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Day three, down the valley
After we went to bed, Sarah had trouble getting warm inside her sleeping bag, fleece liner and silk liner. After a while she wakes me up to see if I'm cold. We are at 4250m sleeping in a tent, and it's below zero outside before windchill. I'm not and after a while she came to the conclusion my sleeping bag is better. We swap, and i got out of a hot sleeping bag to jump in a really cold sleeping bag. Therefore it was not doing any heating for her, the heat must have been getting stuck at the liners.
With a hot bag and heated up liners she was warm and it wasn't to long till I'd got the other hot too. We will both be able to sleep tonight and its not long till I could see she was out. Some success.
We both dozed in the morning and at a bit after six the guide bought us hot matte de coca to the tent and some hot water to clean our faces. I opened the door to find it folded open because of the frost. When I got outside there was ice everywhere! It really was cold.
We headed out of camp and up an adjoining valley to the Alpamayo base camp. This is the first base camp for the assent of mount Alpamayo at 5947m. To get to the second you would have to scramble up the rocks until the snow and ice face, then with crampons and harnessed together they hike over the other side, which is really dangerous. We saw some small dots hiking up the mountain when we arrived. We then walked up a small steep slope (30minutes) to a glacial lake, sparkling pristine blue water. We had great views from here, looking at the mountain sides some 1700m up.
We took many photos and then headed back down to the Santa Cruz valley, and the long trek to tonight's camp. It was a much easier walk, a long gentle slope where we talked about everything at the back of the pack with Dave and Jana. This valley (as explained in the photos) is full of debris from a landslide we walked past earlier. Last year this area we walked was fully vegetated and there was just a small river, this place changes very quickly. We went past two beautiful lakes, one emerald green and one full of reads. On either side of the valley were waterfalls and breaks in the valley walls showed the snow covered 5500m plus peaks behind.
We arrived into camp a few minutes ahead of time for a hot chocolate and popcorn followed later by dinner, a nice end to a beautiful day.
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