried to distract me by telling me the name of all the mountains around us. We have to go on, he said. We can't let the dead hold us back. I know this is a mountains philosophy too. When you get to the level they are at (the guides, those people with a lot of hard core experience) there are many dead, it is to be expected that they learn to go on.

I spent the rest of the day in Joe Simpsons' book "This Game of Ghosts" in my mind, reliving the story of all his friends who died on the mountain. His questioning of why they did what they did. And the story of those who quit, tired of risking it, but who died all the same, like Tat. I spend the rest of the day thinking about the abandonned tent.