Before you dive in, I wanted to say thanks to all you loyal readers and the support you've shown on the message board and in email, I miss you all and am looking forward to my return! Now buckle up, cause this is a long one with a lot of excitement...

September 26th We got to sleep in till 9, but packs were soon on again as I volunteered to lead the day solo. My biggest challenge was getting everyone filled up with water before heading out to break trail and set up /actual/ Camp 3.

I ran around replenishing everyone's water stills and reminding them of everything that needed to go to the new camp/cache. Of course since I was so worried about everyone else, I was the last one to rope up and be ready to hike...

We leapfrogged our way, alternating who took the lead to break the snow. We arrived after a relatively short hike and began probing the new campsite while waiting for the last rope team to come in. After the daily sound of avalanches miles away across the mountain range became quite common and routine, a slab of avalanche right next to us started heading for the last rope team! I was only 200 yards away from what that team would later describe as an ice motorboat that was rushing towards them. Scary stuff. Luckily, it stopped and veered away before anything bad happened.

After we got everything squared away at camp, we passed the 5 man team that had gone back to the top of yesterday's pass where we had dumped the extra fuel bottles, food, and crampons we had left the previous day. They looked a lot more weighed down than I felt heading out that day, brave souls to carry so much weight for the team.

September 27th Today we packed up and moved to the actual camp 3 that we set up yesterday, this time I created a water still/counter with bench kitchen masterpiece. It was quite wonderful sipping lemonades and feeding the still all afternoon, but only till the clouds came to hide the sun. The water stopped running from my black plastic bag and it actually began to snow for our first time on the mountain! The only other time was our very first shuttle day when we made that agonizing hike up to Camp 1's cache and back to Baba G's. I was worried during the crampon fitting lesson that the snow would go on forever and we would all have to turn back.

When the group came back from breaking trail for our big 18,000 ft climb tomorrow, we found out they had an amazing opportunity to actually be lowered into a crevasse and I was terribly jealous of them, but hopefully tomorrow my wish won't accidentally come true!

September 28th The big day. We got rolling at 7am and started walking up and past the most gorgeous, sun kissed and snow covered glaciers ever. We could see down the jagged grey edges of our nearby crevasses with that beautiful haze of blue that glows from the deepest points.

We crossed a snow bridge in between two mammoth drop offs with jaws of ice crystals and clipped in at the other side for snow protection. We then all took a turn scrambling up some flaking shale cliff to the top of the pass. At 18,450 ft, our highest point of the course.

The view from this high is breathtaking, but the path down looks like the elephant graveyard frosted with snow and ice. Luckily, no graves were dug today and we all made it down relatively injury free...

The journey itself was definitely noteworthy, in the first 60 seconds off the pass, I started sliding and tumbling down the mountain, but was able to self arrest in time to stop myself without any help. I should have known then that I was in trouble for the hours of downhill hiking that still lay ahead.

The rest of that snow leg, my pack wasn't fitting right and all of the weight was on my shoulders. Whenever I took the monster man-steps that were paved for me, my pack slammed down and the weight was so painful. Every step brought a flash of pitch black with lightening to my eyes and that /cannot/ be a good sign.

KG recommended that I tie a sweater around my waist since I probably lost too much weight. After that, it was better, but my fleece got trashed. After that, there were some sketchy parts down an icy/watery wash and everyone post-holing every 3 minutes so we actually slid on our butts for part of the way to spread out our weight and avoid the weak snow.

Then, we were descending towards the group ahead of us and I was all of a sudden up to my thigh in a rock crevasse with my pack up and over my head, trying to drag me away from my stuck leg! As I yelled "zero!" for everyone to stop, Matt screamed for me to take off my pack. I pushed it down to him and got out safely, but certainly shaken up a bit.

The next obstacle is a drainage with a ton of loose skree. Another group with Gaurav was there to guide us down so that wasn't too bad, but then our rope team reached /quite/ the crevasse challenge. Matt got down to the 4' jump that would land him onto an ice slab bordered with an abyss decorated with daggers of ice. Right before he tried to lower himself down, he fell and pulled me half way down into the crevasse with him! Luckily, I was at the point with a big cushy pile of snow, but I still yelped from the shock of the pull.

Getting down myself was super sketchy and my giant boots barely could fit onto the dirt sliver we were walking on. Matt cradled my foot and lowered me to the ice slab just fine. Unfortunately, after both of my feet were down, one of my legs was again in a crevasse and I was officially fet up with the day and in very unruly spirits from the now intense back/shoulder/chest pain that was radiating through my body as well as the sketchy events of the day.

We went for another 45 minutes and once again rolled in after dark to tally my second, brutal 11 hour day and it was no surprise when I finished it the same way as the first: Set up the tent, ate two ramen, and crashed hard till the next day.